The heart of the muppets somehow lies in their felt covering and silly little ping pong ball eyes. Their physicality somehow imbues them with a soul. I know this because the second they were turned into animated creations for the 1984 or even worse for the the 2018 reboot series Muppet Babies; they became abominations in my sight and I hated them.

I can preemptively hear some boneless argument being made that robots are the new puppets. And while there is a certain maternal nature that seems to bubble up when we see one of those little food delivery robots flipped upside down on the curb, I can guarantee in twenty years when they are placed motionless in a museum, they will not inflict the same abject horror resembling that of seeing a dead corpse that is brought on by seeing a lifeless Kermit The Frog in a display case.

While both puppet and robot are man made one is crafted with simplicity and art form in mind, the other advancement and conquest. The technology of muppets does not need to be built upon. Money does not need to be spent perfecting it, it is already perfect, we as a human race simply need to choose to dwell in the creation.

I do not want anymore live action remakes chocked full of computer generated content. I do not want AI video summaries of classics sold to me through Instagram Ads. I do not want sequels to movies that were perfectly fine the first time and will only get worse as we try to milk it. You know what a story has never been made worse by? The Muppets.

I want The Muppet Pride and Prejudice. The Muppets Great Gatsby. The Muppets Anne of Green Gables. Heck, I think that The Muppets could even make me enjoy Moby Dick and could perhaps finally erase the image of The Cassock from my memory.

A renaissance of Muppet films would remind humanity what we are capable of. That taking a sock and some googly eyes and somehow giving it a soul is something a computer can never do.

Besides the primary objective of resting, my other motivator for this visit was getting to attend one of my oldest friends weddings. It was extremely sweet and beautifully done. It was heart warming se…

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This week I had somehow managed to convince myself …

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When I first encountered them, they did not have my size in store. They were on sale so I initially had let them go, thinking it was the last of the stock and convinced it was simply not meant to be. But they stuck with me, hau…

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I had a couple of these days recently. Where I slept until my body didn’t allow me to sleep anymore, simply because I couldn’t take the misery of being awake. Where I knew I needed to eat and brush my teeth and wash my hair and drink water but all of these tasks feel impossibly difficult. Where I am almost brought to frustrated tears that things that most days are easy, my limbs refuse to get up and do. Days that all my energy is put to quieting that voice that says: I can’t do this anymore, I don’t want to do this anymore, everything is over.

Maybe you relate. Maybe you have no idea what I am talking about. And for that I am glad. My hope is that we all may go through life with as few of these days as possible. But I think we all will experience at least one day, where we must be brave just to live it. For while we may not all have medical imbalances in our brain, we all will experience grief. If we live a life with any love in it at all, grief cannot be escaped, and it will knock the air out of your lungs.

So while I hope this is not a message you need now, I do hope that you will tuck it away for when you do. When you start to beat yourself up because you can’t get up, I want you to remind yourself that this is the bravest you have ever been. To feel something so deeply and wholly painful that it halts you is brave. To feel it and not smother it is perhaps the most terrifying thing we can do.

And I want you to repeat that you are brave, you don’t have to believe it , but you must keep repeating it. Repeat it until it is solid enough for you to do one thing, one small thing to make yourself feel better. Put on clean underwear. Throw one piece of trash away. Drink some water. Wipe off your face. Text someone that today is hard. Just one small thing.

Sometimes doing that one small thing will open the door for you to do another thing. And another and another until you’ve found that you’ve somehow put yourself together. And sometimes that small thing will wear you out and you will have to go back and recover. What happens after does not matter, what matters is the bravery in doing one thing to care for yourself. You deserve to be cared for. And I promise, it won’t always be this hard.

So as we journey in the coming months together, and I speak of adventures and going out of your comfort zone, know that it does not come from a girl who bravery has always felt easy for. It comes from a girl who has sobbed to her mother, God and the mental health hotline that she isn’t sure she could do it anymore. So I hope you know when I say the words that you are brave and it will not always be this hard, you beileve them to be true.

I was a bit convicted of this notion last week as I contemplated my new role as the bravery ambassador, and how that meant I might need to start actually practicing what I preach. While I would like to claim noble origins for this epiphany, the true rational is the fact that my bladder and its increasing vocalization of its need to pee was the real inspiration for me deciding to suck it up and just ask.

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I used to be absolutely paralyzed with fear having to order an ice cream cone at Dairy Queen. I threw up three times the first time I ever went to sleep away camp solely from nerves. My mother, although thankfully she would not face this concern until much later, was very worried I would never be able to live outside of a 50 mile radius of her.

And yet, I survived being thrown in front of a class of Czech school children with no heads up to prepare a lesson and I taught them English that day. I’ve fully conquered my fear of ordering and have survived many a “table for one,” sometimes even asked in hesitant Italian. I’ve frequently gone to events where I knew not a soul and somehow made it to the end of a night with a friend.

