About a Girl

So lately I've been making my way through Donald Miller's book Blue Like Jazz, which, first of all, I shouldn't have put off reading for six years and which really is a quick read -- maybe a couple hours, tops -- but I've been going slowly, soaking in all the stories one at a time. Today I reached his chapter on living in community, which is pretty darn relevant to me right now, as I need to figure out how to operate next year when I not only share an apartment but a bedroom with another, when I trade in my townhouse for a single-level share, my queen bed for a twin. I was reading this chapter and realized, the person he's describing is me.

"It is like in that movie About a Boy where Nick Hornby's chief character, played by Hugh Grant, believes that life is a play about himself, that all other characters are only acting minor roles in a story that centers around him. My life felt like that. Life was a story about me because I was in every scene. In fact, I was the only one in every scene. I was everywhere I went. If somebody walked into my scene, it would frustrate me because they were disrupting the general theme of the play, namely my comfort or glory. Other people were flat characters in my movie, lifeless characters. Sometimes I would have scenes with them, dialogue, and they would speak their lines, and I would speak mine. But the movie, the grand movie stretching from Adam to the Antichrist, was about me. I wouldn't have told you that at the time, but that is the way I lived" (180).

I wonder, if this is me, how did I get that way? I have a couple guesses. My fourth year of college, I lived in an old, decrepit house with eight other girls. It was an experience, I can tell you that much. Dishes went weeks without being cleaned, trash piled up, and the molding floor was about to fall out beneath our feet. Now, I am a relatively messy person, but I still found myself escaping to my room, eating my dinner and reading my books and watching my TV away from the clutter of the shared living spaces and the rowdy late-night drinking gatherings and the general girl gossip that overflows in any house of that many women. I think I realized that, yes, all of us girls were different, chose to believe the differences outnumbered the quality similarities, and cut myself off from the house. I imposed solitude on myself before it was required of me.

The following summer -- summer of 2007 -- I moved into my Abingdon townhouse apartment and lived there a year without a roommate. I would come home from work, or track, or worship band practice, every day to nothing but my television and stuffed animals. I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to do it. Sleep all afternoon on the couch? Sure, I wasn't getting in anyone's way. Play music 24/7? Sounded good to me. Decide not to move all my laundry off the drying rack in the kitchen for a whole week? I wasn't making anyone else's houseguests snicker.

There was supposed to be a degree of freedom in living by myself; I could bask in the silence and my own thoughts and learn more about myself. That's what the year was supposed to be. And I did learn some things: primarily, that I hate living alone. I was lonely, homesick even, and I picked up some habits that I wasn't proud of. When Stacy moved herself in last August, I was thankful. There would be someone to talk to, someone with whom to discuss stuff with -- work, boys, the Bible, whatever. There would be another person around to make me feel more human, to be a physical manifestation of that for which I was created: relationship.

For the most part, it has been great. Where I have gone wrong, at various times to various degrees but continuously nonetheless, is my inability to bring myself back out of that abyss of self-serving interest that was tended so thoroughly over several years previous. During those years, when I'd been home, it was normal for no one to be around, for my life to seem about me because I wasn't actually interacting with other people, people who would've been a reminder that it's never about me, but about God, about all He has created. But this past year, houseguests have been abundant, high schoolers have popped by at random hours, and another person has been sharing this space equally with me. I wasn't ready for it. I've wanted to watch my TV when I wanted, to work out when I felt was most convenient for me and not necessarily for Young Life plans, to shower before Stacy and therefore hog all the hot water, to leave all my stuff scattered all over the living room and kitchen and bathroom. I've put my headphones on to drown out, well, everything, and to try to convince myself I was the one still at the center of my world. And if I have to talk, even this extrovert has wanted "efficiency in personal interaction;" I've wanted interactions to be short and sweet and to the point so I can get back to what I was doing before I was interrupted (181).

How selfish was I? I still do all these things, I must admit, but now I think I see the consequences of acting selfishly like this. Now, I want to change, and am trying. The world doesn't revolve around me, so I need to live fully aware that everyone with whom I interact is counted among God's most precious ones. If I can show patience, be willing to change plans for them, want to go out of my way for them -- not for the sake of my own pride but simply through the love of Jesus -- then I might truly be called His follower.

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