kitsch

I find it odd that at the end of the year it's compelling to review, package up, and file it away. But I do it every year. Remember back in the days when xanga was the old facebook? Every year there are new years surveys that sweep the virtual world, asking vital and fascinating questions as to whether or not you have received a speeding ticket in the duration of the year or which of your friends or relatives have given birth. These were the questions that I thought would entice friends, to heighten my sagging personality, and make the blogging world do a double take on angsty me, Bri Suitt. I have always been this way. I'm more confident with my words than my skin. I feel bolder and wittier behind a computer screen or blank sheet of paper than I could ever be behind a class room desk or the counter of a coffee shop where the cute barista is waiting to be flirted with. I have found it to be rare to stumble upon such reviews by other desperately needy, like-minded survey filler-outers and find them intriguing. Or just bearable. My suspension of disbelief can only go so far until I start realizing these people really are not as enviable as they are making themselves seem. Obviously I believed my reviews were exempt from such eye rollers. I must get it off my chest that all those years of blogging my year review were really just an excuse to be noticed by someone. Even though that someone was usually just Eli, a big time gamer and pyromaniac from Atlanta with a voice resembling Kermit the frog and whose pants always suggested an impending flood. But still. At least Eli read my crappy thoughts. Plus, I could always reinvent him, which I usually did, pretending he wasn't unsettling and geeky but instead, beautiful and mysterious.

But why do I do this? Why must I crave attention so? I blame this fault on many things, middle child syndrome being the largest culprit. Really, I believe the desire to be known is one of those things that throbs out of the heart of every one, every where. But maybe not. Maybe I'm passing off owning up to my personal flaws to every single person on the planet. Even now, this very moment I'm suppressing the urge to talk about my year, about my adventures of living in Missouri, that I have a new cousin that was born a few hours ago, how I almost changed my major, or that I nannied a kid with asperger syndrome who gave me one of his drawings, how I landed a cool photography internship, how I was daring and caught a duck and let it loose in a dormitory or shaved my head, or that I got hit on by a junior higher, who wrongly pegged me as a cougar of sorts. But I'm not going to indulge that desire. Because not only have I realized that other people find rare entertainment out of it but they leave reading such indulgences thinking you're egotistical -and rightly so. Plus I'm above this. This time you're going to have to grovel about my year.

I'm already hating not telling you about my year. Part of me wants to show you the beautiful and mysterious parts of my year, like my imaginary Eli -the parts that if pieced together just so, make me seem effortlessly adventurous, adorable, independent, and intriguing. There's another part of me begging to just reveal how god awful I am -to confess to the empty blog world all this crap I'm dealing with all because it's my fault and no one else's. I have a raw desire to just spill a stream of nasty disappointment because well, that's me. But there's a middle ground that I'm teetering ever so carefully on right now. I think it's called the truth but I won't know until I read this a year from now and either roll my eyes or sigh confidently. But here it is.

Really, I'm just trying to figure out how to be content, to like the skin I'm in, love well the people in my life, to focus on my passions, to be a godly woman. Goodness, some days I'm just trying to figure out how to not disappoint. The whole attention thing is my band-aid to the gaping wound. God is showing me where I need to quit trying to impress myself with the barbie band-aid and just take it off and and take a big wow at the festered and seeping boo boo. How do you allow yourself to be okay with not being okay and trust God with the nuts and bolts of your dismembered self? That's where I am -at the intersection of 2009 and 2010. My prayer is next year I'll be past that. That there will be an unspoken confidence in my relationships with others, that when I spend time with God I will be less constrained to my flaws that keep me from kissing his feet, and that I will live with more intentionality. This sounds well in type but I know that I know it's going to be messy in reality. It always is. You want to know why? Because I'm a mess. That's what Eli said.

happy new year, friend.