TWISTER OF FATE

Jamie S. Shaver

I’m in a self-destructive phase right now. I have stopped trying to deny this and have every intention of continuing in the same direction full force.

I credit Oprah with my heightened self-awareness.

Entering my junior year of college, I seem to have less of a vision for my life than ever before. Since about the third grade I have held the same basic goals for my future. “When I grow up . . . I want to be a teacher, an English teacher because I love to read. . . . I want to continue living in the Shenandoah Valley and cultivate my own rural, Christian beliefs into my three children—two girls and one boy, in that order—while maintaining my potential as the great American novelist of our generation. . . . ”

That’s the dream. As of last year at this time I was pretty well on my way toward that description, too. I was holding a high GPA with the corresponding majors/minors, entering year number four with my high-school sweetheart, and believing my own perfect mix of Ginger and MaryAnne qualities would pull me through with the book someday.

That was before the tornado.

The word tornado first came to mind when my doctor asked me if I was overexerting myself. “My life feels like a tornado,” I joked. He then informed me that my life would be slowing down. I had mono.

Tornado is actually a Spanish word. It’s a past participle that means to be altered, then restored. A complete cycle.

Tornadoes like the ones in “The Wizard of Oz” don’t happen where I live. My grandma used to say that they would get stuck between the mountains in our valley and never find a way out.

Now I see her point. The tornado I’m inside is perpetually bouncing, suffocated between the fields of corn and national parks that surround it. If transposed to any other setting, I feel certain my twister would split apart into gusts of energy and drop me out unbridled. All the forests and mountains are barriers though; rivers serve as uncrossable obstacles now.

Meanwhile I’m spinning around inside the whirlwind, intertwined with silos, textbooks on Anabaptist life, chirps of slow southern drawl, babies to sit with, and calves to be fed. I am standing, solid and stable, centralized within.

The crazy part is that I’m worried about what will happen if these winds find a gap to exit by and deposit me elsewhere. Will all those things just fall apart and land in some sort of wasteland and shrivel away? I guess not.

Maybe my real fear is that I may not be able to step back in should my mind change again. That wasteland might be my only refuge outside the twister. How often do we cross over these mountains anyway? Hardly ever. The only reason for that is to visit the major hospital to our southeast or the nursing home which contains some family to the northwest. Places that will leave you shriveled.

I drove home from the doctor’s office forced to follow a “farm-use vehicle” well below my wanted speed, and I began to yell at God.

They didn’t teach me that yelling was effective in Sunday school. Methodists rarely yell, certainly not at God. No one at my Mennonite university yells either, but it felt good.

After the first 20 minutes (of what could have been a 15-minute drive), I ran out of accusations and obscenities. I was drained and relieved. I said thank-you to God for listening and told him I could move matters back into my own hands. This, again, is not what my religion professors say will result in a positive response from the Almighty.

Next I took a vote. Every single one of my instincts went Republican: I would settle for things to stay as they are. That was three weeks ago. Since then, I have added vitamins to my daily routine and allowed my dissatisfactions to ferment.

This morning it all rushed back, though. After an outburst at work, followed by the inevitable sobbing breakdown, I clocked out early and came home, where I sit writing this.

I soared into the driveway, stopping just in time to hear my father tell someone in the garage he’s proud of me.

I walked into my parent’s house and was bombarded by my niece, thrilled as always to see me.

I slammed my bedroom door as the phone rang. It was a call from a friend who moved away but has made it clear he won’t leave me.

I sighed as I heard the beep for call waiting. Work; they wanted me to work, again.

I am home, surrounded by the exact things that spur my anxious stomachaches in the morning. This is where I came to escape though, isn’t it? A spot where my past will always be preserved, just like the agricultural land outside my windows.

I think God heard me on the drive home when I was stuck behind a tractor. He probably laughed because he knew I was disgusted with myself for identifying the tractor’s make.

God must have also known that I needed a sounding board and that a tantrum was as close as I could come to repenting for the mess I’d gotten myself into and now needed help to get out of. Repentance appeared as a tornado for me this time: something that twists you away from the bad even as you know you’ll spin right back into it. A complete cycle without even having to run outside this town’s limits. My Old Testament teacher was right after all—God must be everywhere.

A new semester begins soon. I still plan to overwork myself, and I’ll still have mono. The difference is that I know if I keep pushing through, eventually the cyclical motion will land me in the self-improved phase.

—Jamie S. Shaver, a junior at Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, has recently changed her major, the length of her hair, and her priorities.