What a plethora of items, yes? All of the above items have been absolutely swimming through my head during the past few months, and I’m not sure where I want to store them in my mental inventory and how much I want to address each one.

I’ve been having an identity crisis for the past few months…honestly, probably since September of last year when I realized that I don’t even look like I did when I was in college anymore (and that was only five years ago). I’m having trouble feeling like things are moving too quickly in life and I’m unable to keep up with the pace. I’ve worked some things out over the past few months (like accepting my hippie side and being okay that I’m not always going to be like other Christians), but I’m still trying to figure out where my dreams, goals, hopes, fears, and insecurities all meet to let me do what I want to do with my life.

I’ve been very concerned with Green Living for the past several months; ever since we bought our house, I’ve wanted to move to a more natural lifestyle and to tread more lightly on the earth….then my garden died and I was unable to produce the piles of organic produced that I’d hoped for. Then, ants invaded our house and we had to use chemicals to get them out. We are still managing to use CFL light bulbs, are reducing our shower time to conserve water, and use washable containers for our lunch rather than plastic bags. But I want to do more. I want to do more to help the Earth and our animals, whom God has put in our care. I’ve given up meat (had a tofu dog casserole for dinner!), which has been a fairly recent development, and I went raw for a couple of weeks. But I want to do more…..I want to learn more and to get involved more. I want to help spread the message of environmentalism to other Christians, who fail to pay attention to the fact that God entrusted creation into our care in the garden of Eden. That command didn’t go away just because we screwed it up.

Because of our current life circumstances (Joey going to school), we are forced to be very frugal, and in all honesty, I would be frugal anyway. I don’t trust advertisers, and I can’t stand the way they try to coerce us into believing that we need all of the things that they are selling. As a result, I seem to come across as being stingy, which I hate, as Joey and I are not…we tithe to the church, give to animal help/rights organizations, tip well at restaurants. We’re not misers who want to sit on all of our money…..so I’ve let my contemplation of and writing about frugality go so that I don’t continue to perpetuate the ideal that “frugality” equals “obsessed with money.”

So, with all of this floating around in my head, I’m feeling an overwhelming sense of stress….trying to figure out how this all fits together and what steps I need to take next to be the person that I’m supposed to be.