the word made flesh

Yesterday morning I got out my trusty notebook and wrote a list of answers to the question, "what could be making me so grumpy?" And while the list was surprisingly long, I still didn't find an answer that really resonated with me. It's the same old questions again and again...my best guess is that this is just the latest round in the battle between "I want to do this" and "but I can't" where my answers to the obvious next questions "ok, but what is this?" and...why can't you?" remain frustratingly vague.

On the "why can't you?" front, I go through phases of googling things like social anxiety and introversion and autism and I've never come up with something that describes my condition (or more importantly, what I might or might not be able to do about it) in a way that speaks to me. In an effort to work around the situation I've been pursuing English-speaking friendships lately, which has been nice, except that it's only made work harder (after speaking English for a while, it's even harder to get something out in German) and my prospects of finding a place to belong in Switzerland seem more bleak than ever. Which might indeed lead to grumpiness.

I've been particularly noticing, though, how my level of conversational incompetence is highly correlated with the expectations of the person I'm talking to. When I am with someone who expects to have normal conversation with me, we more or less have a normal conversation. But when I encounter someone who does not believe I can speak German, my vocabulary flies out the window and I suddenly can't get a simple sentence out. And/or if I do get a simple sentence out, they still look at me like I'm speaking Martian and I have to repeat myself several times, getting more flustered each time. It's a crazy exercise in communication theory - and an illustration of how much of what we experience is created in our heads before we even experience it.

Ok, it's possible that I have an abnormally low amount of self-confidence, and I definitely have a penchant for abandoning even the road less travelled in favor of hacking a path through the undergrowth - but I think (?) that only means that I experience more frequently and acutely what is in fact true of everyone: having just one person in the world who [I trust] knows me and believes that I can do a thing makes an enormous difference in my ability to do it.

Which is really where the this comes in. This kind of thing is what I'm interested in. How we imagine each other into being. And whether and how this miracle of creation is related to the ones in the Bible. Can our religious traditions help us (by which I mean, of course, me) grapple with questions like, "where are we?", "what's possible?", and "what comes next?" This is what I want to be thinking and writing about instead of...well, at the moment, instead of doing laundry. Sometimes it feels like my head is going to explode with it all. Which could also lead to grumpiness.