Purpose & Suppose are on the Same t9.

It kind of feels like when I'm home, my heart swells to sizes that are not even capable of fitting inside of my chest. This is my childhood, and this is where I can find and make sense of myself.

Christmas is rapidly approaching and my brother gets home tomorrow, and by the end of the week, my entire immediate family will be together for the first time since..I don't know..maybe July. It's been kind of a long time, and I guess I've really missed them.

But, after a few days of everyone being home, most of them are going back again. My sister is going to have to go back to her job in NYC. My other sister is going to visit her boyfriend in Alabama. In a few weeks, my brother and I will have to go back to school, too. For some reason, I just feel like I need to freeze time and run in mid-air for awhile. Like I've got all these figurative pounds that I've gained over the past few months, and I can't shed them unless I take the time to let them go. I want to just keep running and running because I can't seem to shake this weird feeling that pulls at the bottom of my stomach. But it's not like I'm upset.

I was thinking about how so often, especially when I'm at school, I feel as if I have no purpose. Not that people don't need me, but that I just don't know me, and people don't know me, and my purpose gets lost or misconstrued.
"What am I supposed to do when the best part of me was always you?"
I've always defined myself by what other people think of me. I find myself through the things I do for other people, or the friends I make, or the way that certain people can understand me. But none of those are my purpose.

Yet to be honest, I don't think that I have no purpose. Far from that: I think I've just been toying with too many of them. I have so many purposes, and yet, I've lost sight of all of them.

I have the purpose of being a friend. That's the purpose that I always keep most on the surface, because I care so much about people and making their lives better that I make being a friend the most important thing.

I have the purpose of being a daughter and a family member (sibling, niece, granddaughter). And especially lately, I've come to know that that means occasionally doing things that are not for me, but for my parents. It means going out of your way to see relatives, and visit awkwardly with people in your family you haven't seen in awhile. It means giving of yourself in a friend-ish way. With those things that are obligations, make them choices; it's so much more rewarding.

I have the purpose of following my career path and following my passions. I am meant to use my passions and my life itself to teach people and to eventually find myself in a future that uses me to my greatest potential. Even though sometimes I might feel discouraged or useless, or even scared of the things I feel called to do, I know it's one of my many purposes.

I also have the purpose of being faithful. Not just to the aspects of my life that require commitment, but to my God. Even though a lot of people know how important my faith is to me, it is the only reason that I can have any purpose. Even though sometimes I can't always see it, or can't always hold onto it as strongly as I'd like to..I know that my faith and my purpose comes from God and that I would not be capable of being much of anything without it.

I have a purpose to be Julie. And this is my greatest purpose. All of those other things that I find purpose in are found only through me choosing to wake up each day and be myself. From me waking up each day and choosing the things that comprise myself, not the things that please other people. I have so much beauty and completeness simply in myself, that without the me that I am, or that I am constantly striving to be, I wouldn't be much of anything.

But I think that when I'm home, I swell up. I am so aware of what figurative shoes I wear and where I fit and who I love and what I deserve and how not to be selfish, and I just swell. And sometimes the swelling hurts, especially because when I go back to school and I'm so "swollen" of myself, so to speak, I don't know how to be me. I don't fit into the shape that is myself. This is because Dayton is forming a new shape and sometimes I try to fit my overly swollen North Canton self into the shape that is the Julie of Dayton. They are different and the same person all at once. I still need both of them, and I probably always will.

I feel overwhelmed, and swollen, but I am reminded of what my true purpose is.
And I just want to enjoy now while I can.

A little plug for life: even though death and illness sometimes come unexpectedly, or come in and ruins our plans..it reminds us we don't get to make the plans. God, the greatest planner of life, makes them for us.

My planning for the end of December 2010, and 2011 in general are open to being written.
I'm giving up the pen, and taking up my purpose.
I'm reminding myself I'm Julie, and starting from there.

Chemistry and Politics.

You know, sometimes people irritate me. Not in the, you're in person and you're doing things that will annoy me. But rather, when they feel the need to spread their opinions all over you in a buttery slime that you just can't shake off. It has no affect on you, and you can wash it off, but the grease left behind is inevitably irritating. Like when you get a base on your hand, and you can't wash it off with soap because those are bases. Then all you have to do is use acid to wash your hands of it.

The world keeps washing our hands with acid.

Society has created this image that people cannot be several things at once. The liberal people are accepting, and yet, hate conservatives. The conservative people are close-minded, and therefore hate everyone, especially the liberals. The religious people do radical things like hate all gays or picket the war, and yes, this is ALL religious people. The liberal people are either gay or obsessed with politics, and they worship Obama. Then, when these groups of political people mix, or change and become a little bit different, everyone needs to wash their hands of it. People try to become free of these awful stereotypes that belong to the other groups, because those are NEVER things that would belong to them. We wash our hands of each other; the problem is, in the chemistry of life, we're all bases. And washing each other off requires acid. Our world is becoming more acidic, and irritating the skin that coats our lives.

Why is it that there are categories? Why is it that there are labels? It seems as if our world is a world full of opinions and beliefs, and you're not allowed to hold onto too many different ones. You can't fall in more than one category or side with both sides. It's like a rule. It's the whole, you need to be black or white, and with that, one of them is right and one of them is wrong. But it's never your side that's wrong. It's never the other side that's right. The lines drawn between things can never be erased. They can move, and cause more people to be on one side than the other, but things are never erased.

This acid we're building up among us, this acid we're using to throw one another off of each other, it's only going to hurt us. We can't continue to function this way, because to be honest, it's ridiculous. We are making a humanity inhumane in our attacks on one another.

I'm sorry that I have my opinions. I'm sorry that they don't always coincide with yours. But hey, I try not to judge you as much as I can. I'm not going to say, "Oh, I never judge," because that's an irrelevant statement. We all judge. But our choices of whether or not to go farther with the initial judgment, or to shrug it off and form opinions of tolerance in misunderstanding create who we are as a human race. Forming opinions of acceptance when things vary from ourselves creates who we are as a human race. We can't expect things to be lovely and always coincide with our opinions, or we would never have reason to have opinions in the first place.

I'm sorry that I'm ranting about this. I'll be the first to admit that I am not informed about current events, and that I am not super into politics. However, I have opinions about issues that exist in our world, and some of them might be more conservative, and some of them might be more liberal. However, I am who I am. And when people bash, say, all religious people, or all people with conservative views, or all people with liberal views, all of those kind of affect me. It's not entirely fair to assume that people fall in only one category, or even to judge the other categories. People form opinions based on an entire lifetime of happenings, how much they choose to get involved in politics and be informed throughout time, and just the personality that they possess changes everything too.

Mostly, I'm sorry I don't speak up. Everyone else (and by everyone else, I mean the people who think that they need to be heard at all times) speaks up, and I choose to blow off steam in a blog instead. It's basically just my little way of saying that I have a voice, I have an opinion. I am not a label, a stereotype, a party, a belief system. I'm a person. And that's what humanity is about. Looking at people as, just that, people.

We need to stop the acidic tendencies and just remain basic.

Humanity is basic.
And therefore, so am I.