Ends Seeping Into Beginnings

It’s the weirdest thing, living in a last. This is my last semester at The University of Alabama, and as I prepare to leave, I am also preparing to spend four months in China. Looking forward can be difficult. I fully believe it’s necessary to dream and be excited for the future; however, I want to savor these last few months in the south with these people. 

I hope to learn to transition well, so I’m holding a few things at the forefront of my mind.

First, love means reaching out to people, even when this feels futile. It means going to lunch with the freshman I just met, even though our four months of overlap seem negligible. It means risking vulnerability with people I may never see again. It means drawing nearer to the people who are already dear to me, even though that makes saying goodbye even harder. I remind myself that some of the most impactful people my freshman year were friends who graduated that May. Putting time into people always makes a difference, I’m convinced.

I’m also trying to stay grounded where I am. I went to a yoga class (I know, wild right?) and the meditation aspect felt so grounding. Drawing my mind back to the now, to me, sitting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, surrounded by people I treasure and places I’ve loved, means a lot. When I was a freshman, I remember walking across the Quad, feeling so grateful, and thinking, “I’m grateful, and I want to remember that when I am nostalgic, twenty years from now or whatever. I want to remember that I didn’t take it for granted.” Freshman year Cecilia was grateful. I hope to continue to cultivate that gratefulness every day.

Lastly, in preparation for transition, I am attempting to lay the groundwork for healthy communication. I’m learning about the different types of communication that works for different friends, and I’m attempting to cultivate an adeptness at those methods now. I don’t want my time in China to be monopolized by skype calls back to the US. So I’m learning what it looks like to email people, to send occasional notes, to pray for people so that those times when I do talk to them, I feel close already. I don’t think friendships can continue at equivalent levels with distance, but I do think they can be preserved and reignited with geographic proximity. We’re in the preservation game here, my friends, and all in an attempt to remain present. 

Dude, also, it’s the extravagant that means a lot in a friendship. It’s the money saved so I can fly to visit college friends when I’m back from abroad or the random letter mailed for twelve whole dollars to wish someone happy birthday. Extravagant friendship should be sacrificial, and this takes wisdom and practice, but dang it’d be nice to get there, huh?

Lol, a journal entry from Cecilia. 🙂 I used to read blogs all the time, but now I have no idea what people write in these things. I’ve got nothing useful to contribute to the world, ya know? That’s okay, this is a semester of learning useful communication, and maybe it’s this blog…we’ll find out because we’re gonna practice. 

xoxo, Cecilia

Social Media

Internet writers love to talk about social media and how it’s great or terrible or necessary. I’m not going to do that. I simply want to share my struggle, my love, and my solutions for living in a social media dominated world.

Social media provides a deep connection across the world. My friends in Africa can share photos of morning runs, and I have those little bits of togetherness with them which carry us on toward the next time we can be friends in person without taking a lot of time away from either of our lives during this separation (the alternative, texting pictures to a bunch of friends, takes an obnoxious amount of time).

However, I fall into two mentalities with social media which are toxic to how I live.

First, I cultivate my own image. When I open instagram, after I’ve scrolled through the two posts which have popped up in the ten minutes since I last opened the app, I go to my profile and look critically at the thematic content, trying to see myself as anyone looking at my account would see me. I begin to see myself as a conglomerate of these specific (meticulously shot and edited) photos. The things I do in life often become partially an exercise in generating new Instagram content. This mentality doesn’t consume me. In fact, it’s so subtle I hardly notice my slight inclination to seek good photos to further my image, but it’s there nevertheless, and all the more clear to me in times when I leave social media.

Secondly, I become very analytical about people based on their posting patterns, captions, apparent number of friends, adventurousness, and photo quality. I start to categorize friends based on their instagrams, and this is an analytic I don’t want to have at all as I strive to love my friends. I don’t want to have thoughts of “oh this person is skanky because she posted this picture” or “dang she does adventurous stuff every day, I’m too lame to be friends with her.” Rather, I want to love people based on who they are when we sit together over coffee and talk or go on a real life camping trip together.

So clearly I fall into the unhealthy side of platforms which I believe are created to connect people well and give basic life updates.

I’ve taken entire semesters off of social media. Highly recommend. Every once in a while, someone will say, “Oh, like I’m sure you saw on my snap story…”, and I just pop in and say, “I didn’t! Can you show me?” It’s pretty simple, and people are often flattered and excited to share stories in person rather than over Instagram caption.

I’ve set time limits. These work occasionally, but develop this huge internal war in which I have to decide if I want to abide by a limit or deactivate my blockers.

