On Growing Up

People say that you have to write what you know. Write what you know. That's a nice concept, a pretty idea, but what happens when you sit down to give voice to your thoughts and you realize that that is all you have -- just thoughts. Thoughts are incredible things, powerful, strong, world-shaking things, but they are not necessarily knowledge. The difference between saying, "I think I'm going to travel" and "I know I'm going to travel" glares at a person. It's undeniable -- thoughts and knowledge are far from the same.

I realize that I am still very young and that I am about to feed you a cliche, but go with it: the older I get, the less I know. It's infuriating to think about all of the time I've spent in classrooms and friendships and in the world only to come to this conclusion, but I think that that is part of being twenty-one years old. It's about the time in your life where the world isn't as simple, as straightforward as it used to be. Suddenly, lines that used to be straight look wiggly and black and white pictures have burst into color and prismatic effects. I'm old enough to see dotted outlines of what should be and what should not be, but not yet enough of an adult to fully realize what is actually important right now and what isn't.

I know the basics, the foundations. I know where I'm from and what I believe about God and faith and family, but what about the rest? What about the things that make an individual an actual independent, thinking, breathing, growing individual? What do I actually know now that I can take with me when I leave this place? And what should I know now? What does a twenty-one year old need to have figured out?

I know that I'm young and I need to enjoy it. I know that I need to go on adventures and develop an appetite for new things. This is the time of my life where I can stay up too late and watch Jersey Shore with my little brother and have conversations until the sun comes up about dreams and the future and to walk away from homework every so often, just to breathe fresh air and really live. And I know that I should, because those opportunities won't always be so easy to get to.

I know that I need to catch a balance between work and class and leadership commitments and friendships and learn how to make quiet times in a seemingly endless day. I don't quite understand how to do that yet, but I know that I need to.

I know that good friends should be cherished and that taking advantage of people is wrong. I know that other people should be valued, not used, and that I can't be selfish and petty anymore. People are not toys and they can't be pushed aside like them. I know that I've been wrong in the past and I know that I never want to do it again.

I know that I need be healthy now and that you shave a few minutes off the baking time when you're using a convection oven and that those "vacant" forms in the apartment mail box actually need to be filled out in order to get mail. I know how to make my Mama's chili and how to do makeup to make my friends feel beautiful and how to understand Middle English literature. I know how to make people laugh and I know how to listen and I know how to articulate my muddy, unclear reasoning into a semblance of order...most of the time, at least. I know enough to realize how little I actually know, but I'm ready to learn. And I'm ready to understand. And I'm ready to change.

So please, friends, teach me your wisdom. Tell me what you know and what you think and what you're learning. I need to grow and I want your help.

It Goes Fast

I guess I thought that everyone was lying.

Three summers ago, I was on the brink of the Next Chapter. I craved something new, something different, something way bigger than the life that I knew at home. I bought things for a dorm room, for my new existence at college, and I learned to answer The Questions on autopilot.

"I'm going to Grand Valley... I got into their Honors College."
"I'm going to double major in English and Creative Writing."
"No, I don't want to be a teacher. I think I want to go into publishing or something."
"I'm going in blind. My roommate seems nice."

Rarely was I forced to be more creative than that and rarely was the final statement of the conversation any different. "Enjoy it," the older, wiser person would say. "It goes fast."

When I finished my freshman year five minutes later, I thought it was kind of a joke. I blamed it on poor choices, distractions from paying closer attention to my time. When that first summer magically dragged on and on and yet drew to a close before I actually required antidepressants, I was a little more confused. Then my second year came and went, blending seamlessly into my third, and now the summer is over and I'm sitting here in firm and complete denial that I am on the verge of my last year of college.

It's partially terrifying, because I just can't figure out how. time. did. that. Seriously -- how did time just stretch for eternity during high school and then race past during college? I don't understand that. It's also terrifying because once this year is over, then what? I have no idea what comes next. I don't know if graduation means more school or some sort of job or a long-term volunteering thing -- I have no idea.

Those things all pale in comparison to how strange and scary it is to be finishing college. As in, it's ending. As in, this chapter on my life is closing. I'm suddenly nervous, thinking about the past three years and worrying that I didn't wring every bit of experience out of them. I think about my friends and how everything is changing this semester, let alone next year, and how our time as quasi-adults is drawing to a close and before we know it, life and Jesus and opportunities will whisk us away to different parts of the world to do whatever He wants us to do and we're never going to get to have this prolonged season of simple togetherness ever again. At least, not as far as we can see.

