"Probably I shall be bad again"

Today the boys are having four (count them... four) friends over after school for an all-afternoon water-gun-fight. Pray for me. :)

I went to see X:Men 3 last night with Dane . . . it was a pretty sweet flick. All I remembered about the first two was that I fell asleep on Joe's shoulder in both (I'm a total narcoleptic in movie theaters), so every thirty-seven seconds I was rudely asking questions about the plotline and continuity and such... but I had fun anyway. I can't speak for Dane.

We ended up sitting on the tarp-covered sofa outside the Academy and talking until one. There are only two people in the world who can literally read my mind, and it's really very convenient because I never have to tell them anything -- because they already know. So we sat out there for a while under the stars in the warm breeze, the kind that only a dusky summer evening in the Shenandoah Valley provides. There's nothing in the world quite so comforting as an old friend, who knows all about you and loves you anyway. "Friendship," as George Eliot put it, "is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words."

And so I stared up at the stars and thought out loud to him for a while about how deeply unhappy I am, about how lost and alone I feel, about how messed up my life is.

And he pointed out something -- that my abstract grandiose plans for self-improvement (always "someday" plans) are simply too broad and sweeping in their current formulation to actualize.

"Donna," he said, smiling. "You don't have to fix everything in your life all at once. Just change one thing at a time. Do one thing differently, and stick to it."

So that's what I'm doing today. For the next twenty-four hours, I'm eating healthily -- something I haven't done for nearly a year. Maybe it's small, maybe it's not the conquest of the darkness, but it's steeling me for bigger battles with myself to come.

"How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I am not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from his mercy . . . One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable . . . the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I am not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's." (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited)

"Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself." (Francis de Sales)