Struggle Bus

I just want to tell people, "Hey, what you're seeing here isn't the whole story. This girl who laughs and plays all day and slips into a novel after work...she has an evil twin that rarely comes out to play. But she's there." Sometimes I just don't understand why people think it's so easy to come into my life and they want to be my friends. Don't get me wrong, I love my friends. Forever. With all I've got. But I wonder sometimes if they know what they're looking at when they see me.

For the past month or so, I've been saying that I'm on the struggle bus. It's kind of a joke between me and myself (talk about an inside joke). I've been on the struggle bus so long that I furthered the joke: I'm now the driver of the Struggle Bus. It's a means of travel, and if you want to come along for the ride, just let me know.

Being on the struggle bus for me means that I somehow manage to scramble through life, get things done, and be social -- only at an awkwardly slow pace. That usual involves many setbacks. 

I don't know why it seems to be a theme in my life right now. But it's pretty entertaining. Because really, it helps me laugh at myself. And laugh at the mud puddles and crappy French fries and broken power lines in this world. 

That moment when I'm carrying a hot tray of bread and I drop a baguette on the floor. Or I go to say, "Have a nice day," to a customer and it comes out, "Have won-goo-nice da...night..." and they basically walked away before I got past the word have. Trying to do laundry and getting interrupted and finishing it a whopping three days later.

It's the little things in life.

Picking up a random book at a bookstore and absolutely loving it, but then running out of time to read it and knowing that I don't have time to read it before I move and it's too expensive to buy. Staring at a roomful of stuff and knowing that I need to pack it but being unable to get myself to do so.

All of this stuff is petty, really. I think it's stemming from the spiritual chasm running through my core right now. I seem to be going forward (if forward is the right word), and I know that my relationship with God is getting stronger and stronger every day.

But the thing that keeps getting me is this: I constantly love the darkness and crave the light. Constantly.

It makes me sick inside to realize this about myself. And to know that I am deeply, irrevocably lost in this without a way out. I cannot physically escape this state. If God doesn't come down and change this within me, I will be stuck in it forever.

I feel like I am going forward deeper into the light.

But almost every day I run into a wall of darkness and I slip right through it and into the other side almost effortlessly.

And I listen to Demons by Imagine Dragons on repeat...

Does anyone feel this chasm? Does anyone know how to heal it? Because so far bandaids aren't working, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm not letting God heal it.