Week 9: Younger Me

Comparison is a weird thing. We all know it isn’t productive, but we do it anyway. 

Lately, I find myself doing a lot of comparing myself to others. 

You see, I’m at a very different place in my life than a lot of people I grew up with. I’m at a different place in my life than my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, and uncles were when they were my age. I have goals and dreams for my life that I was told I was never supposed to have. I have plans for my future that are in direct contradiction with what I was taught “God’s plan” was for all Christian women. And most days, I’m very okay with that. But some days… I’m not. 

Now, I’m not *really* second guessing myself. I generally know what I want for my future and where I believe I am being called to go in the next few years; however, when I stop and look at the people who raised me and the people I was raised with, there is a part of me that sometimes starts to panic. It is this part of me that starts to wonder:

Am I just running from the inevitability of marriage and children?

Do people see me as less of an adult because I’m not a wife or a mother? 

Am I missing out on what some people argue is the most fulfilling part of the human experience? 

I wonder about these things because when I look at my life and compare it to the lives of most of the people I was raised with and consider the ways our community taught us to live and the way those in power treated and continue to treat us, the differences are staggering. My life looks almost nothing like I was told it was supposed to. The way I am spoken to and inquired about is so far from the way they are. The way even they talk to me now - if they talk to me at all - is not how it once was or we envisioned it to be. By their standards, by the standards of my younger self, I am behind in life and depriving myself of true fulfillment. And the younger me, that little girl, she’s really the one who’s looking around and asking these questions. She’s the one still begging for the approval of a crowd who’s already cast her out. 

I want to give space for that little girl. She’s trying desperately to walk a tightrope that she’s been told is hanging over a pit of eternal hellfire and torment, but she can’t look down to check for fear she’ll fall. She is only comparing us and asking questions because she is afraid. She has doubts about what would really happen if she were to look down below the tightrope and risk falling, but she isn’t ready for that risk yet. And that’s okay. Because I’ve already looked down. In fact, I’ve left the tightrope behind entirely. And she doesn’t realize it yet, but I took her with me.