alyciatimm

I first started asking the question in high school. The bookworm introvert that I am, did not really fit into the pageantry of small-town Alabama. I remember during senior year everyone in my class was meeting up to work on the homecoming float, and for whatever ungodly reason, my mom thought I should be a little more social and join them.

Now, I like crafts just as much as the next white girl, but it was no secret that I did not enjoy high school. I felt a little smothered in the town, and very smothered in the school. I wasn’t at this dang event for more than an hour before a girl in my class asked, “what are you doing here?”

I don’t think she meant anything by it really. I think A. she was kinda a ditzy girl who never seemed to know what questions are okay to ask, and which ones she should probably keep locked in that pretty little blonde head of hers and, B. I honestly didn’t belong.

I never participated in these things, and I wasn’t exactly enjoying myself. I can’t tell you how I responded to her. I don’t remember. It wasn’t important. What was important is, I remember sitting there stuffing this tissue paper in these holes piece-by-piece like a robot and thinking:

“Yeah, what am I doing here?”

We all know how this story ends… I hauled out of there upon graduation and never returned. It had nothing to do with the town. It had everything to do with the fact that for me, that place was a season. That place was somewhere I didn’t belong. We just weren’t the right fit for each other.

Here comes the sun (doo doo doo doo)
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s all right

The next chapter, what I thought was the sun at the end of the story, was grand for about five months. I was in Upland, Indiana at the college of my choice. I was really enjoying it all until J-term.

Let me tell you a little about J-term at Taylor University. J-term in this little pseudo-semester during the month of January. It is a time where every upperclassman is smart enough to take advantage of study abroad or missions opportunity, but the naive freshmen are tricked into staying on campus for the entire month to cram an entire semester-long class into three and a half short weeks during the coldest time of the year.

513. That’s how many steps it took me to get from the door of my dorm to the door of my class. I know this because I counted every single day. The class-load is the least of your worries when you are in the middle of an Indiana cornfield during January of a record breaking winter.

One day I remember stopping 243 steps into this long trek to class and looking around. For a moment, I truly believed that I would never see grass again. I thought the end had come, and the end was cold, icy, and snow-covered. As I looked around the tundra I now called home I remember speaking those familiar words out loud again:

“What am I doing here?”

Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s all right

One day, these words, “What am I doing here,” stopped referring to only geographical locations. They stopped referring to small towns and cold winters. I’m still in Indiana, I’m still really cold, and I still ask this question sometimes, but the meaning feels so different.

That’s a strange feeling. Asking this about your location presents an easy fix. Move.

Asking this about your life, your struggle, the dreams you aren’t acheiving, the goals you’ve long left, the career path you’ve invested in, the relationships you’ve invested in, that’s not as easy. There’s no control there. There’s no fix, and if there is, it sure as hell isn’t easy.

Little darling, the smiles returning to the faces
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s all right

Over the years, I have invested an almost sacrilegious amount of hope in The Beatles. My life was driven by the words, “let it be” for years, to the point that the phrase is permanently inked on my foot. So imagine the hope I felt when in the middle of one of my hardest battles the song, Here Comes the Sun played, not once, but twice within the same hour. This song, which never played on this particular station, played twice within a single sixty minute period.

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes

There was a sun at the end of high school for me.

There was a sun, a bright vibrant, beautiful sun, at the end of that harsh 2014 Indiana winter.

And there has been a sun at the end of every other winter I have weathered in this state.

There are suns at the end of trials, even the ones that were way longer than a single season.

I see it rising in a far distance today, and I’ll be a mile or two closer to it tomorrow, and so will you, friend.

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s all right

Seasons end, yes, even winters in Indiana. Hard days are replaced somehow
by something. Hard winters are replaced by spring, hard illnesses are replaced by some form of healing, hard losses are replaced by numbness, and then suddenly, the ability to smile again.

I don’t know where you are. I don’t what your season is. And I don’t know what it was that made you shout to the universe, “what am I doing here?” I’m not here to tell you that there is some big purpose to it all or some exact reason for your pain or lost paths, because I’ve been fed that load for years now without any valid evidence.

But I am here to share the wisdom of four kind-worded European men who have always seemed to pull me through.

Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s all right
It’s all right