June 9, 2021

I’ve been in Huehuetenango for about a week now and have tried to write this a dozen times.  Each one sounds like an even grosser attempt to make this experience sound cool and life changing and beautiful and painful with a tasteful touch of redemption.  Most things worth writing about are all of those things.  And maybe one day this will be too.  Just not now. But I’m going to try and write for this moment, even if I don’t think it’s worthy of being written yet.  Something I’m learning is that things don’t have to be beautiful or even have much meaning to take up space.  They can just be.  

The truth? I’ve cried more in the 6 days of being here than I have probably in the past 6 months.  Some more vulnerable truth? I don’t really want to be here.  It’s funny though, because the things I usually want nothing to do with become the things that are the hardest to let go of.  I wonder if this will be the same.  

I remember the night before I decided to drop out of college vividly.  During that lovely season of life it was rare I went to sleep with a dry pillow.  That night was one of those rare nights because it was the first time I had felt peace in a long time.  The unrest and anxiety I felt from move-in day to the beginning of the world’s shutdown was consuming.  The really sucky thing was that I had no time to be consumed by anything, really.  My days were spent in survival mode - numbing myself in every way I knew how just to get through it.  I still couldn’t figure out what “it” was that was taking every ounce of my strength to get through.  I just knew it felt like I was swallowing knives with each inhale and I didn’t feel much beyond that.  

The entirety of my freshmen year was spent trying to figure out what the ACTUAL HELL WAS GOING ON INSIDE OF ME.  Something was happening but I had no idea what it was.  I just knew it hurt.  

I like to think I’m good at fixing things inside myself.  It gets pretty simple if you’ve spent years and years in frequent conversation with a few mental illnesses.  Find the source, analyze why things feel the way they do, and make a plan to overcome whatever it is that’s hurting.  It’s the formula that has gotten me through years of panic attacks, low swings, self-harm urges, and struggles with eating disorders.  But this felt so different and I didn’t know where to begin. 

I used to hold onto things really tightly.  Friends, grudges, the fact that I listened to Billie Ellish when she only had like eight thousand Instagram followers….  The things I cared about couldn’t be pried from my tiny little chubby baby hands.  I think that’s where the feeling started. In the sweaty-palmed death grip I had on my life.  

Going to UGA was what I was supposed to do and what everyone was doing and heaven forbid you want anything else Gabbie because this should be enough for you because it’s enough for everyone else!!!!!  I knew it wasn’t enough though and I felt incredibly embarrassed to feel that way.  I was terrified of being the cliche some people told me I would become.  I was terrified of being the dancing-among-the-wildflowers-probably-will-live-in-a-van-at-some-point-and-make-an-annoying-instagram-for-it girl who decided school just “wasn’t for her.”  NOPE.  Those types of people weren’t seen in the ways I so desperately wanted to be. I wanted to be seen as interesting, intelligent, independent, and in touch with the world around me. None of that hippie dippie weird shit.  Now look at me.  A college dropout whose greatest source of income is art and is spending that income converting a van to live in so she can travel around making more art.  Cute.

That’s not really the point of all this.  Back to sweaty-palmed death grips. 

The unrest I was feeling was the Holy Spirit (I think).  I was so far out of what the Lord was calling me into.  Actively sprinting away from it, actually. I was in so much pain because I was convincing myself that the way life was panning out aligned with the desires that had been instilled in me from the moment I was created.  LIES.  God has been screaming into my ears the things He had for me.  I was just too afraid to listen.

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “oh, once I’m out of high school I’ll do ____” or “once I graduate college I want my life to look like this'' let me tell you: if you aren’t those things now,  you still won’t be once you’ve reached the “ideal” time.  Not to be cliche, (but to be completely cliche) the best time to start is actually right now.  I spent my whole life waiting for the right time to start truly living.  And I finally got tired of waiting.     

Dropping out was the first time in my life I released the death grip I had on something I loved for the sake of my relationship with Jesus.  The Lord was so near in those moments of surrender that I felt no hesitation.  It was like He was sitting with me on that horrendously uncomfortable futon and all I had to do was let go and place everything in his hands.  Hands that would care for my life in ways better than I ever could.  He took it all and clasped His fingers around all the fears and dreams and desires and trauma and pain and hope and has held it all so close.  And has since made so much from the little I had to let go of.  

I think most people have made the mistake of assuming relationships to be transactional. I kind of thought for most of my life that living well meant doing the right things and not deliberately choosing the wrong things.  College was right.  It made sense. It was a necessary step in the pattern I had deemed the Pattern of a Good Life.  A step in getting to The Abundant Life, if you will. Something that God kind of smacked me in the face with was the realization that living well (better: in accordance with His word) in no way correlated with doing what was right or even what made sense.  

While on the topic of things that make sense, here is one that doesn’t: me, a college dropout, teaching English in a country where I speak absolutely none of the native language.  Also I’ve never been out of the country?  And I have no idea how to teach anything?  Let alone English to a group of children where the majority have experienced severe trauma?  On paper this makes no sense.  What does make sense?  The fact that the Lord pointed to this little pastel town situated in the mountains of Guatemala and said “go here.”  

