Dear Gracie

Good Advice for When Good Advice Fails You

By Sarah Condon

Dear Gracie, How are we supposed to be able to deal with time? When we are struggling it goes so slow, and when we want more of it, it vanishes.

Signed, Grownup

Have a question for Gracie? Email magazine@mbird.com.

All queries will be kept confidential. Dear Grownup, I wish I knew.

There are mornings when I wake up with a dread for everything the day might hold: meetings, laundry, showering, climate change reports, political angst, etc. I just want the day to be over already. I worry that we are all so isolated within the confines of our tiny screens and our rattling brains that time feels like it is zooming past in a very fixed way. I hope that makes sense. Lexapro has helped this some.

But since I am far from a psychiatrist, I would also tell you that being with people has been the most helpful cure for the ache of time. When I manage to hurtle myself into the world or raise my half-moon neck from the glow of a screen, I am met with a face. Perhaps it’s the face of one of the college students I minister to, or my husband, or the face of one of our children. And I think to myself, “Oh, there you are. Here we are together. What a fleeting gift this moment is.”

When I was in seminary, people talked about the “communion of saints” as being the dead people in our lives who surround us, most especially in church at the altar when the priest invokes the Holy Spirit to bless the wine and the bread. As a woman with Southern Baptist roots, I thought this was incredibly creepy. Who were these dead people who would just show up for church? And could somebody tell them not to? But not long after I lost my parents, I was standing behind the altar during the Act of Consecration, and my parents felt so near to me I could touch them. It was beautiful and jarring, and I hope to never forget it. In that moment, God had somehow suspended time.

And so isn’t it all just incredibly out of our hands? And perhaps there is comfort there, too?

Look for faces, Gracie

Dear Gracie, As the years go by, I’ve become increasingly embarrassed by my former online self. She has been all sorts of people I no longer relate to. Is it true that the internet never forgets? How should I cope with the shame of who I once was online?

Signed, The New Me Dear New Me, Oh goodness, please go gently on your former online self. She was younger and excited about this new-fangled way to communicate. Remember that we all hopped on social media the way people took to cigarettes in the 1920s. We were told it was good for us, and we did not know any better.

I do wonder about your assessment that you’re very different now? Maybe you’ve become a bit better at self-editing, or perhaps you’ve seen a therapist, but I suspect that you are essentially the same person you were many profile iterations ago. Either way, God loves all the versions of you.

As a word of comfort, I would suggest that the internet might not forget, but we are generally so consumed with ourselves that most everyone has forgotten but you. And that you have already been forgiven.

If you find none of this helpful, then I would like to share with you that in one of my earliest posts on Facebook, almost twenty years ago now, I set my status as “knocking boots with my boyfriend.” And no, I did not marry him. And now it is also in print.

Embarrassed and forgiven, Gracie