Jamal
Greetings & Welcome Back!
Sorry, not sorry that I took such a long break with posting blogs, but y'know the only person I have to apologize to is me... mostly for not challenging myself to make this post earlier. More on that later though.
First, a recap of the past two months! This one will be relatively short compared to previous ones because not too many things happened.
June:
That brings us to this blog post... to Jamal.
"Jamal" does not exactly serve as the closing chapter of my Exploration of Self Series (which I mean to carry out all the way through 2019), but rather just the closing of the part of the series focused on the parts of my name.
"Jamal" is Arabic and it means "Beauty" or "Charm"
In this post, I'm going to explore a few of the things that I think make me beautiful or charming.
I don't typically think of myself as conventionally, aesthetically, beautiful. I don't find my body attractive, and while I feel like we've been taught by our society to be fatphobic, I do also believe it's just because I feel like I would be more attractive to myself, let alone others, if I were more fit-looking. I've come to a point in my life in which I've "tried" many different weight-loss journeys, and I'm accepting that none of these journeys were me actually trying to live a different lifestyle. I want to cultivate a body that fits who I am, and I'm ready to try something different.
I would go to the gym occasionally, or attempt to eat less, or just eat better, or even just track my food everyday for over two years. None of this is enough to see the progress that I actually want to see. Something I find beautiful about myself is my love for working out- it makes me feel good to be by myself, blasting music into my ears, and being able to lift heavy weights.
Lately I've been joking around with my friends about how most of my progress at the gym lately, especially during July when I went three weeks in a row of going four days a week, was how much stronger I've been getting. I find my strength to be beautiful and now it's just a matter of keeping up with my calorie counting and gym consistency to get to where I want to be.
I find most of my beauty lies in my intellect and my intelligence; both mental and emotional. I pride myself on being able to learn so much about a topic as soon as I'm passionate about it (#ripneuroscience), and I think it's wonderful how emotionally vulnerable I have become over the past few years- with myself, with my friends, with my mother.
I'm happy to have explored both of these sides of myself, and I'm excited to explore loving my body more as I continue my journey with therapy. My life is pretty hectic right now, just attempting to transition to more of a set schedule so that everything else in my life can fall into place- and that's why I haven't explored too much into this post.
When originally thinking more on what I wanted to say in this blog post, a few weeks ago I sent myself some voice messages that detail why I think it was taking so long for me to make this post. They will act as the conclusion to this update:
I think I have a certain insecurity and anxiety about naming this post "Jamal". And I don't know why exactly I feel that way... maybe it has to do with the fact that, with "Jr." it was about my dad and I had a long time to think about things with my dad and there's still so much to learn about how I feel about that relationship and how I felt about it and years of therapy that I need to fully process all of those feelings, but it's a subject that I can talk about.
With "Neal," it was talking about things I'm passionate about and things that I love. It was talking about race and race issues and the stealing of cultures and names... things that I've studied and researched in both academic scholarship and personal experiences.
"Davis" was about my relationship with God, who, of course I still doubt (because what good Christian doesn't?), but that's the relationship I've built my entire life around... that's the relationship that is at the core of my being... God's Love.... I feel like, while not fully comfortable or fully knowledgeable in my relationship with God... it's a relationship that I've known fairly well for a majority of my life.
Not only have I felt like my sense of self is the strongest it's ever been, which is why I wanted to do this "Exploration of Self" series in the first place, the insecurities... the voice of doubt is asking me: "is it going to be good enough? Is it going to be the best one? Is it the best blog post I've ever written?" I'm naming it Jamal, I'm naming it after myself. This whole series of blogs is supposed to be about myself and I feel like I've done such a good job with the last few that I just don't want to let anybody down. I don't want to let you readers down, I don't want to let myself down.
