And I Can Feel This for Sure, I’ve Been Here Before

Sometimes I do this thing where I revisit previous journal entries from the same day, just to see what I was doing or thinking on that day in years gone by. Since I don’t write every day, I rarely find an entry from the exact same day in history, but I can usually find one that’s close. Recently, that’s exactly what I did.

It’s funny, because the journal I was looking through goes back to 2016, so I looked up my specified day, or one close to it, starting in that year and worked my way forward. Yet now as I’m thinking about it and writing this, I don’t even remember what I came across from years 2016 – 2019, I was struck so by what I read from 2020.

August 2020, it’s hard to believe that’s a whole year and some change ago; it feels like it was just yesterday. Maybe because I’m in the exact same place.

I can feel this for sure, I’ve been here before.

Reading my August 2020 entry, I realized I literally had the same goals and the same dreams – all unfulfilled – as I do now.

Stagnant: that’s the word the comes to mind. And in my case it would be a blessing if that actually applied. Except, in life, I wonder if there’s such a thing, considering life goes on with or without you…me. So is stagnation even really possible? Seems like you can just go forward or backward to me, and to remain is to be left behind.

And I can feel this for sure, I’ve been here before.

Sometimes I wonder, when confronted with the challenges of life, what part of it can I handle, and what part is my only hope to give it to God. Sometimes I wonder, what my role is in my own life. And the older I get, I’m beginning to realize that I have more say in how my life goes than I thought, or maybe than I’ve wanted to believe.  

When things don’t go my way, I often just chalk it up to it not being for me. You know that saying Christians have: “What God has for me, it is for me.”  Yet the longer I go without the things that I want, being nowhere near the things that I want out of life, things that I could have had by now, I can’t help but wonder, is this God or is this me?  The more I go without, the more I get left behind, I can’t help but realize my personal responsibility.

I’ve lacked self-discipline since I can remember. When it comes to chasing my dreams, I normally do the least while wanting the most. I normally put things off, wait to the last-minute, praying I skirt by. And you know what, sometimes I do. That’s a horrible precedent to set, knowing how to wiggle your way out after the fact, becoming so familiar with that routine that it instinctively becomes the go-to.

I think one of my biggest questions is what happened between then and now, that I didn’t get any closer to my dreams.

I spent part of the day reading some of my journal entries between then and now, and I can see that I was sad a lot and didn’t believe in myself. I was trying to will myself into believing in myself. And because of my lack of belief in myself, and fear of failure, I didn’t put in the effort required to make things happen.  I was trying to psych myself up, get myself into a mental space where I believed against all odds. But my negative thoughts, and negative influences got the best of me. That’s the challenge of doing something you’ve never done before, you have to see the unseen, believe in the unseen.

Some might say that I was just lazy. I’ve thought about that as well, and while I can’t completely dismiss it as if it has no validity, laziness would almost be a welcomed excuse, because it would mean that all I would have to do is do something. I think, in my case, it runs far deeper than that. I figured if I were just lazy, how did I get up so many days, for so many years and go to jobs I despised and do a good job at them no less? That’s not something a lazy person would do. I mean most days I would literally force myself out of bed at the last-minute, then rush and still get to work on time…well, most days… ahem, moving right along…

I think the difference between those jobs and my dreams is that those jobs were more real to me. Like them or not, they had a tangible quality that my dreams, no matter how vivid in my head, lack.

Everything starts in your head. Good or bad it all starts in your head. I guess in my head, my fears have been outweighing my goals and my dreams.

Lately I’ve been putting myself through some training – self-discipline training, in an effort to renew my mind, reprogram my mind from all the negative thoughts I’ve harbored all of my life, from all the negative things others have said to me, said about me. From all the negative things I’ve said to and about myself.

I’ve been watching sermons on faith, but also some self-control and self-discipline sermons by folks like T.D. Jakes and Craig Groeschel. But, one that really stood out to me was one by Dr. Charles Stanley. In it he said – and I’m paraphrasing — you don’t wait to get motivated to do the work, do the work and you’ll get motivated.

After I heard that I was like, wow, what a concept. Because a lot of the time I am waiting to feel motivated, not even simply waiting to feel like doing something, but waiting to feel like there is a guaranteed outcome for my efforts. Meaning that I want to feel like if I do A I’m guaranteed to get my desired outcome in B. And if I don’t feel like that: if I don’t feel, excited, and psyched and gung-ho, I don’t do anything at all. I just keep it in my head.

While in the moment Dr. Stanley’s message felt new to me, after thinking about it, I remembered I’ve subscribed to this concept before. Twenty years ago, I took a bus ride from California to Louisiana. I tell you, you don’t realize how big the world is until you take a cross-country drive (Yes, I realize that California to Louisiana is not exactly a cross-country drive, nor is it the world, but extrapolate for goodness sake, extrapolate). Being a city girl, I took for granted the look and feel of a city and for whatever reason pictured that same bustling landscape spread across all of America. I was amazed at how undeveloped so much of the country was…is. For the majority of the ride, I was gazing out at an endless expanse of land and sky.

Out of that nothingness, I wanted to create something. So, I decided to create a story. I hadn’t planned on writing a story. It was just something to do to pass the time, take away some of the boredom. I had no idea how long the story was going to be, or what it was going to be about, save for two things: I would write about beauty and I would make the main character a boy, because concerns about beauty are so often associated with girls and I wanted to flip the script a little bit.  And so, there on the Greyhound bus, in the open space of probably Texas somewhere, with paper and pen, I started writing.

What started out as a simple idea to pass the time, turned into this wonderfully intricate story, 38 pages long, single-spaced, that ended up taking me over a year to complete. I read back over that story now with all the detail in it, and wonder how I wrote it without planning it out? How did I just make it up as I went along, and still make everything fit so perfectly? Honestly, you would probably think I outlined or storyboarded the hell out of the thing, but nope, I just made the decision to write, over and over again, and it came to me.

Perhaps that’s the true meaning of faith. Faith requires you to do first and see later, when so often I just want to see first before I do.

But I can feel this for sure, I’ve been here before.

So, as I go forward and approach the upcoming year and months, days, hours and minutes there within, I’m really hoping I do what it takes so that I won’t come back no more.

Thank God…thank God…thank God

I don’t want to come back no more.

Today’s title and lines in italics were taken from Teena Marie’s song “Déjà vu (I’ve Been Here Before).” I don’t know what this song is actually about, nor do I subscribe so some of the concepts in the song like reincarnation. What I do know, however , is that this song’s got soul, so I take from it what I will, and make it my own. You can listen to it in its entirety here.