You sometimes feel like “one or the other.”

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,

whose confidence is in him.”

Jeremiah 17:7

Dear Me,

Nobody understands the workings of a Southern girl, especially one like you. You’re fed and watered on country music, boot scootin’ across the playground and wailing about your achy breaky heart with a knotted lump of first graders. Even you know it’s bad music, but there’s something that even bad music can do. It can make you feel a part of something.

As you grow older, it’s more difficult to fit the mold. Southern women are beautiful and blonde, bright in their sarcastic wit and devilishly loudmouth if they’re from the part of Arkansas you are. You watch one mother’s friend get it all right without her even knowing she’s doing anything at all. She crows loudly across parking lots and packed stadiums, not even aware anyone else is in the room looking at her. You keep all the panic she should be packing inside her five-ten frame like an organic storage facility. Doesn’t she know that everyone’s looking?

More importantly, doesn’t she know that matters?

And still, you continue to grow, like it’s somehow wired in your DNA, and soon you’re full bodied–full hipped really–and look nothing like the Miranda Lamberts of the world. You’re big-nosed (not unsightly just unexpected) and darker-haired and darker-eyed because of the Mexican genes swirling through the pot like stray olives. You sometimes feel like “one or the other.” If only one or the other would have made up its mind to dominate, maybe you could be purposefully stalking through a crowded mall, your lungs on the highest setting. But your whiteness and your Mexican-ness play like docile friends frolicking through a field, and you’re left to avoid eye contact knowing everyone’s wondering why the white girl’s got hips like Shakira.

It is a whole lifetime of pulsing knots, a tangled array of Christmas lights that you intend to unfetter with unskilled fingers. How your completeness, your self-worth relies on all the things you aren’t and never will be. How many moons of self-tanner and Sun-In and practicing an obnoxious laugh in the mirror before something snaps, gives way to the torrent of reality that’s been bubbling beneath your chest all along?

You figure it out eventually. Not so much you, but Him. He’ll whisper truth into you like the sieve you are, and you’ll go and let it leak into puddles at your feet for a while. But then you get to patching and mending, working shoulder-to-shoulder with Someone who never feels the urge to shout or let their presence be known in a crowded room.

He just is, emanating that fact from the very depths of a heart you can’t even fathom. And slowly but surely, you get the hint.

Talk soon,

Ericka