When I signed up for the World Race, I expected to be challenged. I didn’t expect it to be easy, nor did I want it to be. From the very beginning, as soon as I even heard about the Race, I knew that if I went on this trip I didn’t want to come home the same. You see, I was suffering from something I call the ‘Jellyfish Syndrome.’ It plagues a startling majority of the population, and as I describe it you might realize that you have it too.
The thing about jellyfish is that they don’t have much in the way of muscles, or anything necessary for propulsion for that matter. They may have a little control, but they’re far from being able to chart their own course. You see people like this all the time. The coworker with a dream she’ll never chase, the grocery store clerk who would rather be going back to school for that degree, the successful businessman who would rather be a family man. You meet these people almost on the daily, even if you don’t realize it. Some people are caught in the current of obligations and less than ideal circumstances. Some people are caught in the current of apathy brought on by letting their dreams die, or from having too many of them. Still others are caught in the current of fear. The fear of discomfort, of failure, or of the unknown. Whatever school of jellies you belong to, there’s a decent chance that you, to some extent, fit into one of them. I was firmly situated in the overwhelmed, apathetic dreamer school. I don’t just have a pocketful of dreams, I have a semi-truck full. What is one to do with so many dreams, and ones that often conflict with each other? Naturally, one just locks up the truck, parks it in a dark corner of her mind, and tries to forget about it with varying degrees of success. I suppose you can imagine how that worked out for me. I wasn’t exactly the most joyful person. I was pretty good at being happy when other people were around, sure. I just wasn’t good at avoiding my weekly (give or take) existential crisis. What was I doing with my life? What did I want to do with my life? What was I supposed to do with my life? Heck if I knew, but I knew that every time I tried to open up that semi full of dreams I got crushed by an avalanche of possibilities. One day at work I was watching the sunset, and it struck me. I was trying too hard. Like, way, waaaayy too hard. Bouncing between being a jellyfish and an unfortunate avalanche victim was killing not my will to live life, but to build a life worth living. I was almost done trying. I needed backup.
I called up the best person in the business for advice. Honestly, it shouldn’t have taken me so long to look to him for help, but hey. We all make mistakes.
“Hey, God,” I said. “This obviously isn’t working, so I’m going to stop looking for the answer and whenever you want to show me what I’m supposed to do, I’m ready.”
And I did. I stopped looking. I stopped opening the semi truck of dreams, but I didn’t go full jellyfish either. It was the most peaceful, least restless season I think I’ve ever experienced, at least since I was a kid. I started leaning on the Lord and waiting for him to open a door. It didn’t take long. A week or two after that I heard about the World Race, I applied 2 or 3 days later, and here I am today in Cambodia in the 6th month of the Race.
“Yes,” you might be saying to yourself. “That’s lovely, but what’s your point? What now?”
And I might respond “Well, you see, the World Race helped me to abandon a jellyfish life, and I’ll never go back to that. I’d like to teach you how to do that, too!”
At least, I might respond that way if I wasn’t so unsure about it actually being the truth. The World Race didn’t really cure my Jellyfish Syndrome. When I first hit the field in month one, I was definitely in the honeymoon phase. I was so excited, and alive, and I felt like I was finally moving against the current in the right direction. I was abandoning my jellyfish form and starting to grow some fins. But alas, like all honeymoon phases, it didn’t last forever. Soon enough I began to struggle again. I knew the World Race wasn’t a cure-all for my worldly woes, and I expected the initial feeling to wear off eventually. But I didn’t expect it to hit me so hard, or so soon.
It was probably somewhere around week 3 or 4. We were leaving Honduras and entering Nicaragua, our first all-squad country. That’s around the time I started to experience a different kind of jellyfish, though I wouldn’t really understand what was going on until about 4 months later. They were a more invasive sort of jelly. Instead of me myself living like a jellyfish, my mind started to fill up with jellyfish. Confused? Don’t worry, me too. Let me try to explain this new beast to you.
I had an awful lot of thoughts and feelings about going into all squad month. I’ve always had a hard time connecting and feeling seen in groups of people.. So living with 24 squadmates, lovely as they are, opened a whole can of worms I really didn’t want to get into. I managed to process through some of the bigger issues that arose in me during that time, but I subconsciously stuffed down a lot of the smaller things. Little behaviours that rubbed me the wrong way. Moments of being interrupted or talked over that made me feel unseen and unwanted. Not being invited into things I didn’t really want to be part of, but I wanted to be invited to anyways. I spent weeks and weeks ignoring those things, stuffing them down where I kept the past experiences that made those things problems for me in the first place. I didn’t even realize I did that until quite recently. I thought I was making a lot of progress working through things that were weighing me down, and I suppose I was right. But it was like taking off a 50lb weighted vest and leaving on twenty 10-pound wrist and ankle weights. If you don’t deal with the little things, taking care of the big thing will only help for a short time before you realize you’re still carrying a lot of weight.
