In medias res.

One thing I'm struggling with as a "blogger" (such as it is) is the sense that by sharing my fleeting moments of joy and wonder, or the moments when I feel like I might have figured something out, I'm giving off the following impressions:

- I think I'm so smart and have it all figured out

- I'm happy and positive all the time (okay, just typing that made me say "hah!" inside)

- I'm trying to be something I'm not

Having written that out, the last one may be true. I am trying to be something I'm currently not - a happier, more grateful person. But y'all, it is HARD work for me. I do NOT have this figured out. I am grasping at these epiphanies, writing them down, highlighting them in rainbow colors, broadcasting them, to remind and reassure myself that they happen. That they are truth. That not everything is darkness and drudgery, that there are moments of clarity and light in this life. I also want to be able to offer that out to other people who are in what one of my friends has called "the pit" of depression (that image has stuck with me since I read it on my friend Ivory's blog years back), either for a season or as a more regular state of being in their lives. 

So, if what I write comes off as Pollyanna Faithytimes, if I let my pendulum swing too far into the cliche and the trite and the twee, it's because I am trying so hard to find the sweet spot. My sense of humor is dark, I am fluent in sarcasm. In the day to day, I am quick to see the glass not only half empty, but containing poisonous bilge.

Yet.

Every time life has knocked me flat - and life tends to do that - I have found within myself the ability to get up again. Not only the ability, but the driving need to get up again. Because what else am I gonna do, lay there? So deep down inside of me there is a font of hope, somewhere, but I keep losing the directions, and my GPS is no dang help.

When I was about 25, that Jimmy Eat World song "In the Middle" came out. It was my anthem. I was confused, and stressed, and didn't know what I wanted to be, and work was hard and frustrating, and everything felt like a mess. 

Here I am ten years later, and guess what? I'm smarter and wiser, but I'm still very much "in the middle." I'm learning (slowly) that there will probably be no time in my life when I feel like I've gotten it all sorted and found my way. But if I can mark my trail by documenting moments of joy, I might start to feel like I'm not just wandering through this life.