Experience MHGS

This weekend, I helped out with a student recruitment event called "Experience Mars Hill." In conjunction with one of 3 interview dates, the admissions department put together a schedule of events that provides a taste of the Mars Hill experience. However, since the actual Mars Hill experience is nothing short of putting your mouth over a fire hose and then having it turned on full blast, nothing can adequately be summed up in 2 days.

But this weekend provided an opportunity for me to pause and reflect on what has happened over the last 8 months. Even now, I cannot fully describe the significance of this experience or how it is shaping and impacting me, but I know that I am no longer the same person I was. I guess a more accurate statement is this, "I am more myself now than I've ever been before." In other words, I understand myself more, and I am accepting myself - all of me. My anger, my hurt, my confusion, my desire, my hope. My sorrow is magnified, yet so is my joy. Often, my emotions are boiling just beneath the surface, where I can gain access to them at any moment. Emotions that I have found too anxiety-provoking to acknowledge before, I am now willing to experience.
I feel tender towards myself. The callouses are wearing away and exposing rawness - a rawness that is painful and that requires kindness towards myself.
I am more myself now than ever before because I'm letting all parts of me be present, and I feel more connected to each part.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone where you just didn't understand what they were saying? Or maybe you thought you understood, but you really didn't? This was so familiar to my own connection to my life.
But what about a conversation where you really connected with the other person, where everything they said seemed to be real and true, where you knew the interaction was something unique, something deep and mysterious, the connection profound and beyond comprehension?
This has been my experience thus far at Mars Hill. I am discovering Troy - not the Troy that I've always wanted or hoped to be, but the Troy that I am, in all my glory and in all my depravity, in all my disappointments and in all my desires, in all my cowardice and fear and in all my courageous faith.

And this, regardless of the degree or any academic information, this personal discovery and transformation, is well worth the price of tuition.

Moving Stinks.

Being a student at Mars Hill Graduate School requires that you have an affinity towards entering pain and chaos. I doubted that this description fit me - until last week when Ashley and I decided to move for the second time in 8 months.

Moving stinks. There's no way around it. It is simply unpleasant.

Lifting heavy furniture, packing up cardboard boxes, and cleaning all the dust and lint that collects in every unseen nook and cranny. Nothing about it is fun. And just when you finish the process and get everything out of your place, you realize you're only half done. Now, you have to move it into your new place. Ridiculous.

For 8 months, Ashley and I lived the urban Seattle life right down in the heart of it all - 2 blocks from school, 1/4 mile from the space needle and pike place market, and within walking distance to just about everything downtown Seattle has to offer. It was incredible fun and quite possibly the coolest place we'll ever live. But money is tight when you're a single income family paying for graduate school with Seattle rent and a mortgage in Arkansas, so we decided to move out of the heart of the city and save a few hundred bucks.

Fortunately, we found another great couple that was looking to do the same thing. And what would be more natural than getting a place together, right?

So, last week we moved into a townhouse with Jeremy and Jenny Dew. We figured that single people enjoy communal life, so why stop once you're married? ...makes sense to me... I still laugh at the craziness of the whole thing, but I think that's why I love it too!

I don't have any pictures yet (of the house or the Dews), but i'll try and post some soon.

Object Relations

I wish I had some clever anecdote to share, but I have nothing.

I've been consumed with my first research paper - D.W. Winnicott's contributions to object relations theory and how this compares to the interpersonal psychological tradition.

Problem is I don't understand object relations.

It's like writing about Freud's id and ego - you may be able to read about it and potentially understand it, but the level of comprehension needed to compose a graduate level research paper is another obstacle altogether.

However, if anyone would like to engage in a casual conversation about the facilitating environment created out of the primary maternal preoccupation for the explicit purpose of establishing an illusory hallucination of omnipotent control in the pre-oedipal infant, then I'm game!