That’s where we come back to the new, invasive jellyfish species. Every thought, emotion and idea that I subconsciously ignored for months piled up in my mind like a bunch of jellyfish in a tiny fishbowl. Slowly but surely, over time, the jellies crowded out all the goldfish – the thoughts that were moving, that I was actually doing something with – and I ended up with a fishbrain, er, fishbowl full of jellyfish. Just sitting there. With no current to move them around, and no muscles to do it themselves. They crowded out my ability to focus on anything, my ability to process what was happening at the moment, my ability to process when and why I started to collect my brain jellies. I realized that I needed to process through each one, one at a time, in order to get some healthy little goldfishies back in the bowl. Problem was, by the time I realized that, there were so many jellyfish in my brain I couldn’t tell them apart to scoop one out to start with. It was just a squishy mass of tentacled chaos crammed into a little fishbowl. I wish I could tell you I found the secret to picking one to start with, but I had nothing to do with it.
It was only about a week ago, at our 2 day mini debrief, when I was sitting on the stairs during a worship session. My teammate Alyssa leaned over to me and began to speak. I don’t remember half of what she said but I’ll be darned if she didn’t reach right into that fishbowl, scoop out a big ‘ol jellyfish, and plop it onto my lap. It’s almost as if the Lord used her to say “Hey, you could use some help. Start here.” And I did. It resulted in tears. And some hard vulnerability with my team. And the exhausting process of examining that jelly and learning what I could from it before releasing it back into the wild where it belongs. It also resulted in enough room for a goldfish or two.
Processing just that one thing started a chain reaction. It’s now easier for me to process other things. I can focus better. I’ve started dealing with some of the other experiences and thoughts I’d been unable to deal with before. Don’t misunderstand, the fishbowl is still more jellyfish than goldfish, but at least there’s a few fish in there now to get things moving.
“Yes,” you might be saying again. “That’s lovely too, but where are you going with all this?”
And I’ll respond “Wow, you’re still reading. This is a really long blog and I’m yet to make my point. I appreciate that, let me reward you by trying to explain why any of this might actually matter to you.”
Remember the Jellyfish Syndrome I mentioned about 1,500 words ago? The whole brain jelly ordeal helped me realize something about it. When my fishbowl brain got taken over by jellyfish, life went downhill pretty fast. I couldn’t focus on anything long enough to make any progress, I was tired all the time from trying, and I was honestly kind of a grump a lot of the time. And I was even jellyfishy-er than I was before the race. But if that’s what brain jellies did to me, what does a society full of jellyfish do to that society?
Right now, the world is full of God-given dreams that people aren’t chasing. God-given gifts that people aren’t putting to use. I know not everyone reading this is Christian, but even if you don’t believe in God you have to admit some people are, for some reason, just really good at certain things. You also must have realized that so many of these gifts and talents and dreams ‘go to waste.’ They don’t get used. So, just for a moment, think about a world where everyone just… goes for it. The people with entire worlds in their minds actually write down all those stories and share them with with others. The people who just get numbers sit down to work out that problem that’s been nagging them for months. The people who understand how things work get together and invent the answer to a problem that we all feel. Poets, musicians, artists, inventors, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, dancers, psychologists, all the minds of the people doing what they were created to do. I know, I know. It sounds crazy, idealistic and naive. But I’m not talking solving climate change, becoming a famous rockstar, curing cancer, or taking the world by storm with your spoken word poetry. I’m talking about something a lot simpler. A lot closer to home. A lot more impactful.
I’m saying that if you have a gift for music, use it. Play for your family and friends, bless them with good tunes from someone doing what they love. If you live for those weekly dance classes, maybe dance your way from the couch to the kitchen, or from the coffeemaker back to your desk. If it just makes sense to you when one chemical reacts to another in a certain way, I bet you there’s a lot of kids in your life who would go crazy over some quality slime. There’s a knack to making that stuff, you know. You’d probably also be good at cooking or baking. You see, I’m not talking about changing the world. I’m talking about something I’ve actually talked about in a blog before. I’m talking about changing your environment. When you watch a person do something they love, the air around them changes and the world lights up a little. You get to watch a jellyfish realize that they’re actually a playful dolphin, or a clever octopus, or a powerful shark. It’s like watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon and realize that, hey, it has wings now. It can fly! Okay, yeah, maybe I do still sound like a bit of an idealist. I’m okay with that though. I’m not responsible for how the world sees me, or what you think of me. But I am responsible for the version of me I present.
For me, that means I’ll probably write more. Maybe there’s a novel floating around in this fishbowl. I’ll probably draw more. Love more recklessly. Speak more boldly. I know what gifts I have. I’m learning them, anyways. And the gifts I’ve been given have power. They’re not going to be wasted on me if I can help it. I have decided to be cured of the Jellyfish Syndrome, empty out my fishbowl and fill it with goldfish, and share the gifts I’ve been given with those around me. It won’t happen overnight, I know. It’s a good thing that I’m surrounded by people who see past the jellyfish facade, and remind me often that that’s not who I really am. I have decided to believe them, and what the Lord says about me, and I have decided to grow some fins and start swimming.
What will you decide?
Thank you for reading my first real blog since February! I hope you gained some insight on why it’s been so hard for me to get any words on the page, and I hope you learned something you can apply in your own life! It’s been a journey and a half, and I’m honoured that you decided to tag along for part of it. I hope you’ve been blessed by this, and you can learn from my struggle and grow some fins before your fishbowl starts overflowing. Blessings!
Emalea