I’ve let myself use social media with no limits. Usually when I grant myself this freedom, I start in moderation, but after a month or two, every time my eyes fall on my phone, I pick it up and go to my most frequent apps: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook.

My friend, Jordan, and I came really close to completely nuking our social media accounts last November. We figured we wouldn’t lose much by getting rid of them…we could save our pictures, maybe print them out. We discovered you can create backups of your entire Facebook page.

We talked to our friend who was about to head back to Africa for two years in the Peace Corps and he talked us out of it. He explained how helpful social media had been to maintain those connections with friends back in America during a previous year abroad, and that was more valuable than we gave it credit for.

Jordan heads to Africa for three months starting in a few days. I will be living abroad next year for nine months. We have international friendships at stake.

We didn’t delete our social media accounts.

But I have entered a new, incredibly restrictive, regime to use social media the way I WISH it would be used. Conveniently, social media adaptability actually makes this relatively easy.

First, I archived all of my old Instagram photos and privated Facebook albums. I decided I wanted social media to be a vessel for UPDATES, not for storing who I am as a person. Now when people click to my profile, they see the most recent pictures, and that’s it. A quick check in to what I’m doing now.

I changed my passwords to a randomly generated string which is far too long to remember. I downloaded the Chrome extension called boomerang which allows me to schedule emails. I changed my passwords, logged into Facebook messenger on my phone (because this counts as texting, in my opinion), and scheduled an email with the password for January 31.

This is my plan: to post once a month, a recap of the month with my favorite pictures and stories from the month. To clear out notifications. To get a brief overview of what’s gone on in the past month. Here’s where social media actually helps. Facebook and Instagram do a remarkable job of sifting the posts you’ve missed which you’ll most enjoy to the top of the stack. So after a month of inactivity, the top posts will be the people who got engaged, the babies born, the people you care about most. It’s a little creepy how well they do, but also useful when you log out for a while.

I never have to consider clicking to Facebook to procrastinate. I can’t get it until that password email arrives in a month.

It’s a system which some people have told me is “extra”, over the top, you know? And it definitely is! But I think sometimes we have to help ourselves to journey into healthier territory. My self-discipline and self-awareness are not sharp with social media, so I’ve created plans.

Anyway. There you go. My social media thoughts. What do you think? Do you like social media? Do you set limits for yourself?

On Dreams

We have a very limited number of days, and yes they go on forever (it feels like sometimes), but also…one wild life, you know?

You know what I do a lot of when I get bored? Meaningless entertainment. Not inherently bad stuff. I got home from finals and read the entire Percy Jackson series over again because I had nothing to do. Which was relaxing.

Here’s a beautiful quote from Ann Voskamp, which I stumbled across in the forward to Daring to Hope. It’s from a deeply spiritual perspective. “But if the steadying love of Christ moves you, it will move you out into the world with the bravest hope” she says. “He mave move you somewhere across the world, or he may move you to believe again, to dare again, to reach out again.”

I made a dreams list during our family vacation to Florida. It’s linked in this website’s heading. Some of the things are small, trivial goals. Some of them are crazy.

In the last few years, I’ve forgotten how to dream. I settled into my plans for studying abroad (an old dream) and let myself be satisfied with that. What a poor way to live this life.

We have so few years of dynamic growth. In females, the prefrontal cortex can complete development around the age of 21. That’s pretty soon, my friends. I want to use every day now for growth, and hope that I can continue this trend for the rest of my life.

Since I made my list, I’ve started learning Chinese again. I’ve been stretching in preparation for dance classes. I’ve researched recipes, planned school habits, discovered techniques to develop self-discipline.

And these things are so enjoyable when they’re stepping stones to dreams and goals. I’m not learning Chinese out of guilt, but out of a desire to explore. How fun is that?

This new dreams list is meant to be progressive. When I cross off one goal, I hope to increment it a step farther. Like an “okay, now that I’ve accomplished this thing and grown in that way, what more can I do? How can I capitalize on this?”

In a way, this blog post is a stepping stone to a dream. I haven’t blogged in forever, and I’m aware that this post is a) uninteresting, b) poorly written, and c) inapplicable to general readers. However, one of my goals is to blog every single week while I live abroad. I have so many questions that I wish I could find blogger answers for, so I’m making a list and I want to answer those questions once I’ve discovered answers.

I’m gonna blog random stuff in the meantime, random, poorly written stuff, to get ready to articulately answer questions.

That’s all. 🙂

xoxo, Cecilia