The Freelance, Unconventional Nun is one party cynical, one part bitter, one part wounded. This is what I left you with last. But I am also hopeful and thankful. The point of FUN is not that I am single, a man-hater or a whiny twenty-five year old. The point is that I’m not alone; I have an amazing community around me. Like I said it’s been a long year for my friends and I. We have found more than enough to laugh and cry about and for me this has led me to realization that what I needed was them.
I was always one of those women who would get my friendships with boys confused (for reasons discussed last time). I got to a point at the end of 2007 when I decided that I wasn’t going to touch boys. This was a very funny and extreme resolution because at that point I had still never even been kissed. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle the physical contact, hugging is one of my favorite activities. I just felt my friendship needs changing and knew that I was in some sort of self-preservation mode.
When I moved back to the states from New Zealand I was pretty much on my own. I moved back in with my family for a summer and had no friends in town. My best friend lived an hour away with her husband. I found solace in my books and I devoured Anne Lamott. I used the season of separation to evaluate my life. What were the things I wanted? Needed? Dreamed about? I started to see many of my needs change.
This most obvious change needed was spiritual. The practices I had been doing no longer seemed to have the same effect they once did and needed to be reevaluated. The way I viewed my friendships needed changing. I have always had great friends around me, but I was appreciating them in a whole new way except that now they were very far away. I knew that in Seattle I would have a chance to explore both of these aspects of life.
When I got to Seattle I moved into a house with three women who had traveled and lived and loved and educated themselves and weren’t afraid to speak up at the many things they saw as injustices. They also weren’t afraid to share good wine, or books or music or spirituality or the various parts of life called art. I also found a church community that was completely different from anything I have ever been apart of it (yet another chapter in my episodic spiritual life). One night they made an announcement about the women’s group, Hysteria, and said to talk to Jolie about it if we wanted to know more. After the service I promptly found Jolie and asked, “Are you the woman who has hysteria?” (Which got even funnier when I looked up what ‘hysteria’ means.) Jolie told me that yes, she was one of the founding mothers of the group that was created to be a place for women to share their lives, drink wine and create.
As I became a part of this group, I realized that it feed my soul far more than a large church gathering did. I meet people my roommates go to grad school with and have been pleasantly surprised by some of the amazing women I work with. I then started to see how these great friends I was making are really the “church” I have been looking for. These women are strong, beautiful, courageous, brilliant spiritual and grounded. We aren’t an organized group sitting in rows. We gather around dinning tables and coffee shop patios and books and lakes and wine and each other.
The Freelance, Unconventional Nun has so many parts it’s hard to explain them all in one go. In fact I’m still foggy on who she is and what she does but that is life right? We gather together with people in places around things and we learn about life and we cry and laugh and hopefully we don’t miss the gifts that as we women share with each other.
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