The point is that I'm tired of wasting life and then writing about it, but I'm even more tired of writing about how I want to change that and then not doing anything. That's why I haven't posted in so long. The point is that it does go fast and I don't want to miss anything else. Things are changing and seasons are ending soon and I'm not going to sit around this year and cry about it anymore. The time is ripe, the day is still full of potential and I choose to be thrilled about the opportunities in front of me instead of the mistakes behind me.

My life looks very different than it did a year ago and infinitely different than it did three years ago. I don't know what is going to happen this year or in April when I graduate, but I know that Jesus does and that's good enough for me. So what if college goes by fast? I'm getting a sneaking feeling that life goes by even faster, and it's not meant to be wasted.

Starting today.

Lasting Words.

When Shelby and I moved home for the summer, we spent a solid two days unpacking our bedroom together. For the most part, that entailed the major things -- finding corners of the house to hide our dishes in, laundering massive piles of clothes, combining our army of lotion bottles and hair care products. When we started to organize our respective closets, though, we got side-tracked. Shelby and I both have a number of boxes filled with cards and letters and pictures and old journals on those shelves, and when one of us starts to go through all of it, everything turns into If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If Shelby starts looking at all of her cards from graduation, Carly will want to do the same. If Carly finds a ridiculously dramatic and painfully hilarious diary from fourth grade, Shelby will want to find hers. If Shelby has a particularly juicy piece of gossip from middle school hidden in those pages, Carly will obviously want to get on Facebook and look at pictures of those people... the whole thing morphs into a horribly vicious cycle that is very hard to get out of.

Some of my favorite things to find in those boxes are letters from my sister. I have saved the notes we passed in Spanish class, the MASH commentaries of our lives, the card that she left under my pillow my first night away at college, and no matter where I am in my life, I know that these things will always make me smile. One letter in particular struck me this spring. Shelby wrote it to me the summer after my sophomore year in high school when we were on the verge of something very new and different in our sisterhood -- separation. I was going away to Engineering Camp [laugh with me, please] and Shelby was going to be gone for two weeks at camp right after that,so for the very first time in our lives, we were going to be separated for three weeks. That time seemed insurmountable then, as evidenced by what Shelby wrote me. "We need to brace ourselves," she said. "You know what they say, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder...' Maybe this will be good for us. Maybe it will teach us not to take each other for granted so much." She went on to admonish me to behave myself and begged me not to do anything stupid and before I acted on a questionable instinct to think, "What would Shelby say?"

In some regards, things have changed a lot. In others, however, nothing will ever, ever shake this friendship. What seemed so frightening all those years ago is now normal -- if I see Shelby every four or five weeks during the school year, I consider myself lucky. I practically stew in jealousy at my friends who go to college with their sisters and I hate the distance between Shelby and I more than I can say.

But maybe fourteen-year-old Shelby was right; maybe this absence does make the heart grow fonder. Maybe it's worth it to be apart so that we can really enjoy being together again. Maybe I wouldn't notice all of the time we have together right now if we always had it. We're starting to fall into a summer pattern, a lifestyle where we act as a unit and simply expect to do nearly everything together. We speak for each other when we plan things now and whether we're running errands or hanging out with friends or just sitting around in our bedroom, we get to do it together.

Today is Shelby's twentieth birthday and it's been freaking her out not to be a teenager anymore. When I stop and think about it, it is kind of weird how much we've grown up in the past few years. We're not little girls anymore; we're learning what it means to be women and how to be sisters who support one another in adult lives instead of the birdcage of childhood. Still, there is one thing that I know in the midst of all of the uncertainty and change that is life as a young adult -- no matter how old we get or how far away from each other we live or what life choices we make, we will always be best friends. I think Shelby said it best in the letter she wrote to me when she was fourteen, so Shelby, in your own words: "You are the human being that knows me the best. I love you more than I love anyone else... soon we'll be together again and between the two of us, I know we'll have a ton of stories to tell each other. I love you soooooooooo much."

Happy Birthday, baby sister. You're half of my heart.

Some Things Never Change

Mrs. Christine Webb will not be living with my family this summer, meaning no more Inside These Crookston Walls, meaning no more hysterical laughing every night as I read her interpretation of my family's insane antics. In her loving memory and to celebrate her wedding a few days late [or just to serve as an introduction...] I would like to offer my own, honorary ITCW entry.

