Wednesday, April 29, 2015

I've got a dream (she's got a dream...)

Okay, so for those of you who may not have read some of my older posts where I mentioned this, I'm a Christian.
Straightforward, I know.
Having said that, a couple weeks ago at youth group, we started a series called "What Keeps You Up At Night?", and it's all about your dreams, and your fears, an how to deal with them (basically).
So at the end of the service, they had us tear off the ends of our paper with the notes on it (those of us who got paper- Oooohh, burn.). On those pieces of paper, they had three things written:
Name:

Dream:



Fear:




They asked us to fill out that sheet, and after we put it in a basket we were dismissed to our small groups. Now, they suggested things for our "Dreams" space, such our future career, or just something we wanted to do with our lives in general. For our "Fear" space, they didn't necessarily mean fear so much as what do we feel is blocking our path to achieve that dream.
Of course, I wrote my planned career, but I also did something that per my usual, was pretty courageous.
I sort of indulged in something that's been on my heart for a while, even if I only identified it around a year ago. It's sort of a difficult thing to explain, and I don't remember how I worded it on my paper either. So, I'm just going to do the best I can.
I have this weird instinct to try and be there for people. I want to be that person that people aren't afraid to pour their heart out to, and I want to be their "backbone" so to speak. I don't really know how else to describe that feel to you.
So I wrote something along those lines under dream, and under 'fear' wrote something like this:
I want to be there for people, but that's a hard thing to do when no one spares you a second glance. I can't be someone's support system when I'm just a background character to them.

Aaaaand so on.
Anywho, it's been like a week since I started this post, so I don't initially recall where I planned to steer it, so I'll say this:
Being that one "friend" that no one pays attention to sucks.
It sucks so bad.
And to be honest, it hurts a little and it's depressing.
Nobody wants to be included in a circle of conversation purely to fill a space.
Nobody wants to be left awkwardly standing around because that one person who treats you like you exist hasn't arrived yet.
Do you get the point yet?
NO ONE WANTS TO BE TREATED LIKE THAT.
And here's the thing, if you're not familiar with the feeling I'm describing, the chances are you're on of the people who keeps isolating us.
I'll give credit where it's due, many of you probably don't even realize you're doing it.
Regardless, next time you're at some group function and you notice that one kid who's always hovering around, waiting to be accepted by the people they admire, say hello. Involve them in the conversation, please.
Because I know I can't be the only one who comes home from an otherwise good night, and is suddenly sad because someone starts telling you a story about something that happened earlier, and you were standing right there when it happened. It's crushing, that you're so invisible that people will tell you a story you were involved in and not remember that you were even there.
It kills us to have to repeatedly introduce ourselves to people we hang around with, because they simply forget us time and time again.
Again, I know this is not on purpose, but please, please, pay attention to the invisible ones.
We usually want nothing more than to help.



Sorry for the rant,
Phranklynn McS.

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