One of my professors told me recently that I should be keeping a journal of this time in my life. For reasons that I won’t explain here, I’m going to start doing that.

One thing I will comment on publicly is the fact that I have been really sensitive lately. I’m a hyper-sensitive person naturally (to a fault), so when I find myself even more sensitive than normal, I start creating conversations, events, whole worlds that don’t actually exist. I start reading a lot into off-handed comments, and imposing a whole lot of attitude on emails that were probably meant neutrally at worst.

Two conditions contribute significantly to my heightened sensitivity: 1) increased stress; 2) lack of affirmation. My increased stress has everything to do with the life conditions that I’m not going to comment on here. I’ll simply say that some stress is positive stress, some is not, and I’ve got both. A lack of affirmation is a far trickier thing because it’s much more subtle. What is affirmation? Is it something I give myself? Is it something others give me? Is it a compliment? Is it occasional? Is it a confirmation of my person? Is it the confirmation of a calling? Is it fundamental to my being? Well, yes.

As far as compliments go, I’ve got those. Compliments are like potato chips–they’re delicious, but they don’t fill you up and you can’t have just one. I can eat a whole bag of chips and still want dinner.

How do I affirm myself? Well, I suppose I remind myself of what I know to be true about my peson, my world and the people around me. Sometimes that means I affirm myself over and against others. That’s often therapeutic and necessary, but it’s hardly ever satisfying in and of itself.

I remind myself of what I know to be true: I am created in God’s image and have inherent worth and beauty; The center of my person is that imago Dei, everything else waxes and wanes; God’s love is for all people, including me, so we all deserve respect and to be treated with dignity; I am not God; I am finite and faulted.

How do others offer me affirmation? This one is tricky, because we all know people who go around needy of others’ world-shaping words, apparently incapable of affirming themselves. That isn’t healthy, and we all make efforts to avoid these people within the limits of social niceties (at least I do… if I’m honest). Still, I’m Reformed and I believe we need communities to affirm our callings, which in our culture is directly connected to one’s personhood.

Affirmation is in the details. It lies in others’ abilities to pinpoint the specific qualities that make us capable and skilled at particular tasks. Because we are one way, or have developed one set of qualities and abilities, we are able to make this or that particular contribution to the community, which in turn affects the world. Joseph Myers, in Organic Community, says that we live in a world in which people need to hear specifically what qualifies them to do what is needed by the community. In our world of anonymity and collective information, each of us needs to know what I can do to make the world better; what I can do to make my church better; what I can do to make my family better. I think this also has to do with the development of a specialist mentality in much of the Northern World (not using the East-West dichotomy anymore), where people believe they are highly suited for one very particular living condition and will search that out through various career paths, marriages, geographies, etc. Information, mobility and affluence are both the chicken and the egg in the sense that people’s searching is cyclical and generally produces more searching, rather than the desired living condition.

We have become hunters who can no longer gather.

I digress.

So, I’m really sensitive these days, and I’m searching, and I’m not gathering. Is affirmation the key to happiness? I don’t know. I never seem to have enough to know if it can sustain me. I will persist reminding myself that God is at my core, and everything else revolves around that core, coming and going, hunting and searching, longing for meaning in a specialist’s world.