5/6/2024
This year is set aside for a time of healing and new beginnings.
I am taking over my family's personal finance, after my husband being in charge of that for nearly a decade. Budgeting intimidates me and being responsible for little details makes me squirm. I have realized that my "inability" to handle little details is mostly fueled by fear of failure and general worry about embarrassing myself.
Even alone, unobserved by the all-knowing, ever-judgmental "they", I fear embarrassment. I can be embarrassed all by myself. I am starting to truly understand how silly that is. The worst thing about feeling embarrassed is that you feel embarrassed: nothing else happens to you. You don't go blind, your arms don't fall off, you don't vaporize into a ghost (although sometimes that does sound more agreeable). The only thing required of you when you feel embarrassed is to endure it. You don't even have to try again. I think we often should, but it's not a requirement for surviving embarrassment.
Back to the personal finances. I have always considered myself a semi-detail oriented person. That is, I can handle details at work, when I'm answering to someone else who could get mad at me or fire me for doing a bad job... BUT it's next to impossible for me to conquer details in my own personal life. My gracious husband has never agreed with me on this and has always said that I need practice and that it's not impossible, just difficult. I have been sure, SO SURE, that I am one way and he is another and I can't keep up, so I just better settle with being a slow, artistic, non-nerd, details-don't-work-for-me, fear potato.
TURNS OUT... I am still a bit of a fear potato, but with confidence and determination, and resting in the strength of the Lord, I can handle hard things. Honestly, using fear as a way to get out of responsibility is just laziness with crying on top. I don't really want to live like that anymore.
So, I am taking on new responsibilities and putting my head down to work hard on healing and implementing new systems to help our family function well. That means that I'm not prioritizing time to draw every day, but I can draw on Sundays during church. I am going to turn these Sunday Morning Sketches into a series. I like to sit in different seats all around the sanctuary, so I should be able to draw the "same" thing from different angles an infinite number of ways. I'm looking forward to this simple warmup turning into a project!
I am taking over my family's personal finance, after my husband being in charge of that for nearly a decade. Budgeting intimidates me and being responsible for little details makes me squirm. I have realized that my "inability" to handle little details is mostly fueled by fear of failure and general worry about embarrassing myself.
Even alone, unobserved by the all-knowing, ever-judgmental "they", I fear embarrassment. I can be embarrassed all by myself. I am starting to truly understand how silly that is. The worst thing about feeling embarrassed is that you feel embarrassed: nothing else happens to you. You don't go blind, your arms don't fall off, you don't vaporize into a ghost (although sometimes that does sound more agreeable). The only thing required of you when you feel embarrassed is to endure it. You don't even have to try again. I think we often should, but it's not a requirement for surviving embarrassment.
Back to the personal finances. I have always considered myself a semi-detail oriented person. That is, I can handle details at work, when I'm answering to someone else who could get mad at me or fire me for doing a bad job... BUT it's next to impossible for me to conquer details in my own personal life. My gracious husband has never agreed with me on this and has always said that I need practice and that it's not impossible, just difficult. I have been sure, SO SURE, that I am one way and he is another and I can't keep up, so I just better settle with being a slow, artistic, non-nerd, details-don't-work-for-me, fear potato.
TURNS OUT... I am still a bit of a fear potato, but with confidence and determination, and resting in the strength of the Lord, I can handle hard things. Honestly, using fear as a way to get out of responsibility is just laziness with crying on top. I don't really want to live like that anymore.
So, I am taking on new responsibilities and putting my head down to work hard on healing and implementing new systems to help our family function well. That means that I'm not prioritizing time to draw every day, but I can draw on Sundays during church. I am going to turn these Sunday Morning Sketches into a series. I like to sit in different seats all around the sanctuary, so I should be able to draw the "same" thing from different angles an infinite number of ways. I'm looking forward to this simple warmup turning into a project!
5/3/2024
So many things have happened in the last year, but a lot of that includes
journaling, praying, and processing in places that are not online.
I still have struggled to express myself in visual art mediums since the miscarriage in January 2023. I haven't rejected visual art. I still greatly appreciate it! I have found myself less and less interested in creating in that form. I've flourished musically and started writing fiction for the first time since I was a kid. However, my drawings, paintings, and digital creations have fallen far behind me.
