30 Things I've Learned in 30 Years
Today I finally turn 30 years old, the age I’ve longed to be since I first felt the dissonance of having an old mind in a young body. I mean, I was the college freshman with a flowery poster on my wall that read:
If they come for the poor and innocent and do not pass over our bodies, then cursed be our religion.
…Yeah. I’ve been pretty intense since day one.
This weekend my beloved, Chris, put together as many quarantine gestures of love as he could and I had a dreamy Saturday celebrating my birthday in the sunshine. Today is overcast and a Monday, and I am eating mini peanut butter cups in bed and that’s just how shelter-in-place life unfolds lately.
This post is a bit of a break from the usually birth-y goodness, but I wanted to stretch myself to write down 30 things I’ve learned in the last 30 years. Things about life, hope, grocery shopping, suffering, travel, painting my nails. You know, the stuff of life.
Here goes.
Love is still the central thing
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to outpace love. Like, the mandate to love my enemies, to love my friends, to love my neighbor, to love myself. Surely, I thought, people would better be served by my being useful to them. Turns out that haunting scripture really is true:
“If I speak in tongues of human beings and of angels but I don’t have love, I’m a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and I know all the mysteries and everything else, and if I have such complete faith that I can move mountains but I don’t have love, I’m nothing. If I give away everything that I have and hand over my own body to feel good about what I’ve done but I don’t have love, I receive no benefit whatsoever.”
Love really does a gut-check on our motivations. I’ve lived service without love and it is resentment. I’ve lived leadership without love and it is manipulation. I’ve lived marriage without love and it is contract. Love’s still the central thing.
Slowly picking off your gel manicure will harm your nail-beds all the time, every time
But I’m still too cheap to return to the salon to get them removed. Maybe in my 30s I’ll finally implement the cottonball-tinfoil trick at home.
Meal planning really does keep the grocery bill down
When we first got married our grocery budget was $300 a month. Now it’s double that. During quarantine that’s what I spend in one trip to the store. Pre-quarantine, I learned to meal plan every week and became so much a part of our life that I didn’t understand grocery shopping without it.
Speaking of bills, I can now discuss our budget without crying
I used to cry at every budget meeting when we first got married and we held them weekly. Lord, have mercy. I entered marriage with a lot of baggage around money and scarcity and shame. Now I love the idea of stewarding our resources and having agency over the impact we can make with funds. I still don’t love budget meetings, but I don’t cry at them anymore.
Everything worth treasuring in life takes WORK, or at least intention
Sex, friendships, good parenting, staying fit, healthful meals, keeping your immune system strong, financial freedom, generosity, community. ALL THE THINGS. So. much. work.
I’m just a double-chin kind of gal. Always have been.
I used to try to lose a lot of weight to rid myself of my round face, but I’ve always had a round face even with a slender body. It’s really freeing to see yourself as you were made and surrender to it.
It is liberating to be honest with yourself about what you do and do not like (read: Julia Roberts)
Remember that movie Runaway Bride? And how Julia Roberts doesn’t know how she likes her eggs because she spent years deflecting to the men in her life and their preferences? Now, I’ve always been a bit salty and opinionated so I wouldn’t say her struggle has been my own. But recently I did start getting honest about simple preferences and quirks that as an Enneagram 3 I always clung to in order to appear more appealing. Lately, I’ve been practicing blunt honesty with myself and it is so FREEING. I DON’T LIKE LONG THEATER PRODUCTIONS THERE I SAID IT.
Great Love and Great Suffering
I write about that often here. Father Richard Rohr says that great love and great suffering seem to be the biggest forces that lead to human transformation. I couldn’t agree more and they often have a cyclical relationship: great love that leads to great suffering that leads to great love. Understanding suffering as reality and not a curse or something good people are spared of has been so helpful to fall more in love with a God who deeeeeply identifies with our suffering and enters into it. Mmm.
