I have learned to kiss the wave that slams me into the Rock of Ages. –Charles Spurgeon

I spent so much of my life trying to fit in before I finally realized that I just didn’t. It took me a little longer to realize that this was an asset: my perennial location on the periphery of social groups taught me how to be an observer (not an Observer, to be clear), which taught me how to narrate human behavior. In short, being a creeper taught me how to write. And I am grateful.

As a bit of a social misfit, at least in my own eyes, I dreaded the fall as the worst of all seasons, for with it came school. Though in the South, school officially begins when the temperature and humidity still hover around 100. Nonetheless, as the leaves began changing, I would find myself staring down nine months of insecurity and discomfort, of struggling to find a place and usually feeling without one, of lunchroom-seat politics and not getting asked to dances or picked for teams. So I studied. I read a lot of books. See, kids? Staying in school does pay off–one day you might have letters behind your name as you sit at home and write for free while your student loans pile up!

Now, though, fall is my favorite season, and not just because of pumpkin spice lattes. Fall is when the God-forsaken heat and humidity lighten up, and with them, my mood. My hair calms the eff down in fall. I bake in fall. The days begin to shorten, which makes it less weird when I go to bed at an hour at which, a few weeks earlier, even the sun was shaking its head. Football is on, and even though I don’t really like or understand the sport, it seems to be accompanied by more reasons to drink and eat chips and myriad forms of dip. In the fall, new television series begin (yes I know they do that every other season now too, but I’m working on a list here). My kids will go back to school, which means more free time to write for free. People (department stores) start to think about (market) Christmas. I get to don sweaters and boots. I LOVE SWEATERS AND BOOTS.

With older age (I am currently twenty-one), other things have changed: besides loving fall, I hate the summer with a passion. Damn mosquitoes, aforementioned heat and humidity, children–the little blessings–always around watching me pee, and people. The people just come out in droves in the summer, do they not? The Husband and I experienced this recently during a getaway to the 30A-side of the gulf, where we spent a weekend while our kids remained under the watchful (when not on Facebook) eye of The Mom and Dad. I preached the Gospel of the Gulf to TH while we were engaged, when I informed him it was where we would be getting married. He fell in love with it quickly, August-temperatures-and-tuxes-mixture notwithstanding, and we go back often. Our other two trips there in the past few months have occurred in the fall and winter, so imagine our surprise when we arrived there in July and found that we had descended into the bowels of hell, with extra-nice scenery. Gone were the mild temperatures and empty stores, gone were the hours spent quietly lounging on pool chairs under towels, gone was the shalom that comes with no restaurant waits or tripping over families of seventeen. In the place of all that was chaos. Hot, nasty chaos.

The weekend reminded me of what a contrarian I am–my new, grown-up word for misfit–as I rued all the things that everyone else showed up en masse to enjoy. It reminded me–sad, sunburned me–of how this makes me different from many, this preference for lying underneath towels and away from people, this solace I take in solitude. It highlighted all the ways I tend to swim upstream, either insecurely or proudly, and it made me grateful that I finally found a place–a family, who resemble that too. A husband who would sooner put on a skirt than dress in khaki and white for pictures on the beach. A boy who takes one look at a crowd or unfamiliar environment and either runs the other way, or circles the perimeter, already smart enough to look for his designated spot on the periphery. We are the people who stick together, who prefer our own little cocoon, thanks, who don’t make friends all that easily because that shit is hard and, when we do have friends, we tend to bare our souls to them (no? just me? okay), so they better be the right people. We like our house, and our stuff, and our predictable routines and safe spaces.

Which is why it seems really mean that God appears to be calling us to move to Australia.

I mean, some of it makes sense–they do flip the seasons over there, and I respect that bucking of trends. But the rest–the discomfort of relocating halfway across the world just because God seems to think it’s a good idea (hey, I have good ideas too, God!)–that’s just insane. But it appears to be happening, despite my pleas/prayers to the contrary (I never should have invited the Almighty to change my heart. He TOTALLY called my bluff.)

The next few weeks will be telling. And this whole situation is packed with so many unknowns as to give me diarrhea at just the thought of it. I am all over the map about it (see what I did there?), and am hitting every possible emotional target. But here’s what I do know: our little family has weathered some storms, and some painful seasons (I even watched the final one of Glee). And while it might be necessary for me to seek stronger medication as adjunctive therapy to deal with this, I rely on a grace that is bigger than my plans (dammit) and stronger than my…well, than me. A grace that has bonded the four of us eternally, and will continue to hold us–and those we know and love–in its hand, which is also the place it keeps the whole wide world. Even the Southern hemisphere, I’ve been told.

God have mercy.