On Turning Thirty - Part Two
10-20...or Teenage Angst
10-20
Woof.
If a decade could be the most insanely long and winding roller coaster ever made, this one is it. The highest of highs, lowest of lows with hormones, low-rise jeans, pre-pubescent acne and poor body image (not helped by 1,000 selfies from a small digital camera) thrown in to make you absolutely want to loose your cookies on the way down the big drop.
This decade was all of the things you’d expect. Puberty and first loves and a deep relationship formed with Jesus when those first loves caused deep heartache.
It was Friday nights spent straightening every last bit of my hair for the football game later that night. It was trips to other parts of the world that opened my eyes and stretched my heart to things not always looking like my white, suburban upbringing.
This decade was pure ecstasy in Kristie’s lavender room when “he messaged me back!” and long drives alone in the country. It was blaring Keith Urban, Coldplay and Jason Derulo back to back to back and then ending with bawling my eyes out to something by Hillsong.
This decade contained first regrets and mistakes. Hurting people I didn’t mean to hurt, not knowing when a relationship had run it course and I could let go, not being the kind of friend or human I wish I would have been looking back.
It contained moments of immense pride for my little tween self - hitting the buzzer beater in a basketball game against our schools rivals, being selected for a scholarship as a student leader, leaning into a singing voice that I had always used in private (read: in the shower with a hairbrush) and now had emerged as a public gift that people (besides my sweet grandma) actually enjoyed hearing.
This decade is when I noticed my deep need for a savior after watching the cheesiest Christian movie; something in it grabbed my heart and brought me close. A lesson I’ve learned again and again is to not despise or underestimate the simple things that God can use to bring more intimacy with him.
This decade I moved from girl to woman. How does so much happen in 10 years? I was 10 and had no boobs to speak of and suddenly at 18 I had moved out of the only home I ever knew and was trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life? Absolutely wild.
In this decade my heart was ripped wide open by first exposures to the atrocities of poverty, homelessness, war and racism and again in different ways by well-meaning boys who didn’t know how to be “just friends,” and also in recognizing the ways family had shaped who I was in good and hard ways and then in the very unknowing of who I thought I was.
I also watched that same raggedy heart be put back together stitch by stitch with the help of friendship and stillness and my first time in therapy and the small voice of God lovingly saying, “this is the way, walk in it.”
This decade was annual beach trips seeing how tan I could possibly get, it was watching the first of many friends I had grown up with get engaged. It was late nights watching The Notebook or Ever After while eating moose tracks ice cream with the Weretka sisters, it was deep talks with my mom about everything under the sun and bike rides to work out the high school angst on those humid summer nights. It was watching my boyfriend play high school baseball on a sunny Saturday in April, getting acceptance letters to colleges, hearing my only beautiful baby sister be born when I was 13, riding my bike with my dad while he trained for multiple marathons, reading in a hammock on the back patio and laying eyes on the tall, skinny blonde boy in a white T-shirt who would become my husband that second weekend away at college.
Even now my mind swirls with a million memories of this incredibly raw, formative and beautiful decade. You absolutely could not pay me to relive it, but gosh, what a fun ride it was.
Please enjoy these embarrassing photos. Make special note of the barely-there eyebrows and poof making me at least 1.5 inches taller. My vulnerability is on a whole other level with this one. 🫠
