Greetings, friends!

To be quite honest, sometimes as I am walking about the neighborhoods of Portland, navigating the bus system, working in the office, or even taking part of a ministry or a cultural event, I feel quite sad. I wonder why I feel this way, and sometimes I just don't feel "real". Not real as in honest or genuine, but real as in breathing and living and finding all the potentials. I've noticed this from being around people who seem so real in this sense to me. They actively pursue life and fight for joy. I see this and wonder why I just hang back. Sometimes I feel so cut off from what's really going on. I feel a certain disconnect that I can't reconcile in either my social times or lone times. Portland is amazing, really. I just have had a spirit problem for a long time. Something that I subconciously believed that being in Portland might fix. But of course it hasn't. Only God can fix it. I go to him, I feel consistently. But I feel like it can be in vain. Sometimes I feel most narcissistic when I am going before God, because I feel like I'm just trying to take, take, take from the relationship. I only really seem to give with the hopes of recieving. I feel most of the time, my relationship with God is focusing only on what I can get out of it. I. I. Fuckin' I. I'm sick of myself. I realize that I'm not feeling the same joy as I used to, cause part of me absolutely hates myself. Most of you might be surprised to read this i'm sure. I'm so damn good at acting like a perky, energetic person.

Why am I sharing this? I have friends who don't like that I get so personal in my blogs. 1) I want to be real (in a genuine sense of the word) and 2) I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, and I'd like you to be reminded that you're not alone and 3) so you're open to share and stop pretending that everythings just "good" (as we often respond when we're asked how we're doing).

Anyways, I just read this out of the Brothers K, and it really hit me. And it helped me to realize what my problem I felt looked like. Cause 'til now, I couldn't write it out.

"There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some- like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree- quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all,
till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground."