Juxtapose

A long time ago, I was just a child, this little skinny sixteen year old working at a medical office, answering phones, making appointments, masquerading as something more mature and grown up. I found myself in a situation that was somewhat like a classroom full of interesting people - young, old, some looking like those "non-traditional student" types in dingy sweatpants and others looking like they had it all together, running in to pay their bill in between yoga and picking up their toddler from ballet lessons. The first day I worked there, my hand shook when I picked up the phone to answer someone's question about billing, and I went home with a knot in my stomach that day. I had never thought of myself as shy, but maybe it was just that I hadn't talked to anyone I didn't know already.

One day, a few years later, I found myself spending my last day there, wondering how it got to be such an easy job. I marveled at my ability to pick up a phone and talk, at my ease in conversation. I could finally look at people as, well.. people. These days, that comes in handy. I meet doctors with an air of superiority that betrays a god-complex bigger than the Pope's, and I hear them spit out orders to me that are clearly intended to make me do more work so that they can do less. It is at times like those that I reach back into my memory and remember that people are people, no more, no less, and all in all, very pitiful indeed. I am a person too, no more, no less, and some days it tickles me to realize, with renewed happiness, that I need not be intimidated.

I would say there are many life-changing moments I've had, those epiphanic situations that shed new light on things I've been looking at with tired eyes. Many of those things I've written about here, and sometimes I say them over and over again in different ways because each time I think on them, they seem like a new discovery. I talk over and over about things like about God's grace, the frailty of humanity, the imperfect beauty of family, and about the strange but true occurrence that two very flawed individuals can be one person and not kill each other and can actually be better than they were before. I talk about them like they're exciting to me each new day, because they are, they should be. Every new day, I have to redefine who I am in light of these things, taking my cross and bearing it, dying to self, every new day. None of these are things I really understand, I talk about them to try and make them fit together in my brain, but there's always something new to think on when I have exhausted my current list.

Some days, I feel like every day is a little bit of an epiphany, in some small way or the other. What moments in your life have defined you?