That was a really long winded way of saying I dropped out to be what the Lord has always called me to be: available. But available and willing are two very different things.  I’m learning a whole lot about the willing part of the bargain right now.  

I want to write these blogs to be more honest.  Instagram has a really cute way of being offensively inauthentic. I didn’t want to limit all of my feelings to a pretty picture. This is also to kinda force myself to process all that I’m seeing and hearing and learning and doing in a healthy time frame (and not like 6 months after I get back to the states hopefully).  Also, disclaimer -  I can’t remember the last time I’ve written actually anything.  So if this sucks just remember I literally dropped out of college.

Last Wednesday we arrived in Guatemala City and began the 6 (yes, 6) hour trek by van to Huehuetenango.  A kind man named Jorge drove us through the most nauseating car trip of my life and got us to our destination with only one person puking their guts out!!!! Huge win.  

This is super cliche to say as a white person experiencing another culture for the first time, but everything the first day felt like an out of body experience.  Like it actually wasn’t me in the car that almost hit the little kids strapped up with neon colored bagged snacks walking through traffic pleading with braking drivers to buy some and lighten their load.  It didn’t feel like I was passing a Little Caesars (?????) and Dunkin Donuts but also men hauling bags of avocados on their backs within a half mile radius of each other.  I felt the shutdown and wonder seeping in at equal rates.    

We stopped for lunch and then for coffee and dessert at another Café.  Jorge bought us cakes and cappuccinos as we sat awkwardly across from the people who we would be doing this really hard thing with for the next 2 months.  Also the cake was apparently made from cocaine (according to Jorge...I’m like 99% sure they were just poppyseeds) and the cappuccino was lovely.  Just some important notes.  

After the lowkey traumatizing ride to Huehue we finally made it to our host family’s house.  Me and one of the other interns, Stacy, are staying with the most precious woman who cooks us authentic Guatemalan breakfasts and makes us tea and leaves flowers on our nightstand.  Her name is Marta and her fiancé Levi lives next door.  Levi made oatmilk for Stacy and me after an offhand comment that it was our favorite thing to put in coffee.  

The first day was painful.  We had to put our dogs down on my second day of being here which was so hard to process.  It was even harder to handle because I was simultaneously learning how to be a teacher (note: it’s pretty freaking hard), exist in a world unlike anything I’ve ever known in my 20 years of exietence, and was managing sadness about all the other things I wasn’t quite ready to leave behind before moving here.  It was a lot and I cried a whole lot.  I remember praying to just be able to breathe.  I hadn’t felt like that in a long time.  

There is so much to say about everything that’s happened this week. I’m a teacher now with real desks and markers and students who look at me like I hung the moon.  My heart has already felt the burning impale of the words “teacher, I can’t do it!” because I wonder how many times these sweet babies have already heard that in their little lifetimes.  I want to scoop them up and scream at their trauma for making them believe they are anything but worthy and capable. I’ve eaten the best food of my whole life (THE MANGOS)  and drank coffee that was grown about a mile from where our little cabin is. I’ve also cried and screamed and been angry at God for bringing me here. Yet I have never been more sure that I am being held so tightly in the gentle arms of my Father.  He has broken me open and created a new capacity that I think He intends to fill.  Hopefully with more of Him in me.  Or more Guatemalan mangos.  Both would be great. 

This blog is already annoyingly long so I’m going to end here.  If you want to pray over my time here, please pray for endurance and willingness.  And that I don’t get food poisoning. And that maybe these kids learn a little bit of English and that I don't ruin them LOL.  This is hard and stretching and so very uncomfortable.  I’ve never felt more unqualified for anything in my whole life, actually. In fact I like to stay as far away from things I'm bad at as I possibly can. But it’s SO good because the Lord loves to use my inabilities to bulldoze me over with what He is capable of doing through me.  It’s never anything I could think to ask for.  It’s always more than my simple expectations. 

My precious grandma sent me this little snippet of her devotion from today:

“Apart from Me you can do nothing.  Come rest in my Loving Presence.  Whisper, ‘surely the Lord is in this place.’  Relax, knowing you were not made to be self-sufficient.  I designed you to need Me.  So come to me. Without shame or pretense.  Talk with Me about the inadequacy you feel.  Entreat Me to show you the way forward.  Instead of rushing ahead, take small steps of trust, staying in communication with Me.  I am the Vine; you are one of my branches. Stay connected to Me and life will flow through you, enabling you to bear much fruit.  Don’t worry about success in the eyes of the world.  Bearing fruit in My kingdom means doing the good things planned for you so long ago.  So live close to Me - ready to do My will.  I will always open the way for you, My child.”  

More to come if my brain learns how to process things <3 

Thank you to anyone who has prayed over me since being here.  I think I can literally feel them sometimes.