Is this The Beyoncé album? Is this The Jamal? I'm 21 years old! Should I be bold enough to call something Jamal? Should I be that bold? Am I That Bitch? Am I Allowed to do that? So obviously I have all these insecurities about it and I was supposed to originally write it in April... and then June... and I even hesitated so long that I haven't even written it for the end of July!
Some of you might thing that these are over dramatic thoughts and me just placing meaning into something that is relatively meaningless, but I believe that language has power, and, as I said earlier, one of the things that makes me feel beautiful is my focus on intention. I intentionally name these posts as a way to invoke the power within the language. I'm invoking the power that is meant when one says "Jamal."
And it's supposed to mean beauty. Jamal means beauty... my name means beauty.
And I rarely feel wholly beautiful.
Now the insecurities make a little more sense, right?
There are moments in which I catch beauty in myself, and of course I've talked about a few of those in this blog post, but overall I don't feel beautiful... I don't feel like I'm enough. It's not even like... Am I good enough for other people? It's... am I good enough for myself?
I say all these things about who I am, and I think all these things about who I am. Am I reconciling these two pieces?
I'm still scared to have tough conversations with friends and bring up how I feel in moments, even though I value it so much... and people might think that I do this, but that's only because I've gotten marginally better with most and so much better with very, very few.
I'm scared of how tense things can be and I'm scared of losing people and I'm scared of so many thing.
Like am I living my truest self? No.
And part of that is being able to live as my truest self and being able to find and make and develop and evolve and grow a Home that accepts my truest self... and also so much, obvious work on loving myself and becoming more and more myself.
This whole time I haven't felt ready to write this post and at the end of the day I forced myself to write this. I'm always going to have to force myself to write something like this, because I think the most beautiful pieces of art are the most difficult ones... the ones that hurt the most... the ones that make you think the most... the ones that make you critically challenge your perception of things.
Making a claim for beauty is something I try to do everyday... along with my claim for self love... and it's all a process.
That's what I'm trying to say. Life is a process. There's no finish line. I need to accept that and need to accept that every bit of life is an experiment.
There are a few things in here that I listed that I think make me beautiful. Toward the end, I also listed all of my insecurities.
Along with all of those claims for beauty and admission of insecurity, I think I'm beautiful because of my patience with myself... the knowledge that I'm always evolving, growing, and loving more and deeper. I'm beautiful because of the courage I have to be so introspective and to share it with others.
I'm beautiful because I try to live each day as an experiment- an attempt at being the best version of myself.
One of these days I'll write a blog post that is more of building myself up, but I'm not ready for that right now and I'm okay with that. My life is very much in transition right now, and I need to focus my energies on that... focus my energies on living each day as Jamal... beautiful... charming.
This post was, ultimately, an experiment and a practice of self-love.
Thanks for reading.
First, a recap of the past two months! This one will be relatively short compared to previous ones because not too many things happened.
June:
- The month started off with a Parks and Rec Training! I got to learn some of my coworkers and people from other Parks & Rec departments around the area. It definitely made me excited to start my new job!
- For most of the month I just chilled around home, begging myself to apply to jobs and sort through my old stuff, but it was rough to will myself to do those because idk... depression? Being at home has been an adjustment that I wasn't prepared for and it certainly realigned my wants for my time home... more on that later
- Eventually I did will myself to apply to Student Affairs jobs at local colleges and universities, as well as all 9 Americorps positions in my area. It was beginning to look like my life journey was pointing toward Southwest, CT... so I started to warn some friends and family.
- From the 21st to the 24th I attended my denominations' Biennial Mission Summit Gathering at Virginia Beach. It was so beautiful; not only was I able to spend some nice, needed, time away from family and home, and enjoy some ocean water fun, I was also able to meet so many new people within American Baptist Churches. I'm also thankful for the trip for reaffirming my love and interest in the denomination in general... I talked to a few schools while there and am excited to begin looking for future education soon.
