Today, as my mother (finally) started cleaning all the Christmas decorations up, my sister rummaged through the boxes and cabinets and pulled out my elementary school awards. Laughing at the blue ribbons that I couldn't even remember the occasion for, I asked my father, "You can't take it with you, so what do you get?"

In the famous words of Stephen Schwartz's Jesus (see Godspell)... I am trying to find the answer.

Recently, I've decided that taking pictures of food wasn't something I liked too much. I had sort of fallen out of love. But I still craved that social media influence. I felt like my words and content were valued, and I didn't know how else to talk to this amorphous cloud.
So I started posting vsco pictures (really fun editing that way!!) of whatever I felt like, and of course, with such a big change, the unfollows took me by storm. And something that really shouldn't bother me.... kind of did.
For the past year or so, blogging has been such a big part of my life. It was a bane of accomplishment, and I felt like I was going on to something more. Out of all the blogs I've start-stopped, I had actually stuck to this - and people were actually reading it!
But because I had entered this community, I also met people who seemed to have it all together, and people wanted their lives so bad, they amassed huge followings.
Meanwhile, I had about 100 loyal, actual followers that I loved very much, and probably 2000 spam accounts.
So I thought it was a leap, to stop posting pictures of food as much, to focus my content on the words I had to say.
I stopped the endless hashtags, I kept the captions to my convenience, and I tried to use Instagram a little more like my real life friends did.
But as I started to lose more followers, I started to feel like all of my hard work over the past year was slipping away. I had worked so hard to make all of those food creations, edited those pictures, shared those recipes... And now it seemed to be leaving me, one IG personality at a time.

But that's the danger of becoming attached to an accomplishment.
It's a chronic issue of mine. It happened when I came into the school and realized that lots of other people were very smart as well, and I had to be okay with not being the best.
It happened when I decided that being skinny wasn't worth torturing my mind, and pretty could be found in other places (souls).
It happened when I thought writing was my greatest talent, until I met an English teacher that showed me all the ways my expository prose needed improvement.
It happened now when I thought blogging was what made me, dare I say it, better and more accomplished than others my age, yet here I was - not really sure what I was doing anymore.

And I have to learn that it all comes and goes, and it's ALL temporary.
It won't last, any of it, into anything past death, so it's almost all pointless.
Almost. Because after death is an eternity of God and Love.
And that's hard to remember in a world where we celebrate ourselves ruthlessly. It's hard to remember that I am literally nothing in the long run, not in comparison to the things that He will do for me.
If anything, my accomplishment is that I have decided to let Him work through me, and my only direction is to listen to what He has planned for me.
Maybe it's not blogging, maybe it is. We'll see.

As for now, here's a low maintenance and super easy bowl of cereal. Very representative of the lazy life I've been living with food lately. Special K, frozen blueberries, bit of coconut, buckwheat groats, cinnamon, and chocolate soy milk. Delicious.