Personalities

I don't like personality tests.

John Green said "Imagine others complexly." I love that. We defy stereotype and categories. We ooze over lines. We are complicated creatures difficult to define.

Unfortunately, we love to understand and to do that we often simplify and categorize.

It is true that there are similarities between people, but I do not ever want to minimize a person to a title.

However, Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." And I agree with that. Seek to understand yourself, and all that surrounds you, but seek to understand it in all of its complex beauty.

I suggest, that rather than answering questions to receive a title, we answer questions to discover the answers. So here are some questions I suggest you ask yourself if you want to understand yourself better. These are just a start to give you the idea, come up with your own questions.

1. What do I enjoy doing and why?
2. What makes me happy and why?
3. What makes me stressed/ anxious/ nervous/ afraid and why?
4. What makes me sad and why?
5. What makes me angry and why?
6. What do I think I'm good at?
7. What do other people think I'm good at?
8. What do I find very difficult to do well?
9. What sorts of thing confuse me? How? Why?
10. What energizes me?
11. What time of day do I feel at my best?
12. Do I enjoy being with a lot of people more, or by myself, or with just a few people? Why? Which one gives me energy? Is the answer different in different situations?
13. In what circumstances do I learn easiest? Is it different with different things?
14. Do I learn slowly or quick? Is it different with different things?

Thank You

It is a story I like to tell a lot, so you have probably heard it before:
An 18 year old girl sat in the back of her uncle's car panicking a few months before her 19th birthday. All of her life's possessions were crammed into the little trailer at the back of her uncle's car. "I can't do this!" She declared over and over and over again. "Maybe we should just turn around. I'm going to fail. I'm never going to make friends. You know, I bet I never even got accepted, it has all been a mistake and I'm going to get there and they aren't even going to have my name listed." Finally her uncle invented a complicated car game for them all to play to distract her, or to shut her up.

4 years later and here I am still as scared as ever but with four years worth of beautiful moments.

I loved university.
I loved meeting people who care about books as much as me.
I loved learning how to really read a text closely and understand it.
I loved learning how language works to create meaning.
I loved exploring ideas.
I loved learning the history of my country.
I loved hearing different opinions and reading the stories of a variety of people.
I loved learning how to communicate more clearly.

But more than all of this it was the people I met that changed my life.

Four years ago I left behind the only home I had ever known, but it didn't even feel like a home.
My father had passed away three years before that and I truly felt like my family had crumbled.
In the years since then I have learned to appreciate my family for who they are but at the time I felt very alone.
I had been out of high school for a year before I came to university. High school had been hard for me. I was an easily stressed, overly inquisitive, kid with bad fashion sense who had never heard the music of my peers or seen the movies of my generation. I was awkward and scared of social interaction yet still unbelievably bold. It took people a long time to get used to me. The first thing they noticed was that I wasn't like them. It took time for them to realise that I wasn't like anyone. When they figured that out I started to get some respect, but it took time. I learned patience. Even though I found a lot of solace in the drama club I never truly felt like I belonged. I made friends but we never really hung out. I spent most of my time with my family and half way through high school all of that shattered when my dad died and my older sister moved out for university. I still had my youth group but it didn't take long for them to get tired of my questions and by the time I came to university I was left with very little community to hold onto. I was afraid and cautious. I had low expectations for the next four years. I didn't believe that I could ever belong anywhere. I was convinced that everyone would leave me eventually.

I don't really know how it happened.
It is funny how many people can be loved by someone who doesn't even believe that humans are capable of selflessness.
Don't get me wrong, there has been anger and grief. There have been people who entered only to leave. (It wasn't always there fault sometimes it was just due to temporary circumstances.)There have been people who didn't understand or didn't care. There has definitely been hurt, but there has also been something else: belonging for the first time.

From bible studies, to camp, to classes, to French immersion, to friendships that grew outside the bounds of categories.

My new friendships have taken me to poetic coffee shops, on crazy long bus rides, on hikes out in the woods, and into people's homes.

I don't even have the words to express how much all the people I have met over the last four years have meant to me or how special the moments have been. All I can say is that I know when I have forgotten what a false dichotomy is and how to conduct a close reading I will still remember the summer of blueberries, planking on the bus, barefoot pasta potlucks, afternoon campouts in the forest, river walking adventures, 4 hour coffee time, poetic non verbal communication, sunsets over the St. Lawrence river, long dinner conversations, and ever single person who entered my heart.
Thank you.

