Oddly, the closer the wedding gets, the better I feel about it. I'm still anxious, and there are about a gazillion details to attend to, but at least now I'm worried about very specific things and not just freaking out over the entire idea of hosting a wedding. By the time this is published it will be two weeks until the day of the rehearsal. I'm starting to believe I will survive it.
A theme for me recently has been realizing how people are wired differently. Obviously all of us are different, and I've already told you what a game changer it was for me to understand the difference between introversion and extroversion. But I don't think I realized until the last 2-3 years how many of the ways we are different go down to our core. No amount of therapy or personal growth is going to clear them up.
The difference that feels particularly relevant to me right now: some people handle stressful situations by meticulously preparing for them; some people find that preparation makes them more stressed and they'd rather wing it.
I think I am by nature a person who is more successful in coping with stress by being prepared. But I was raised to admire people who wing it, and by a dad who was charismatic enough to be able to pull off most situations just by letting his charm flow. So I've had to learn that I'm better off if I prepare. I've been making lists for the past week and every time I get through another round of list-making, I feel more confident and less stressed.
And then, like all list-makers, I get the joy of marking things off the list as I do them. There's nothing better.
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Books I've loved this summer, besides the previously mentioned The Road: Emily St. John Mandel's new one, The Sea of Tranquility. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (I know, late to the party). Surprisingly (to me), Jessica Simpson's memoir, Open Book. I didn't realize until I just went and looked at my list how many re-reads I've done this summer: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, Archangel by Sharon Shinn, Good Omens (the audio version is fantastic). Those last two are a bit dated, but I still enjoyed them thoroughly.
And the Narnia books. Like most adults I know who are former evangelicals, I've had to re-think my childhood obsession with C.S. Lewis's series of seven books about the magical kingdom of Narnia. It turns out they're really pretty problematic. For example, in The Last Battle, Susan is banished from heaven because she's interested in nylons and lipstick (not kidding--I just went and looked it up to make sure I had it right)(she is no longer a friend of Narnia, Peter pompously announces).
And then there's the blatant Orientalism in The Horse and His Boy. They're just dated. Until this summer, it had been fifteen or twenty years since I'd read them because I was more than a little embarrassed I'd loved them so much.
I was obsessed with them as a child. I re-read them every year until I was twenty. Even though I was raised thoroughly evangelical, it wasn't the Christian allegory that drew me in. In fact, I think I was on my second or third time through The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe before I realized it was a thinly veiled account of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and then it was only because my mom pointed it out to me. I just loved Mrs. Beaver and Mr. Tumnus and the Bulgy Bears, and the triumph of the Good and Kind over the Mean and Cruel. And the magical door into a secret kingdom, which caused me to furtively check the back of every wardrobe I encountered until I was eight or nine.
Anyway. I was on a road trip this summer and the audiobook I had picked out was not holding my attention, and I remembered I had picked up the entire Narnia collection for one credit on Audible at some point. So I started with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and then The Silver Chair (which is probably the one that holds up best), and I'm halfway through the aforementioned Horse and His Boy. The narrators are excellent.
I think there's enough water under the bridge now that I can revisit them as an expression of a past way of thinking, sort of like reading Little Women or Anne of Green Gables with their pious moralizing, or Georgette Heyer, who has a Jewish money-lender in what is arguably her most popular book, The Grand Sophy. And anyway, Evangelicals can try as they might, but C.S. Lewis, a high church Anglican, would never have been an American-style Evangelical. Not a chance.
But that's an entirely different topic. I'm enjoying them. I will probably skip The Last Battle--no amount of time is going to clear that one up.
If you made it all the way through this mess, I'm grateful to you for sticking it out. Have a good weekend.
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