I feel... tired. I told someone a few months ago (and I also may have blogged it...I can't remember) that I feel like I'm treading water and my nose is barely hovering over the surface... that I'm barely keeping afloat. Sometimes my whole mouth is above water... sometimes the water is just barely beneath my nostrils... but I'm still treading. I'm still moving. I'm tired but not spent yet. Sustained day by day. I think that's how I'd describe it. I still feel like this... I think I've felt like this ever since I went back to school.
I never got a chance to write out my thoughts about The Upper Room Interview. It went online in early May. At first, I could barely stomach the sight and sound of myself. It was so painful to see my own face on the computer screen, so painful to hear my voice... to watch myself speak. It wasn't even the content that was painful... it was watching and hearing myself that made me so uncomfortable I had to look away the first few times I tried to watch it. And then I always wonder, "Is this what ppl have to look at when I talk to them? Ew." And to my friends, I say in my head, "Thank you for bearing through it and thank you for being my friend despite having to look at this face and hear this voice. Ick. I'm so thankful to have you in my life."
Somewhere into the story though... I start to get used to the sound of my voice and the nuances of my facial expressions (or lack thereof)... and when I start to cry in the interview... I always start to cry in real life. It's quite an interesting experience to cry with myself...facing my own face on the screen. Like some kind of out-of-body experience. By the end of the interview... I end up getting used to myself and I actually wish that I could listen to her talk more about Anderson and about life. She looks so calm and she tells the story so well. Even though I know it and I've heard it so many times... heck, I've lived through it... it somehow seems different listening to myself telling it. I get sucked into my own life's story and how amazing it is. I almost wish there was an uncut, total and complete version that I could watch...not just what I taped that day... but the whole story...start to finish... or at least up until now. Like the DVD extras or something. Behind the scenes... and then the blooper reel. That's what I enjoy the most about watching a DVD or Blu-ray... the extras. LOL.
Anyway... so I've watched the interview quite a few times since it was posted. I... remember thinking to myself... I wonder what people will think... I wonder what will stand out to them about our story... I wonder what will come from this experience... the value of it all... I wondered a lot of things. I still wonder about these things. I haven't had much time to think about it... contrary to what the length of this blog entry may suggest.
So... I've been keeping a collection of thoughts over the past month... I'm not sure if the collection has gotten dusty but I'll try to get it out as best I can. I have lost all sense of time since I've been "treading" to survive. I partially watched a movie called Journey from the Fall with some girls from my care group while I was studying for my chemo certification. It's in Vietnamese so I could only get the gist of the movie from the subtitles that I read in between looking up chemo drugs, but even with the just the gist... I was deeply impacted by the film. From what I gathered, the movie had 2 parts: the first was showing the plight of the people through the Vietnam war or some kind of communist...something... and the second part was how the whole experience impacted their lives after immigrating to the U.S.
The first part of the movie was set in Vietnam. It reminded me a lot of the Holocaust. The way people were hunted, pillaged, and ravaged... the way families were torn apart... the way civilized people were reduced to the desperation of starvation... and how finding a beetle was like finding gold... they argued over who would get to eat the butt and who would get the head. It made me cringe because (1) I can't stand bugs, much less eating them... and then eating them while they're still moving... and (2) to see people reduced to the point of utter devastation... was so difficult to watch.
The second part of the movie, after the survivors had made it to the U.S., was impactful in a different way. The story followed a woman, her mother-in-law, and her son. The woman was without her husband... not knowing whether or not he was still alive... the son without his father... the mother-in-law without her son as well. The complexities of going on living in spite of catastrophic loss and traumatizing events... and the insensitivity of those who don't know their story and who don't care to understand their struggle and their pain... was also difficult to watch. There was very little communication going on... life was droning on... colorless and dry. The woman went to work. The boy went to school... kept getting picked on, kept getting into fights and other trouble and he also kept getting blamed and scolded by the principal for unexplained bad behavior. The bottling up of emotions and feelings went on for a while... until one day everything exploded. There was yelling, there was screaming... mean things were said with tears... the son yelled in frustration at his mother... demanded to know why it seemed like she had forgotten his dad... the mother-in-law was screaming at the mom to take care of her grandson and also voicing her own pain at the loss of her son... and something the mother said really stood out to me... she said that that who she is now is just a shell of the person she was...and that she died a long time ago.