Stars, Dr. Seuss, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Why Mediocrity is Perfectly Acceptable

Ok big confession here: I'm really panicking...about a couple of little stars.

I am about to graduate, and a couple of years ago I went to a friends graduation where I got this booklet that held all the names of all the graduates. Some had stars beside their names, and some didn't. The stars represented good grades and as much as this makes me sound like a Sneetch form a Dr. Seuss book, ever since that day I have been working my butt off to get a star beside my name.

Now this might sound ridiculous, but I think that at a deeper level this crazy obsession over a star is actually something that we all do all the time.

We all want to be special.

I remember a really long time ago I was a part of this youth group where one day the youth leader got this idea to try to use symbolism to make a point so she took us all into the nursery of the church and she gave us cookies and read us "The Sneetches" by Dr. Seuss. We all reminisced about the good old days of being kids. Then we talked about the symbolism behind the book and behind the cookies.

She offered us a choice, we could have a store bought chocolate chip cookie, or a home made chocolate chip cookie. Everyone chose the homemade cookies. Then the youth leader delivered her big metaphor: We are all like the homemade cookies and that is actually better. We are different and unique (you know, like snowflakes), and wouldn't it be boring if we were all the same? We need to be brave and be ourselves and don't try to fit in like all the Sneetches in the story. Just accept everyone for who they are. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!

We have all heard this kind of thing SO MANY TIMES BEFORE. At the time I was too impressed by the idea of using a cookie as a metaphor (this was a long time ago, metaphors were still new to me, leave me alone) I wasn't paying enough attention to realise the ridiculousness of it all. But here it is, what if the problem isn't that we want to fit in at all?

Take the Sneetches story, it wasn't really about fitting in, but about standing out. Yes, the Sneetches who had "no stars upon thars" didn't like being left out and wanted stars so they could fit in, but that wasn't what kept the story moving forward. What kept the plot going and what let stupid whatshisface make all that money was the Sneetches who were like "shit dawg they're just like us now, we gots to think of some other way to be special" (Ok those are not words from the story, but you know what I mean). So they paid mrwhatshisface (actually this could also be a book about consumerism, but that is not what I'm talking about so shelve that thought in a different brain drawer for later contemplation) and GOT RID of their stars so they could be special.

All our lives we have been told we are special like snowflakes so we have been trying crazy hard to be special to stand out. All my life I have wondered "What is my gift, what can I give to the world? Can I inspire others with words, music, or athletic ability? Can I explain things better than anyone else or discover new knowledge faster? Can I solve unsolvable problems with my brain? Can I create useful tools?" The question gets disguised as a seemingly useful one "what can I do for the world" but at the heart of it is the selfish desire to be special in one way or another.

What if we are not? What if I have no amazing abilities? What if I am just...mediocre?

Now don't get me wrong. We all have skills of some kind, you might not be the best at anything but you are probably ok at lots of thinks and it is good to know what these are and how to use them. For example, I am convinced that one of my biggest things to offer is that I actually give a shit (pardon my language but I feel like this is the best way to word it) and  I am willing. When I look back, all of the things I did with my life are not characterized by me being so great at something, but by me seeing a need, caring that it existed, and doing my best to fill it. Then of course I ruin everything by freaking out because I don't think I'm good enough. I've been trying this whole time to find my calling, so to speak. Every time I step up I think "oh maybe this is what I'm meant to do" and then I panic if I make a mistake because I see my reason for existing shattering and I get like frozen by fear of failure.

 I am finding peace in realising that it is perfectly ok to be mediocre, you don't have to be special. My skills aren't anything that make me shine, my skill is simply that I'm willing to try, and now I can calm down when I'm trying to help knowing that I don't have to look for my role in life anymore, because I've been playing it the whole time.