This change did not happen overnight, it was not an overhaul of my entire personality that allowed me to suddenly do this frightfully anxiety inducing thing. It was a small decision, a decision to be uncomfortable. You start small, pick the necessary discomforts. And as you grow, lean into the unnecessary ones. The ones that you could easily choose not to, but oh the moments you’ll miss if you do.

My sister Laicy was constantly pushing me to be brave, she could convince anyone to do just about anything, especially me her baby sister. She convinced me at 7 to give white cheese a chance. She convinced 12 year old me to try on a blue wig just for fun. And she even convinced 24 year old me to foot race in the city streets of San Francisco. She made me braver, and she made everyone around her braver, occasionally to my embarrassment, but nevertheless she lived life like an adventure, and she people were drawn to her because she invited them into the adventure with her.

And I think the best way I can honor her now thats she’s gone is to invite you into the adventure with me (And Laicy too). So take my hand and let’s practice being a little braver together, we’ll start small and build our way up. I promise.

And if you do your moment of bravery, come tell me about it in the comments. I want to hear about it and you can encourage others too.

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The whys forced themselves to be declared. Why did that job you seemed to be leading me to not work out in the very end? Why did they leave? Why have I had to spend the last ten years on antidepressants, and why every time just as I get better do I get dragged back under? Why as I go to wedding after wedding am I still asked to do this all alone, why am I not loved? And the biggest one, the one that was most terrifying to utter: Why didn’t you save her? Why did she have to die?

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Those same words were tucked within me, but I was too ashamed to voice them. I thought that being Christ-like meant that I was serene in the face of the storm, that it meant neatly tucking my heartache into a box because I knew God had a plan for it. But perhaps the closest to Christ I have ever gotten was when I allowed myself to utter the same words he uttered on the cross; Why have you forsaken me?

If Jesus, perfect and blameless, Son of God himself could have a moment where he did not understand why it had to be so, a moment where he felt his father had left him, a moment where he too dared to ask God why - then who am I to be spared of the same feeling?

As I sobbed these questions, as I was prayed over I didn’t get miraculous answers. None of my whys have answers. But there was surrender. Surrendering that I’m hurt. Surrendering that I’m angry. Surrendering that my heart is broken, about so many things. There isn’t a neat bow that I can put on it that gives it a reason or a joke I can crack to make it less broken. All I can cling to that even though the cross seemed like the end, though there were three days where it looked as though it was over and all that they had been clinging to seemed to be taken, the resurrection still came. But it did not come without pain. Jesus did not spare even himself from the heartache of our life. So I don’t understand why my life looks like it does right now - but I know Jesus understands my heartache. And for now that is meaning enough.

But God had a choice too. He could have chosen to spare himself from our suffering. To stay safely secured in Heaven free from pain and anguish. He could have forsaken us to bear the heartache of our broken world alone.

But he didn’t.

He took on flesh to walk in our suffering beside us. When he heard of Lazarus’s death, he did not gently pat their shoulders and tell them not to worry. Jesus wept. (John 11:35). He chose flesh even though it meant one of his closest friends kissing his cheek and betraying him to those who sought to destroy him. He chose flesh even though he would be pierced with nails, left to die as they mocked and ridiculed him.

He was the only one who could have escaped suffering if he so wished, but instead he ran towards it. Solely driven by his love for us.

I believe in God because I simply refuse to believe that humans are good as it gets. Because I see an intricate and perfect world and can’t fathom that it all fell into place by happenstance. But I believe in Jesus specifically, because if I am to believe in a single God of the universe, I want it to be the one that loved his creation so much he chose to not watch from a distance, but dwell with us, not merely in the joy but in the suffering as well.

This Easter season has been heavy with my own grief, but as I cry out to the Lord, the praise and the anger and the desperation, I have never felt closer to Him. For I know, more than I have very known anything, He is not staring down impassively on me, but he is holding me as He weeps beside me.

I’m sure that somewhere in the recesses of history, there is a kindred spinster spirit that too, found herself in a tea room of married acquaintances raving about how the system is built against romance. To which I’m sure they replied, “It is simply the way things are done” and “It worked for us you must trust the process.” But unlike myself, she did not have a blog to be help soothe her sanity as she is made to feel like a lunatic for saying that none of this is normal. So this blog is in her honor as well. This imaginary women I have made up that is. Not making a fantastic case for sanity as of yet. But on ward we must go.

My first claim is that we have simply put too much pressure on a cup of coffee. The coffee date seemed to be society’s solution to the ever mounting pressure of online dating, an alternative to a meal that is chill and casual and just a chance to get to know one another. But whether it be coffee or a meal or a walk in the park, the stakes of the meeting remain the same. We are both meeting under the pretense that this meeting is to decide whether this is a person we want to see again or not.