- When I got back from VA, I started my job at Groton Parks & Rec and became friends with so many coworkers! I'm excited to have had them in my life for this summer, and am excited to maintain relationships with some of them. Part of my worry with working at Parks & Rec was how many people knew me from high school and their inability to accept that I've changed as a person, but that didn't happen at all! I think a lot of the people I knew I didn't impact that much in the past, and I think they made room to accept that this is who I've become.
July
- July started out with work and I started to really get to know the kids I was working with... each day of work has been a challenge... I think the kids we work with need some support other than a place to be away from home, but of course, I'm not able to help or enact any change within their personal lives and that's also not my job.
- For the Fourth, Mari & Isa invited me to their annual family/joint-graduation party! It was a lot of fun to hang out with them, Duncan, Tyra, Clarissa, Rafi, and new peeps! I'm also very thankful to Calli for inviting me to stay with her the night of the third and the morning of the fourth! It was a lovely final vacation spot for the summer.
- The rest of July was mostly just interviews, getting work done on my car, work, and hanging out with friends!
- Early July I was offered a position with the Great Oak Charter School in Bridgeport, CT through Americorps as a Math or ELA tutor to middle or high schoolers. I left to move to Bridgeport at the beginning of August and was so excited to meet a ton of new people and explore more of myself away from the comfort of home or Burlington friends. The position will last a year. More on it in my next post!
- The last week of July I got the honor and privilege of being the director for Union Baptist Church's VBS 2019: To Mars and Beyond! We got to show the love and light that is Jesus to 29 children and youth and I'm so thankful for an amazing group of volunteers who were able to do that with me. I also developed a Middle School program for this year's VBS to provide leadership training, separate, tailored fun, and team-building exercises. I think it went super well!
That brings us to this blog post... to Jamal.
"Jamal" does not exactly serve as the closing chapter of my Exploration of Self Series (which I mean to carry out all the way through 2019), but rather just the closing of the part of the series focused on the parts of my name.
"Jamal" is Arabic and it means "Beauty" or "Charm"
In this post, I'm going to explore a few of the things that I think make me beautiful or charming.
I don't typically think of myself as conventionally, aesthetically, beautiful. I don't find my body attractive, and while I feel like we've been taught by our society to be fatphobic, I do also believe it's just because I feel like I would be more attractive to myself, let alone others, if I were more fit-looking. I've come to a point in my life in which I've "tried" many different weight-loss journeys, and I'm accepting that none of these journeys were me actually trying to live a different lifestyle. I want to cultivate a body that fits who I am, and I'm ready to try something different.
I would go to the gym occasionally, or attempt to eat less, or just eat better, or even just track my food everyday for over two years. None of this is enough to see the progress that I actually want to see. Something I find beautiful about myself is my love for working out- it makes me feel good to be by myself, blasting music into my ears, and being able to lift heavy weights.
Lately I've been joking around with my friends about how most of my progress at the gym lately, especially during July when I went three weeks in a row of going four days a week, was how much stronger I've been getting. I find my strength to be beautiful and now it's just a matter of keeping up with my calorie counting and gym consistency to get to where I want to be.
I find most of my beauty lies in my intellect and my intelligence; both mental and emotional. I pride myself on being able to learn so much about a topic as soon as I'm passionate about it (#ripneuroscience), and I think it's wonderful how emotionally vulnerable I have become over the past few years- with myself, with my friends, with my mother.
I'm happy to have explored both of these sides of myself, and I'm excited to explore loving my body more as I continue my journey with therapy. My life is pretty hectic right now, just attempting to transition to more of a set schedule so that everything else in my life can fall into place- and that's why I haven't explored too much into this post.
When originally thinking more on what I wanted to say in this blog post, a few weeks ago I sent myself some voice messages that detail why I think it was taking so long for me to make this post. They will act as the conclusion to this update:
I think I have a certain insecurity and anxiety about naming this post "Jamal". And I don't know why exactly I feel that way... maybe it has to do with the fact that, with "Jr." it was about my dad and I had a long time to think about things with my dad and there's still so much to learn about how I feel about that relationship and how I felt about it and years of therapy that I need to fully process all of those feelings, but it's a subject that I can talk about.