Confessions of Eccentric Survival

Streetlights fascinated my child brain

As did the line in the middle of the street

Crossing at the lights was great fun

But better still would have been to balance

On that middle line, as the city slept

 

My nightmare was that I had run away

Though I always intended to return

I just wanted to see what freedom felt like

I’d wake up feeling guilty

For abandoning my mother in my dreams

 

 I used to go into the library just to touch the books

I didn’t always even take anything out

 I simply liked the smell and how they felt in my hands

Books kept me securely couched somewhere between

The lands of imaginative feelings and physical realities

 

Today, I often mutter to myself

“I don’t know what I am doing with my life”

When I have merely forgotten what I am doing with a moment

 Sometimes I try to say “What is this, my life” in French

But it comes out badly muddled and no one understands

 

Sometimes, when I am overwhelmed with the burden of existence

I find myself standing in the middle of the kitchen

 The sudden feeling that I have lost my purpose may cause me to sit down

Kitchens can do wonders for your perspective on life

 

Sometimes I even try to fly, although I always know it won’t work.

Thoughts on homeschooling

I am just now realizing how proud I am to be homeschooled and how foundational this experience was for my life. When I first started public school (in grade nine) I was really proud of being homeschooled. I soon learned not to be and, although I still talk about it fairly openly (I'm a very open person), it is no longer one of the first things you will find out about me when you meet me, but yes, I was homeschooled.

The way I see it (and I could be wrong) just from what I have experienced myself and what I have heard from other friends who were homeschooled, there seem to be three basic types which I then generalize further into two categories.

Category one: internet/ curriculum based
This category is pretty much JUST doing school at home.
If you are fully curriculum based your parent or guardian will probably act as your teacher but he or she will be led all the way by a curriculum which will tell them what to teach you and when.

If you are internet based it seems that this is pretty much just like taking an online course for a public school. In that case someone you may not even know in the real world will be teaching you, guiding what you do when, and grading your work.

Both of these options seem to include a lot of individual book work although there can also be group projects/ experiments/ and activities with siblings or with a homeschool group.

The second category is what I like to think of as learning by interest.

I have heard of people who will literally not teach until their kid asks a question. That may sound crazy at first because the system is so focused on making sure kids learn certain things by a certain time, but think how many questions kids ask that we are too busy to take the time to answer. What if those were learning opportunities missed?

My mom chose a bit of mix and match. Now the first half or more of my homeschooling days occurred before we had a computer with access to the internet, so we never used that option. My mom never taught based on one complete curriculum but she would mix and match books from different curriculums. Sometimes we did book work, and sometimes we'd do an experiment or project together, the idea of which she might have gotten from one of the books. However, she didn't JUST mix the different curriculums, for she also mixed them with her own ideas and with learning by interest. We only had curriculum books ordered specifically for certain subjects. A huge portion of our learning was thanks to the local library. We made numerous trips to the library and mom would ask us to pick an interest, something we were curious about, and we would get books out about that subject. Sometimes when we were done reading it we would create some sort of project to illustrate our knowledge.

In the two years after my sister went to high school, before I did, my learning became even more experiential. I got to pretty much choose everything I wanted to read about and because I really enjoyed hands on projects I made a ton of them to illustrate the knowledge I gained from my readings. I also got to do a lot of things like bake with my mom for "cooking class" or practice drawing flowers in the garden for "art class."

Another major part of my learning was literature. Technically literature was never on our list of things to learn. We worked on grammar and spelling work-books and had creative assignments to write poems or stories, but after being taught how to read I don't remember ever being given reading as an assignment. Instead, mum would start every day by reading aloud to us from a novel she had picked. These books would usually be above my reading level, they might have won awards, and they were often about other countries or other time periods so I was learning about stuff, but I thought we were just reading. When school was done usually I would end up dropping a book about butterflies or space or whatever, just to pick up a novel I had picked out myself. I thought reading was fun, but all the while I was growing my vocabulary, my knowledge of how meaning is made, what a good sentence sounds like, empathy, and my knowledge of the world around me. All of this was happening without me even realizing it.

So that is my experience with homeschooling. What were the benefits and was there a downside?

Benefits:

1. Learning at my own pace (I was always a slow learner because I wanted to completely grasp a concept before I moved on)
2. Having someone to talk to. There was just my mom, my sister and I. My teacher's attention was not divided between 30 kids so I could ask all my questions and discuss out loud all my confusions which is how my mind has always worked best.
3. Passions were developed. A lot of my learning was based off of what I was interested in, so I never lost my love of learning. It seemed fairly fun to me rather than something that was forced upon me, because it was something I still wanted to do.
4. I learned critical thinking because we took a short course in it when I was around 10, but the whole style of my learning lent itself to critical thinking because I was always more focused on understanding and grappling with confusion than on deadlines.
5. It developed my creativity because I was encouraged and enabled to think outside of the box.