Last Sunday, I was intentional about bringing my sketchbook to church and sketching what I saw. I'm really proud to say that I sketched. I found it freeing and just as enjoyable as I remember. Even if it's not my default art form anymore, it felt so good.
My health is in a weird place right now and that feels sad, but I know that my daily life reflects good choices that I was meant to make and steps that are good to take, so where there is disappointment, I have also found joy and peace.
I have my whole life to live my life, so I am slowing down and taking tasks as they come instead of rushing through one thing only to rush through the next. Instead of relying on frenetic energy to achieve satisfaction, I am taking slow account of my to-do list. And choosing peace with each task conquered, instead of shame that I have not reached an unmeasurable goal.
Thank Christ for this peace. It does not come from me.
journaling, praying, and processing in places that are not online.
I still have struggled to express myself in visual art mediums since the miscarriage in January 2023. I haven't rejected visual art. I still greatly appreciate it! I have found myself less and less interested in creating in that form. I've flourished musically and started writing fiction for the first time since I was a kid. However, my drawings, paintings, and digital creations have fallen far behind me.
Last Sunday, I was intentional about bringing my sketchbook to church and sketching what I saw. I'm really proud to say that I sketched. I found it freeing and just as enjoyable as I remember. Even if it's not my default art form anymore, it felt so good.
My health is in a weird place right now and that feels sad, but I know that my daily life reflects good choices that I was meant to make and steps that are good to take, so where there is disappointment, I have also found joy and peace.
I have my whole life to live my life, so I am slowing down and taking tasks as they come instead of rushing through one thing only to rush through the next. Instead of relying on frenetic energy to achieve satisfaction, I am taking slow account of my to-do list. And choosing peace with each task conquered, instead of shame that I have not reached an unmeasurable goal.
Thank Christ for this peace. It does not come from me.
7/6/2023
This isn't really a good blogging format, but it's what I have for now.
I permanently deleted my social media accounts, not because I'm morally against social media, but because I was just tired of Meta adding more and more advertisements in new pockets of their platforms that I enjoyed. I'd been contemplating removing myself from Facebook and Instagram for about four years and after one more ad annoyed me, I got rid of it all on an angry whim. Well, you know what they say about people who take a break from the internet... they're just like crossfitters and vegans. So, I don't need to talk about that anymore. The less annoying I can be the better, but no guarantees.
I have this knopp.lol url because I thought it was hilarious when saw that it was available, but this definitely isn't a place dedicated to comedy. It's not really dedicated to anything specific. I've found that when I overcategorize a project, I feel like I have pigeon-holed myself into one specific thing and then the perfectionism takes over. That's when I get weird. And the project dies.
I'm learning a lot of things this year:
1) I'm re-learning how to handwrite a journal this year. I used to force myself to journal and it wasn't much fun after I discovered the internet and social media. Talking with people was better than writing in a book. But in recent months, I've discovered that the paper doesn't interrupt and I don't have to DEDICATE a certain number of pages or word county to journaling for it to count or help.
2) I'm re-learning to love consuming books! I enjoyed it in my pre-internet days and I had my favorites (Narnia, The Secret Garden, and the Queen's Thief series), but computers were too fun and emailing, chatting, and photoshopping took priority over reading. Sure, I had the occasional book I was motivated to read, but my love for books had died down to a dull roar. Besides, "i love books" was basically a personality trait in the manic-pixie-dream-girl era of the 00's and I knew that my love of the idea of books didn't count as an actual love of reading.
Enter Christmas 2017. In my stocking, I received my first Ann Rule book. For those of you who may not know, Ann Rule was a woman who worked with Ted Bundy (the serial killer) at a suicide hotline. When he was convicted of his many murders, she was horrified to find out that her coworker and friend had committed such brutal crimes. She wrote a book about her experience and became a true crime writer until she passed away. The book in my stocking was Dead By Sunset, a true crime book about a murder that took place in Portland, on the Sunset Highway. I was already getting into true crime, but I'd never heard or read such a detailed account featuring landmarks that I knew and buildings that I drove by regularly. I decided to give reading a second chance.
In 2018 I tackled Mindhunter, by John E. Douglas, after thoroughly enjoying the show. Then I tackled Gay Girl, Good God by Jackie Hill Perry; a personal testimony of the author on how she found salvation through Jesus.