With "Neal," it was talking about things I'm passionate about and things that I love. It was talking about race and race issues and the stealing of cultures and names... things that I've studied and researched in both academic scholarship and personal experiences.
"Davis" was about my relationship with God, who, of course I still doubt (because what good Christian doesn't?), but that's the relationship I've built my entire life around... that's the relationship that is at the core of my being... God's Love.... I feel like, while not fully comfortable or fully knowledgeable in my relationship with God... it's a relationship that I've known fairly well for a majority of my life.
Not only have I felt like my sense of self is the strongest it's ever been, which is why I wanted to do this "Exploration of Self" series in the first place, the insecurities... the voice of doubt is asking me: "is it going to be good enough? Is it going to be the best one? Is it the best blog post I've ever written?" I'm naming it Jamal, I'm naming it after myself. This whole series of blogs is supposed to be about myself and I feel like I've done such a good job with the last few that I just don't want to let anybody down. I don't want to let you readers down, I don't want to let myself down.
Is this The Beyoncé album? Is this The Jamal? I'm 21 years old! Should I be bold enough to call something Jamal? Should I be that bold? Am I That Bitch? Am I Allowed to do that? So obviously I have all these insecurities about it and I was supposed to originally write it in April... and then June... and I even hesitated so long that I haven't even written it for the end of July!
Some of you might thing that these are over dramatic thoughts and me just placing meaning into something that is relatively meaningless, but I believe that language has power, and, as I said earlier, one of the things that makes me feel beautiful is my focus on intention. I intentionally name these posts as a way to invoke the power within the language. I'm invoking the power that is meant when one says "Jamal."
And it's supposed to mean beauty. Jamal means beauty... my name means beauty.
And I rarely feel wholly beautiful.
Now the insecurities make a little more sense, right?
There are moments in which I catch beauty in myself, and of course I've talked about a few of those in this blog post, but overall I don't feel beautiful... I don't feel like I'm enough. It's not even like... Am I good enough for other people? It's... am I good enough for myself?
I say all these things about who I am, and I think all these things about who I am. Am I reconciling these two pieces?
I'm still scared to have tough conversations with friends and bring up how I feel in moments, even though I value it so much... and people might think that I do this, but that's only because I've gotten marginally better with most and so much better with very, very few.
I'm scared of how tense things can be and I'm scared of losing people and I'm scared of so many thing.
Like am I living my truest self? No.
And part of that is being able to live as my truest self and being able to find and make and develop and evolve and grow a Home that accepts my truest self... and also so much, obvious work on loving myself and becoming more and more myself.
This whole time I haven't felt ready to write this post and at the end of the day I forced myself to write this. I'm always going to have to force myself to write something like this, because I think the most beautiful pieces of art are the most difficult ones... the ones that hurt the most... the ones that make you think the most... the ones that make you critically challenge your perception of things.
Making a claim for beauty is something I try to do everyday... along with my claim for self love... and it's all a process.
That's what I'm trying to say. Life is a process. There's no finish line. I need to accept that and need to accept that every bit of life is an experiment.
There are a few things in here that I listed that I think make me beautiful. Toward the end, I also listed all of my insecurities.
Along with all of those claims for beauty and admission of insecurity, I think I'm beautiful because of my patience with myself... the knowledge that I'm always evolving, growing, and loving more and deeper. I'm beautiful because of the courage I have to be so introspective and to share it with others.
I'm beautiful because I try to live each day as an experiment- an attempt at being the best version of myself.
One of these days I'll write a blog post that is more of building myself up, but I'm not ready for that right now and I'm okay with that. My life is very much in transition right now, and I need to focus my energies on that... focus my energies on living each day as Jamal... beautiful... charming.
This post was, ultimately, an experiment and a practice of self-love.
Thanks for reading.
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