I'm Happy! I'm Sad! I'm....I don't know... spoon

I feel like an eternity has gone by, but only two months have passed. Since I've moved away from home to be with my husband time seems to have stopped working normally. The first two weeks my husband and I were married I kept losing time. I would have a whole plan laid out for the day and then all of the sudden it was 5pm and I hadn't done any of it. Time just seems to disappear. I either have too much or too little and that leaves me with an odd feeling of limbo where I'm not quite sure where I am.

Thus the title. I feel a little like Alice in wonderland when she first falls down the rabbit hole. She's floating upside, down right side up, she's big, she's small, she's passing so many doors of all shapes and sizes and all I can do is continue to fall and run into random pianos.

My poor husband. He doesn't know what to do with me. He can tell me a joke at which I will laugh hysterically at one moment then tell me the same joke 2 minutes later and I will burst open crying saying how insulted I was by it. The poor man doesn't know whether to try to hold me or run away from me. But he is a great man and has stood by me through every mood swing and forgiven me all of the random whatever that I throw at him. And he still gives me back rubs. What a great guy.

Now at first I didn't know what the heck was going on with me. I thought before I got married that I was a good stable woman who could handle hard things and enjoy life. I was completely proven wrong when I made this move. I felt like the weakest person in the world and the last kind of woman cut out to be an army wife. And so the hysterics continued.

But then I began to reach out to those around me, and I found a strange thing. Friends. I have never felt like a particularly popular person and whenever I have gone somewhere new it has been extremely difficult for me to make friends. Up until now I've always had my family close to me and so if I didn't have friends I was still OK because I still had a support group. I am now halfway across the country from all of them. Maybe it was bravery or maybe it was shear desperation, but I had to reach out to those around me. I found friends. I found people who could make me laugh, who I could make laugh. I found people who understood when I told them that I was afraid of this new life. People who not only understood but then offered comfort and support.

The past few weeks my storming emotions have begun to calm, but instead of going back to where I was before, I've felt myself settle into something a little bit new. I am still the same person I always was before, but I have a new life now and a new life requires a new outlook.

I am happy. Not in the sense of oh these things have made me happy. I am happy in the way that I know my heart is filled. My heart is filled with love and blessings. I have friends, I have family and I have my husband and my heart is filled with the knowledge.

The only way I can think of to explain this is to imagine a scale. My emotions can swing down and I can be sad for a time. My emotions can also swing up and I can be happy for a time. but there is always a middle space the is kind of neutral. I'm neither happy nor sad but I am still good. This neutral area I can label as "OK" or "good" if people ask me how I'm doing. But there are times, and this is one of them where that neutral area stretches upward just a little bit. I can still go through highs and lows, but the steady constant that I come back to is happy.

It's better than OK. It's better than good. I cannot live in ecstatic, but I can live in peace. That peace to me is deep happiness that cannot be shaken. The only thing I know of that cannot be shaken in this world is Christ. He is my rock and my salvation. He is the reason I can smile and say "I am happy." He is the reason I can smile and say "I am at peace."

He suffered so that we might have joy. To have His joy does not mean to never be sad. Glory in our redeemer. He will steady you as he has steadied me.

I am at peace.

I am happy.

The Hunger Games: Sick Fascination

I saw Catching Fire last night. I just recently watched The Hunger Games on Netflix for the first time. I have not read the books and so my judgment can only come solely from the movies. Maybe that's a good thing maybe that's not. I don't know.

All I know is that I did not like the movies. Either of them.

People tell me that it's a great representation of sticking it to the man, of finding hope in a hopeless situation and similar things. But last night as I sat in the movie theater, many times curled up hiding behind my husbands shoulder, I had to wonder why I was even there. Why was this entertaining? Then I realized that to me, it wasn't.

I wanted to walk out. I wanted to go sit in the hallway to hide from the torture and carnage that was happening on screen. But I stayed. Why I don't know but I did.

Let me clarify that when I walk out of movies it is normally out of self preservation. I cannot handle some things especially with movies, so to save myself from the anxiety and the nightmares I leave. I do not see this as a judgment on the movie because there are plenty of good movies that I refuse to watch or have walked out of simply because I could not handle them.

Maybe that's why I didn't like The Hunger Games. All the same, I have to wonder, why do we find this entertaining? At what point is it too much? How can someones mentality even get to the point where they want to imagine such a situation?

 At what point does it stop to be fantasy and becomes reality?

Yes these are imaginary characters. Yes it was an imaginary situation. But I would argue that our imaginations drive our realities. We may not hit this extreme, but are we not headed that way?

My husband says I don't understand war. Maybe I don't. Maybe I am a pacifist at heart, because I don't understand the mentality that someone has to hurt someone so completely as that. This is not just killing someone, but mentally and emotionally torturing them. With that, I can't understand the audiences mentality in taking enjoyment in it.

You can argue intrigue and values of the rebellion. I still wonder how we can be entertained by such torture of a young girl and her friends. As I watched this "intrigue" play out to its end, I felt more and more darkness. There are things in life that inspire light and there are things in life that inspire darkness. The Hunger Games inspired only darkness to me. I felt no hope. I felt no light. I felt no love. I only felt pain, fear and anxiety. Maybe that was its purpose. But I believe, as we are all taught in science, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Studying darkness can bring us insight and knowledge, many times we can become lost in it. I do not like always feeling darkness. I prefer to seek light. Maybe that makes me shallow, but it makes me happy. I've had enough real darkness in my own life. I don't need to wallow in fake darkness. 

I do not by any means wish to pass judgment on any one. These are just the thoughts and feelings I have had and if you read this and feel I am wrong all I can say is that I'm sorry and that I just don't understand. Just let me ask this:

How long until our imaginations become a reality?

There's A Little Shrek In All Of Us

So... my new family blog.... because I'm starting a new family so what the heck! New blog! Yay!

To clear any misconception: No I am not pregnant, I have just been recently married and a husband and wife count as a family. So there.

Yes I have an attitude. Yes I'm weird. But you know what? I'm ok with that, because I've come to grips with the fact that I am Fiona and my husband is Shrek. This is not to say that my husband is more ugly and smelly than I am because I can tell you right now there are moments when I am smellier and uglier than him. I am only saying that when we fart, it doesn't smell like roses. When we fight, it doesn't turn up butterflies. When I sing, little woodland animals don't scurry in to help me clean the apartment, no matter how much my husband wishes they would. The reality is, I'm not a Disney Princess and every movement I make isn't planned out in grace. I stub my toes all over the place. I mean look at Fiona. She made a bird explode. Top that.

The point is, we all want a little fairy tale, but a fairy tale isn't reality. We don't have a finite story that ends when we beat the bad guy. In our lives we will have multiple "bad guys" and many times we will have to fight them at the same time. I guess that's a good thing about being part ogre though. We're a little bit more durable.

I'm not by any means suggesting that we should wallow in trash and do disgusting things. We should, however, be aware of our inner ogre. That means that humans do human things and many times those things may be... well, less than glamorous.

That is why I have found sisterhood with Fiona. I can be a princess when I want to be, but I'm not perfect. That is true both personality -wise and physically. Does this mean I can't have a fairytale? No. I have my fairytale, but luckily mine doesn't end. I get to live my ogre life with my ogre husband riding off into the sunset every time we accomplish something together. The greatest fairy tales are those about the couple that never gave up. So join me and embrace your inner ogre a little bit. Weather out the tough storms and ride into the sunset again and again.

I'm going to have to get my husband some armor and a horse...