Cuh-RINGE

Why do my mistakes haunt me for days at a time? Let’s talk about that. Sometimes it’s the simplest things. What I said or didn’t say. What I did or didn’t do. How does one come back from those things? Or rather, how does one shake it off? I just keep replaying things in an unending loop, wishing I had done something differently. It’s like a highlight reel, on repeat, sometimes on shuffle. I don’t think it meets the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Just recurrent cringe attacks from my blunders during the day… or the day before… or the day before that. Sometimes a memory from something particularly embarrassing that occurred years before will come up on the slideshow too. My elephantine memory doesn’t always feel like a blessing.

I remember that time I fell during fun sports in form 2 or 3. I also remember that although many people laughed as I tumbled to my knees that Friday afternoon, few people remembered what had happened by the time Monday came around and they all asked why my knee was bandaged. Not sure which one was more embarrassing tbh. The fact that my friends forgot was probably the more painful of the two, for other reasons. I remember the time my dad came to pick me up from a day party and the DJ thought it would be cute to do that thing where he says SO AND SO YOUR FATHER IS LOOKING FOR YOU on the mic. Shout out to the one friend who didn’t laugh and walked me to the car in a show of support. I mean we don’t talk any more and I doubt you read these but shout out to you anyway.

I replay all the times I knew the answer to something but I didn’t say it and someone else did and got the props and I wished I was more confident. That actually lead to my strategy of ensuring that I sit as close to the front as possible so that if I do say something, I don’t have to see many people in front of me turn around to look at me as I speak. Conversely, I replay all the times I said something that was so obviously wrong just for the sake of saying SOMETHING. I be trying yall. My brain and my tongue are in bodes a lot of the time.

Isn’t that weird? How sometimes we say things without thinking? WILD! I don’t really know how to curtail that. As much as I try to bridle my tongue, sometimes it just has this autonomy that’s hard to fight. Strange. I ask myself why I’m like this a lot. Which I feel like I should stop doing. My discernment is nagging at me. Considering the fact that A) God made me and 2) He did so fearfully and wonderfully, I suppose I shouldn’t be questioning His creation. But can that apply to mistakes and shortcomings? Aren’t those all on me?

There’s a verse that says, shall the thing formed say to the thing that formed it why am I like this? The context was different but it still reads like a form of chastening. Perhaps I should be asking Him to mold me into something better, rather than questioning my current form.

IDK mehn. Pray for your girl

Verse of the day: “But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” – Romans 9:20 NIV