Downside:

1. My particular homeschool experience left me without ever having gained the social skills I so desperately needed because we didn't have a car, so we could not be part of a homeschool group.
2. I never learned how to handle the stress of a deadline because I had all the time I wanted to grapple with my confusions.
3. I was used to having someone to talk out my questions with and did not learn much independent problem solving which made it overwhelming when suddenly my teachers didn't care about me because I was only one of thirty kids.

NOTE: All of these problems are based on things I ended up learning (or began to learn) in high school, so it's all good man.

Ten Books that Changed my Life

These are 10 books that profoundly impacted my life. I list them pretty much in the order that I read them. Every book I have ever read has impacted me, but this is a list of the ones that probably had the BIGGEST impacts on my life.

1.      The Clay Marble by Minfong Ho was read to me by my Mum when I was still quite young. It taught me empathy and made me realise that the world is much bigger than just my little life.

2.      The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis helped me understand the concept of substitutional sacrifice a little better.

3.      A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews helped me survive my first and worst semester of public school back in grade nine. I don’t know quite how to describe how it helped me I just know that it did.

4.      Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I think I read this the summer my Dad died, or maybe it was the year after, but I know it helped me mourn.

5.      Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I still remember reading this in grade eleven. I was home alone with the dog because mom had gone to work. We were sitting on the couch and I imagined that the big lonely empty house was the ocean and my dog was the tiger. This book helped me deal with a lot of the loneliness I felt when Mum started working.

6.      Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. I know he has a bad reputation for his book Love Wins, and it has been so long since I read Velvet Elvis, so I don’t even know what I would think about it now. All I can tell you is that when I read this book, in grade eleven or twelve, I was on the brink of disbelief and this book somehow convinced me to stick with my faith small though it was.

7.      A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'engle. I think I read this book the year after I graduated high school and it helped me be comfortable with my adult love of children’s books and made me realise the importance of the imagination even in the adult world.  

8.      The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. This is one of those books where I can’t explain why it affected me the way it did, all I know is that I picked it up during the year after high school. At the time I had told everyone that I would never go to university. When I put this book down I thought to myself “That was beautiful. Literature is amazing. I want to spend the next four years of my life discussing books with people.” I applied to Trent a short time later, TRUE STORY.  

9.      1 John (in the Bible). In my first year of university I read the entire New Testament and this is the only book in it that did not anger or confuse me but encouraged, inspired, and interested me.

10.  Paper Towns by John Green helped me realise that more than stories and characters what I am interested in writing is ideas imbedded in stories.

 

20 things to be thankful for

For almost two years now I've had a list on my computer of things I am thankful for. When my computer broke last year I had to start over on the new one but I tried to remember most of the things I had written before. I just write more every once in a blue moon so my progress is slow but I have 610 so far. My list is very specific but I just wanted to summarize it here for you. Think of this as a) a reminder of the good stuff and b) inspiration to notice things even if you don't write them down. I was reading "Seeing" by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek the other day for school and I came across this: "The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand." She was using pennies to represent all of the free gifts in the natural world that could be enjoyed if people would take the time. But she laments "Who gets excited by a penny" saying "It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny."

My own list is categorized to make things easier to find, but the following is just a summary.

1. Hope
2. Forgiveness
3. Help
4. Friendship
5. Babies and children
6. Animals
7. Laughing
8. Great conversations
9. Beautiful natural sights
10. Beautiful natural smells
11. Cooking and baking smells!
12. Beautiful noises (some natural like laughter and ice melting, others are man made like the sound of coffee percolating)
13. Soup! Coffee! Tea! - Pretty much any warm liquid
14. Sweet things!
15. Salty things.
16. Art (books, movies, paintings, photography, singing sculpture, plays, spoken word etcetera etcetera etcetera! I just love how art makes me feel!)
17.  Good health
18. A roof over my head
19. Access to food
20. Light bulb moments