I cried. I cried pretty hard. So many emotions were stirred in my heart. The journey of a grieving widow always gets to me. And then the son who would grow up without his father... the mother-in-law who had to deal with the complex emotions of having outlived her child. It's just not the way things are supposed to be. And then I wondered how I was going to allow it to impact my life... and I decided that I didn't want to be someone who was judgmental and who was insensitive to the plight of another person. Maybe someone has gone through a traumatic experience like this... maybe they haven't... maybe their behavior is just an expression of repressed grief... maybe it's something else... but either way... to try to give people the benefit of the doubt... and understand that... everyone has their reasons for doing what they do... and it is not my place to judge... cuz I am far more ignorant than not. Realistically, the most difficult people I come in contact with nowadays are at work. I've been trying to remind myself that Mr. Stinky didn't refuse his bed bath for absolutely no reason... that he probably had his reasons, logical or not, and that his reasons probably aren't to torture me with his stench. It helps sometimes to try to look at things like that... sometimes.
I also went to visit a Messianic Jewish temple on a day when they had a Holocaust survivor as a special speaker. Hearing her stories about the gestapo, how her family was ripped apart... how they were also once civilized people... reduced to living like animals in the ghettos... fighting for rotten food thrown on the floor... stealing when they could... and just how cruel and heartless the Nazis were... reminded me about the Journey from the Fall... and also about how little value they held in a human life. People... real people... were exterminated like bugs... thrown into mass graves like refuse... someone's mother, someone's father... someone's sister or brother... devalued simply for being who they were... which was Jewish... God's chosen people.
The Holocaust survivor is an amazing woman. She attributed to God the "coincidences" and miracles that conspired to keep her and her sister alive through the Holocaust and Auschwitz. It was amazingly impactful to hear her share her story. She didn't profess to believe in Jesus, the Messiah, but... she's still alive for a reason... and that means God's not done with her yet.
I read this today... reminded me of the whole ordeal... my interview, the widow in the movie, and the Holocaust survivor's story...
I will not die, but live,
And tell of the works of the Lord.
The Lord has disciplined me severely,
But He has not given me over to death. Psalm 118:17-18
I did not die when I lost the love of my life... I lived. Correction... I live. And I live to tell of the works of the Lord. There must be a reason why I'm the one that's still here. There must be a reason for all the things that have happened to me. There must be something that I've been prepared for... as a nurse, as a woman, as a widow... some purpose, uniquely mine, for why I am in this exact place, at this exact time. I'm journeying through life for a reason... and that reason gives me purpose and worth. Things don't happen aimlessly or haphazardly... God always has His reasons and they are not to torture me... they are to prosper me and it is the same for every other life on this planet. The worth of my own life... the worth of others' lives... are all valuable and that value should be respected. And not merely respected... but... loved. Having a high view of the worth of a life... comes from loving God and subsequently loving what He loves... and God loves people. He absolutely, hands down, without a doubt... loves people. He loved people enough to die for us. That is the greatest kind of love in existence... self-less, unconditional love.
It's a strange phenomenon... when you love someone you kind of just begin to love what they love. Things that I've grown to love because Anderson loved them... baseball, batting cages, bowling, Brazilian food... his family... it just kinda... happened. When our hearts and souls became one... we loved as one... in compound unity. Not always... but... it's something... strange...but lovely. How something that brought him joy would also bring me joy... how the things he delighted in became things that I delighted in as well. We shared in each others' delights... we shared in each others' joy. I don't really understand it but it was a beautiful thing to experience. I wonder... if we loved each other... if loving one another also increases our love for ourselves? I know the Bible says:
In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself. Ephesians 5:28
Hm. Something to ponder. Giving love... is that how you receive it most purely?
Alritey... I'm not sure if I'm done thinking things through but I'm done for now. It felt nice to write again. Hope it made sense...
goodnight...
<3,
Tiff