Ask for help, ask for help, ask for help
I sort of walked out of the womb saying “Thanks, but I’ve got this.” Maybe it was the years of fundraising my budget and salary that finally broke me, but it’s been so healthy to learn how to ask for help. My friends know I am still working on this, but it honors the humanity of others to rely on them and not promote yourself as an indestructible force who does all the helping and needs nothing. It’s also simply not true. Ask for help.
Your clothes are meant to fit your body not the other way around
Like, oh, I don’t know, 99.9% of females, I’ve been socialized to scrutinize my body, never relaxing into its softness and constantly pinching it towards perfection. Following women like @thebirdspapaya online who are on these public and radical journeys of accepting their bodies has been really transformative. It started with the “no fat talk” move in the early thousands and I am grateful it has continued to take root in my life. I still hate that female bodies typically experience more variance than male bodies when it comes to sizing up and down and up and down, but I am learning to release the numbers on the clothing I buy and surrender to multiple Saver’s or Target visits so that my clothes serve me. Not the other way around.
Purity Culture is the curse that keeps on giving
Oof. I am a 90s kid through and through. I was televised taking a pledge of sexual purity at some large Christian gathering when I was 12. My dad bought me a purity ring (it really was lovely, though). I didn’t have sex until I got married. And then I learned that I had something called “vulvodynia” and all that awesome married sex I was promised by terrified Evangelical adults went <POOF> and what followed were years of literal, emotional and spiritual pain to make sense of the sexual nature of my body. I am entering this decade excited to continue to learn about my sexuality and how God made our bodies. I feel more free than ever. I am sad that I was never “allowed” to see myself as a sexual person, where I was having sex or not. It has me thinking and plotting for how I’ll raise my boys. And that includes having really good water-based lube in our medicine cabinet!
I don’t call God “He” anymore
Don’t freak out. Take a breath. I just have found “He” to be too limiting a pronoun for a God that of course exists beyond gender and human constructs. “He” actually became a painful word through broken relationships with men. I do truly appreciate the Father metaphors of God, but they are simply metaphors. And human brokenness did not stop at Bible translation committees. Google the names you see in yours. Chances are they are 90-100% male and white. And that means they can only translate out of one lived experience, when there’s such a richness of diverse experiences through which to read the text. Right now I go back and forth between addressing God in my prayer life as “Amma” (Mama) or “Abba” (Papa) and I’m drawn to the more gender neutral but powerful Creator God. Birth also scrambled all that for me. I needed a God who could identify with that distinctly female physical experience. And I am grateful that God was there all along.
Simply speaking the truth isn’t enough
Folks, especially right now, will not be able to separate your words from your body, your context, and any influences they assume are driving you. We are all formed by our context. I naively set out in my twenties to speak true words to all sorts of people and they often did not respond to those words as I had hoped. This has led me to consider what it means to be more tactical with the truth God entrusts me to preach. I’ll report back at the end of this next decade.
Integrity and Integration have the same root
After becoming a mom and having the illusion of “balance” slap me upside the head, I began longing for integration. Meaning, I wanted the Erin who existed at work to resemble the Erin who showed up at home. I knew I couldn’t give 100% to both callings, but I could keep working to allow what is done in secret to mirror what is done on Instagram. Integrity… becoming a woman whose yes means yes and no means no. A woman who handles funds honestly, who gives her husband the same kind of active listening as she does her clients. Integrity is the word God gave me for 2020 (yeah, I guess I do that thing) and I am eager to pursue integrity and integration in this next season.
New wine needs new wineskins
Change processes matter. You can’t expect a system that has produced one result to magically produce another. I am committed to the slow, long-game work of developing wineskins for new wine.
People’s prejudices are their project, not yours
Growing up in an alcoholic family system makes you think you can actually change other people. But you can’t. And yet for the better part of my twenties I was drawn to the tireless project of changing folks who hadn’t indicated any desire to change. I spent a lot of emotional and spiritual energy on this project only to realize that I am not the Holy Spirit and my time could be better spent tilling soil that desired to be nourished with rain.