Those are fifty-fifty stakes settling on top of that cup of coffee. Which is simply far too high for a poor latte to bear.

So let’s just collectively acknowledge that people are doing coffee dates not because they are chiller but because they are cheaper. Which is fine. But let’s just acknowledging that there is really nothing chill at all about meeting a stranger and in a span of an hour or two deciding if you really are compatible.

Now you may be saying, but Shelby- theres a third option isn’t there? What about becoming friends? And I consider us, dear reader, to be friends, so let’s be honest with each other and admit that we both know that no one is becoming friends with their failed Hinge dates and I can tell you exactly why.

I firmly believe that starting from a place of friendship and upgrading to a place of romantic relationship is one of the best paths one can take. The reverse however, not so much. When friendship is offered up as a consolation prize for not having a romantic connection with someone, we are labeling it as something that is less valuable than the intended outcome, which makes it painful to accept and so we don’t.

So in our desire to make dating more convenient and seamless in a modern world, we have inadvertently put ourselves repeatedly in the same circumstances of old where we are placed in front of another getting to know them after declaring some level of interest in a vaguely pre-discussed relationship, instead of the other way around. Which is the reason I do believe that is has become a seemingly universal experience for women that the feeling before going on a online date is similar to that of being held at gunpoint and asked to perform karaoke.

Now before we get too far into the depths of nihilism and lose my reputation as a romantic by nature allow me to say this. I am not anti dating.

I merely want to be asked on a date because someone already enjoys my presence not to find out if they do.

So then what do we do? How do we meet people whose presence we enjoy?

We get hobbies. I know so annoying. But if I join a pickleball league than my primary objective is to play pickleball. If I play, than I have had a successful evening. No 50/50 stakes about it. I do not have to spend the night worrying if pickleball likes me back or if I think pickleball would make a good father someday down the road. Which without this worry, I am generally a much more enjoyable and charming individual. Which increases the chances that if I meet a handsome individual we would be able to connect in a way that is more authentically chill and genuine than a swipe and a coffee date.

We host. We bring people together and let the envoirments do the work. We have our friends bring friends. And maybe one day one of those friends becomes something more. But if they do not then you have still built a community of food and friendship in the mean time. Which is hardly a consolation prize.

We say yes. To the trip. To the dinner party. To the art class or game night. The more life we fill ourselves up with the more we find ourselves walking along others doing the same. The algorithm of shared communities and interests will always be more successful than Hinge’s.

Online dating has and will work for some. And from the bottom of my heart that beings me joy. But I also think for those of us who leave it with a hollow feeling, it does not mean something is inherently broken or wrong with us. But more it was a system we were not built for. And more importantly, it is not the only path we might find love. No matter what the targeted ads might tell you.

Twenty-Five was an age I had once attached specific milestones to. It was the age 15- year-old Shelby imagined perhaps she would have her first kid. Imagined she would be married for a year or two already. Assumed she would be teaching elementary school somewhere in Oregon. 15-year-old Shelby would assume that this depression she had just been diagnosed with would be long grown out of by the time she reached 25.

If I took stock of my life now and measured it against the aspirations of that 15-year- old, I can safely say I have failed on every mark. And yet.

Somehow I have ended up with a life so much bigger than I could have ever imagined. That teenage girl had never heard of Prague, and yet her 22-year-old self would live there. That high school senior was terrified to move two hours away for college, and yet she would be able to go all the way across the world to study for a semester. Writing had been that girl’s hobby, a secret dream and now it was something that this woman is investing in fully.

If the only measure of love I allowed myself was the presence of a husband or children in my life, I would be cheating myself of seeing how abundantly I am loved. The love that makes friends cross oceans to see me. Love that treats me to dinner merely because they enjoy my presence. Love that is not in exchange for anything I had done for them, but one that is simply given to me.

And if that depression had only been a blip. If I hadn’t had to claw my way out from the brink of losing it all, time and time again. If I hadn’t had to learn to grow around it and despite it and with it, then I don’t know if I would examine life with the vigor I do in those moments of joy I do experience. For every day of sunshine, every laugh, every smile was fought for. So desperately fought for.

If I had white knuckled that 15-year-old’s idea of a perfect life, I would have missed out on the one God had planned for me that was so much bigger than anything that 15- year-old could imagine. It can be painful to open our palms and let those dreams flutter out, but oh, isn’t it necessary.

So what do I hope for this next quarter of life? For all the adventures I have had in this first chunk, in so many ways it feels that they are only just beginning. I hope for more travel. More words to touch lives with. More love in whatever form it comes. More joy no matter how fleeting and continuing to fight for it when it leaves. More trusting God and whatever crazy adventure He has in store next. His way is not always easy, but it is always better.

So heres to the later half of my twenties. May you be as wild and adventurous and wonderful despite it all as the first half.