It was 2019 that I decided I was going to read four books. Four books is all I wanted to do. From start to finish. No more, starting it one year and finishing sometime in the next lifetime. I read The Man in the High Castle (hated it), Animal Farm, 1984, Misery, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Matilda, and My Friend Dahmer (which hardly counts, because it's a graphic novel, but I strongly recommend it to anyone who's into true crime). I was SO proud. I couldn't believe that my goal was four and I conquered double that!
2020 = LAME. I slogged through two books that year: The Shining and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I loved one, hated the other. I'll let you figure out which is which.
In 2021 I listened to one audiobook with my husband: Micro, by Michael Crichton. We listened to it on a plane and it was so riveting, we had to clap our hands over our mouths to keep from disturbing other passengers. He also listened to a Tom Clancy novel on a road trip, which I was totally going to listen to too! But I fell asleep.
I was invited to join a book club with some friends in 2022. This was also the year that I figured out that if I wanted to complete books within a reasonable timeline, I was going to have to utilize the magic of the audiobook. Reading I'm learning a lot of things this year. physical books requires a lot of either concentration or time and I have neither in large quantities. I only read two of the assigned books because I was in the middle of listening to Lord of the Rings. I suffered through a painful YouTube summary of one club book: Northanger Abbey. The books I completed were And Then There Were None and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The former was fine. I listened to it in one sitting and that just about broke me. The latter was dark and magical and sad I accidentally recommended to someone who asked for suggestions for light reading.
2023. Guys, I am finally on a roll. Halfway through the year and I have conquered FOURTEEN (14) audiobooks. I've got three physical books in the que and many more to go. I am so proud of myself. Also, thank you libraries! For having an audiobook app!!! This year, so far, I have read: The Maid, The Story of Rolf & the Viking Bow, The Terminal List, Another Kingdom, The Children of Men, Fahrenheit 451, True Believer, Dragon Teeth, five Harry Potter books, and finally... the big kahuna of the year: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time.
With a lot of fiction in the first half of the year, I'm looking forward to more non-fiction in the second half.
3) I am learning how to grieve. I know, I know. Hard left turn into something completely different, but I am sad and I don't know what I'm doing.
I really reduced what I wrote and published on Instagram in the last few years because anything genuine I wrote, seemed to read as attention-seeking, or like I was trying to be profound for likes and interaction and that's not really what I wanted, so I kept the public stuff to a minimal because I don't want people to feel like they have to interact with my poorly written thoughts to show that they read it. And I don't want to feel like I need people's validation to my writing to mean something. Not everybody bottles stuff up- I usually don't- but some things are too big to talk about. It's not like they shouldn't be talked about or that society won't listen to me. But it's just uncomfortable to feel really awful things and it's easy to smile and say, "Yes, this is hard but it's okay". Really, I don't know what "okay" is or when it's going to reach that mysterious point. I just know that I am grieving something I cannot touch. I guess if I could touch it, I wouldn't be grieving.
In January I had a miscarriage. And it's not like I was far along. I didn't know I was pregnant. I've never had a positive pregnancy test before. It wouldn't even been called a miscarriage on the paperwork. It was an abnormal/chemical pregnancy. Even writing the word miscarriage makes me cringe. This isn't an uncommon loss. This isn't something unique. So many people have miscarriages and missed pregnancies, and chemical pregnancies and blighted ovums, and ectopic pregnancies. Nothing about this pain is special. Nothing about it is unique. The kid wasn't large. I didn't have to give birth to it. It died before I knew it was even alive. How could I feel this loss so strongly when I didn't even know? It felt fake.
But I'm not grieving that one little baby that was so tiny, I could have only seen them under a microscope. I mean, I am, but it's more. I'm mourning the loss of a life I envisioned. I didn't expect much, and that's a different problem, but I expected to have children sooner than now. I've always had health problems related to my reproductive system, but they weren't painful, so I thought that they could be fixed. And we'd move on. I'd have babies and whatever. Everything would be fine. But it's not fine. And I am sad. And I feel guilty for being sad because none of this is anybody's fault. Nothing helps. Everyone is kind and it doesn't help. People are sweet and it doesn't help. People are hopeful and it doesn't help. My help comes from the Lord. And right now, that doesn't feel like much help. And here it is, midnight, and I'm trying to find that point I was going to make.
I'm learning a lot. I'm a WIP project.
And journaling digitally is way faster than handwriting. I was able to cover so much more ground!
-CK