Boundaries
Which leads me to boundaries. I had none, I’ve developed a lot. It’s changed my life. It has been a joy to figure out more of who I am and who I am not. What behaviors I can tolerate and what behaviors I cannot. Boundaries have helped me love the dearest and nearest ones in my life. The kind of love that doesn’t turn into resentment (like I mentioned above). When I was a child, I didn’t have much agency to put up boundaries. It took a ways into my twenties to reckon with the reality that I had way more agency than I thought as an adult. Lovingly and gently explaining those boundaries, though never perfectly, has led to the first-fruits of true transformation in some of my most far-gone relationships. Praise be to God.
Embodiment
I grew up in a culture that praised the mind. I climbed the academic ladder and then spent 8 years working higher education-adjacent. Finding birth work as a doula has been a saving gift for me to learn how to be in my own body, focus on my breathing, my strength, and then in turn to help other women get grounded in their bodies. I’ve loved rediscovering Jesus and the body. A theology of the body. And the story still just being told of how women’s bodies preach the gospel over and over and over.
You don’t have to carry the conversation
WOAH. BIG NEWS FOR EXTROVERT. I don’t have to make sure everyone in the room is at ease. As an empath, I sense allll the emotions and then used to take on responsibility to manage others’ emotions. To ensure they were having a good time. Feeling engaged. Charmed. One day, for real, I just stopped. I stopped talking when the conversation lulled. I took a deep breath and smiled. The other person continued on or maybe they didn’t. The silence wasn’t death, it was silence. It wasn’t my fault, it just was. And it was kind of beautiful.
Women are strong
That’s all.
I like going places to sit down. I just want to sit down.
Team lazy mom. I want to go to a park and sit down. I want to watch my kids play while sitting down. It’s probably why I am still nursing a 20 month old. I just want to sit down. It’s the only way he’ll let me sit down.
Just keep going
I penned those words and hung them up in my office. They sustained me through three very trying professional years. I am so glad to be learning endurance and perseverance.
Surrender to the waves
Ah yes another birth metaphor. You will feel more pain if you fight it. Surrender. One of the greatest lessons of this past decade.
You can be the first to name it
Meaning, to speak of the thing no one else wants to. To name the friendship dynamic that’s been looming, unspoken. To name the uncomfortable team issue. To name the glaring injustice. It’s part of how God’s made me, and that’s okay.
Evolution is not only okay, it’s part of God’s creative pattern
Birth, death, resurrection. Birth, death, resurrection. Repeat after me. It’s okay to change your mind. It’s okay to apologize and try again. It’s okay to end up somewhere you never anticipated (literally, relationally, theologically, etc.)
You won’t solve every problem you’re aware of in your lifetime
This is tough for us prophets out here. We see everything (or so we think). We want to heal it so badly. But we are one human in a constellation of humanity. One generation in a very, very long story being told. I live in the paradox of urgency against injustice and perspective and humility that I am no Messiah.
Prayer is an ongoing conversation
And I’m at it all day, but I often didn’t consider it prayer. But it is prayer. It’s beautiful.
God is reality
Amen. God doesn’t need to be conjured up. God doesn’t only peek out when you play “Oceans” on your iPhone. God is always present, always moving, always accessible in every part of a person’s life and day. God is. Amen.
Play and fun are required to run the marathon
Coming full circle from the beginning of this post, I have had a thorn in my side my entire life and that is that I take myself entirely too seriously. But I really do LOVE to have fun. It’s been a joy to discover the concept of “pleasure activism” and badass womanist scholars leading the way who understand how crucial it is to not let shame govern the story towards liberation. We can play, we can laugh. We must. Or we will snuff out way too soon.
It really is true that to truly love others, you’ve gotta love yourself.
I love myself. Heck, I like myself. And my ability to extend compassion and grace to myself is allowing me to extend way more to Chris, to Parker, to Cedar. To love them. Not hold long accounts and high standards. To enter into rest together. Thank you, Jesus.
If you made it this far, wow. You’re great. That was a lot. But I am lot, and I love that about myself. I love you, too. I can’t believe how many genuinely rad people I get to call mine. I think I am walking into this decade with so much more gratitude. I’m entitled none of it, all is gift. Thanks for being here and for cheering on a new decade.