Day 7810:
There is only one entry today, because everything else paled in comparison. Today my mom let her goats out to graze as she rode Charlotte. That was fine, until it was time to put those dumb animals back in their pen, at which point she casually asked me to catch them in the side yard. Sure. The boy goats are stupid and easily caught, but Buttercup is conniving and I swear that she has ulterior motives in life [when I mentioned this to Julie, she just shrugged and said, "Typical girl."]. I casually walked up to her and offered her some grass and she made to eat it from my hand, but then she darted in the other direction. I could practically hear her snickering. I proceeded to chase her into the horse paddock, out of the horse paddock, and back INTO the horse paddock, only to be thwarted each time. At this point, I yelled at my mother, who was leaning against the goat house laughing at me.
"Patience, Carly," she said, casually walking toward me. "You just have to be a little more patient." Carefully, she climbed into the horse paddock and sauntered toward the goat.
"Buttercuuuup," she cooed. "Buttercuuuuup... come here, sweet baby." The horses barely moved as she walked past; they were clearly unimpressed. Consequently, so was Buttercup, because she completely ignored Mom as she sat in the grass near her.
"Buttercup, look what Mama has," Julie said, holding out her phone. That's right -- my mother was trying to lure a stubborn goat to her by waving technology in her face. Effective method. That's not it, though. "Want to see the pictures on my phone, sweetie?" Mom continued to ask the goat, who continued to eat weeds and ignore her. Undeterred, my mother began to look through the pictures saved on her phone. "Oh, here's Shelby after her surgery last week... Buttercup, come see Taylor at the prom. Ooh, this is Mama drinking a pineapple drink in Hawaii - that was a very fun day." At this point, Buttercup may have looked up at Julie, perhaps with the same look of disbelief that was on my own face. "Buttercup, look, here's you in labor!" Mom said next. As Buttercup started to walk away, Julie suddenly lurched and caught her by the hind leg, as if she were some sort of professional cowgirl. My jaw dropped a little; I was equal parts impressed and horrified. Julie looked up smugly. "And that," she said, "is how it is done."

Christine, please move back here and write these things for me... this farm life is too funny not to be documented in some way.

An Inciting Incident

This is my life. This is what I love. This is what I am called to do. I write. I don’t always write well or consistently, but I write. I write the things that come to me – I put it all down in ink and make sense of it as I go.

It doesn’t seem like an inherently scary process, but it really is. On a good day, it’s like I poke a hole in my heart and let little bits of it trickle onto the page. Other days, it’s as if I use my soul as sidewalk chalk, smearing it across anything I can find. And that’s kind of nerve-wracking. I mean, I write to be read and I write to reveal, but the power of words scares me. What if I say something wrong? What if I misrepresent what I want to say? What if someone reads it and thinks I’m an idiot? What if nobody reads it and I know I’m an idiot? Or worst of all, what if I can’t get it out to begin with?

Those are obviously the wrong questions, though. As a writer, I can’t help but to write – it comes out of me even when I don’t sit down formally and decide to spend time working on my craft. And as a Christ-follower, I can’t help but to do what He asks me to do, to use my gifts, to pursue my passions. For me, that that means that I have to write.

I’ve been blessed with a beautiful network of support. Pam and Kate and Dee, for example, always build me up and encourage my work. Taylor takes it a step farther and assumes ownership of my writing in a way that I would let few people do. But Jackie pursues my writing. She asks for it. She demands it. She promises that I can do it even when I’m sure that I can’t and she lets me read everything to her, even the really awful, boring stuff. I think that she’s just vying for the position of Jordan, Donald Miller’s friend who frequents his books, but her reasoning is secondary at this point; she’s well on her way to securing that position.

Jackie and I sat on the beach talking today, talking about God’s promises and His plans for our lives and the awesome potential for living the epic, whimsical stories that we both yearn for so deeply. She asked me why I haven’t started writing the books that I want to write and I said that I don’t know if I can, that I don’t know if I should, and she just stared at Lake Michigan and listened. Jackie listens. She processes. She takes her time to speak, but it is generally worth the wait. After a while, she just sort of shook her head and said, “I don’t know a lot of things, Carly. But I know that you were created to write. And I think that you should start.”

So I’m left with the question, what if I really am a writer? What if I wrote a book this summer? What if I wrote every day, faithfully, in discipline and in boredom, in joy and in inspiration, when I feel like it and when I don’t? What if I actually tell people about this project and thereby lock myself into it with accountability? What if I took a risk and did what I loved and risked falling out of love with it? What if I allow myself to become so consumed with Jesus that I write everything He tells me, that I turn off my internal editor and just write what He asks me to? What if I did that? What would happen?

I guess the only way to find out is to do it… so I’m going to. I’m going to write all summer. I’m going to beg Jesus for words and for patience and for understanding and for stuff to write about and then I’m going to write it. Because what if I am a writer? And what if I did the scariest thing of all and walked away from my dreams because I was too afraid of them? That sounds worse than being an idiot or being frustrated for a little while, so… here goes nothing.