Right now, I’m sitting in the casita, listening to two flies in what sounds like a dogfight or maybe courtship. Hard to tell which. I can’t see them, I can only hear them. The sound alone could drive a monk to madness. So I play a Spitfire versus Messerschmidt movie up in my head, complete with a cast of characters and a storyline. Two dashing young men named Geordie and Fritz who should be friends locked in mortal combat in the skies over Britain. Then, the low rumble of oilfield drilling operations a mile or so off intrude, sending me back into pondering the mystery of me again.
I’m what you might call an odd combination—neurodivergent, INFP, and shaped by a slow-growing faith. I don’t even know if that’s the right order. Some days it feels like an open and inviting landscape complete with an orchestra, or maybe a Swedish death metal band. Other days it’s a three-car pileup in my head, complete with first responders, news media, helicopters and everything, set to the sound of circus music. It’s never dull.
My mind doesn’t line up with the world’s rhythms. It lingers too long on small things. It remembers slights that others forget. It sees ten meanings in a single sentence. It loves people fiercely but burns out trying to understand and interact with them. And my lips and tongue can never find the words that flow so easily from my fingertips. I spend hours thinking about how temperament, experience, and whatever grace still works in me shape what I see, what I miss, and how I respond to it all.
That particular wiring bends the way I read reality. The neurodivergence makes patterns and contradictions blare like neon signs while others walk past unbothered. The INFP temperament pulls everything through emotion first: every look, tone, or silence becomes a signal to decode. It’s empathy turned up so high it hurts. I can sense the undercurrents in a room before I know what anyone said, yet I’ll replay a single conversation for hours afterward wondering if I said too much or not enough. That kind of perception can make life feel like standing too close to a speaker that never shuts off. So mostly, I stay to myself and generally avoid social situations, more so now that there’s such division. Somewhere beneath the noise, faith works as a stabilizer: slow, steady, reminding me that awareness isn’t meant to be control, just recognition.
And then there’s the trail of failures: dreams abandoned, friendships frayed, people damaged by my choices, plans and ideas that never quite worked. Each one left a mark. I’ve wrestled with the feeling that I should be further along by now, more consistent, more confident, more like the people who seem to have it together. But when I try to copy them, I disappear into a me that isn’t me. My soul and self have always rejected the masks the world requires us to wear to fit whatever role we must play for the audience of necessity. And I wonder at folks who wear the mask so well they became the mask. Or the mask became them. Not sure which. Either way, I couldn't sustain it. Every attempt left me more exhausted, more lost. It matters because the heart of reconciliation is to look beyond masks, no matter how deep they go: including the ones I tried to wear myself.
I've had to learn to be true to what I am built for, and I can’t say for certain what that is yet. I know I’m not built for seeking advantage or transactional living. That’s why Faith Over Factions is a festival of free. Except for: (Buy My Book LOL). I know I am built to ask why when others say what. I feel deeply and heal slowly. I look for God in the cracks and the smallest sounds, not the spotlight, applause or cascade of likes, loves and comments good and bad. That makes for a lonely path sometimes, but also an honest one. For most of my span I viewed myself as a broken toy rather than the more realistic self-impression that faith, in its quiet way, presents.
Maybe that’s what grace looks like when we stop trying to impress it. We begin to see that our quirks, sensitivities, and even disappointments aren’t defects, they’re the raw materials of whatever thing grace is still shaping inside us.
If you’ve ever felt like your mind or your heart doesn’t fit, you’re not broken. You’re just walking a different kind of road, the one that goes through failure, self-doubt, and odd grace before it circles back to love.
The path of The Beleaguered Believer.
The one who never gives up on grace.
The one who keeps getting up no matter how often they’ve fallen.
The one who keeps trying regardless of the noise.
