Anxiety Interrupted by Rachael Dymski

Author:Rachael Dymski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: New Hope Publishers
Published: 2018-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

When I’m Anxious about My Calling

When I was thirteen years old I became friends with a war veteran named Marty. Marty came to our Sunday school class one morning to talk about his experience in World War II. I didn’t understand then the kind of bravery it would take to open up to a group of middle schoolers about the hardest and most formative years of your life, years you would spend the rest of your days trying to reconcile and make peace with. Marty talked to us about fighting, about following orders from our country to kill, to destroy, to conquer. He talked to us about his uniform, about eating dinners from a can, about waiting for letters to arrive, about hoping he would live long enough until the next shipment arrived. Marty cried while he talked to us and tried to explain the weight war has on a person for a lifetime afterward.

As a thirteen-year-old who had never before talked in this much detail to a war veteran, I was so moved by his willingness to share his story with us. I wrote Marty a thank you note, and he told me in church a few Sundays later it meant a great deal to him because he had gone home that day and berated himself for crying in front of us—real men didn’t cry. We became fast friends over the summer, and when Marty moved to Oregon in the fall, we continued to write to each other for the next ten years.

Marty and I were an odd pair to become friends: he a hero, a veteran, a scholar, and me a teenage girl with braces and no idea how she was going to fit into the world she was growing up into. It was through letters to Marty that I first discovered my mind processes more clearly through writing than speaking. Marty was one of the first people who told me I should consider writing as a career. “You need to keep writing, Rachael,” he used to say in his letters. “You are already a writer; you need to keep writing.”

I brushed it off and told him I couldn’t write, not really. There was no career in it for me. At fifteen or sixteen, I was already experiencing a great deal of anxiety over what I was supposed to do with my life. None of the careers that came up in my personality tests at school—teacher, counselor, director—seemed especially appealing to me. Secretly, I desperately wanted to write for a living. I had half-written novels tucked under my bed and filed away on my computer, but I thought it was a selfish, unstable career—not meaningful or sure enough.

The anxiety around what to do with my life continued as I finished high school and started college. I changed my major three or four times, always staying away from anything English or writing-related because I thought I couldn’t do it. What I learned in college is that people of

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