When I like a thing, I tend to...really like it. Almost to the exclusion of everything else. When I was in my Hamilton (the musical, not the city) phase, I read Chernow's book about Hamilton (that was SO LONG), I memorized the whole soundtrack, I followed every Twitter thread and video and anything I could find that was remotely related. I listened to literally almost nothing else for months.
Then...at some point, I stopped. I was done. My brain wandered off to something else, and I haven't really listened to the soundtrack since. I still like it, I want to see the play eventually, but when I had the chance to join people in the random lottery style lineup for tickets for the eventual Toronto debut of it....I didn't really bother. (Saved me a bunch of money, I suppose, I heard tickets weren't cheap.) It's no longer a hyperfocus.
This is how I like things. I get into them, with my whole self for a while, then I'm done. I've done it with numerous craft projects (cross-stitch, crochet, among others), languages (Russian, mostly), I do it with stage plays (Hamilton, RENT, In the Heights (that one's still an active focus)).
When I found the Baha'i Faith...I kinda fell in with both feet. There are a few days around when I declared where I didn't sleep a lot, I was just kinda floating in a lot of reading and a lot of wondering and some very patient friends who let me ask them a lot of questions. I have read (and continue to read) as many books about the Faith I can get my hands on. (Yes, I did read Lights of Guidance cover to cover. It was actually pretty interesting. I learned a lot.)
I hyperfocused, hard. I wanted to know everything all at once. I still do, although I've kinda realized there's more than I'll ever know, or fully understand and that's okay. I read a lot and I tried to be everywhere and do everything and I reached a point right after the Bicentenary in October where my body was like "okay, enough, breathe a little".
So...I've been breathing a little. I still love Baha'u'llah and His message with my whole heart, I still go to Feast when I can and I usually have at least one Baha'i adjacent book in my book rotation (right now, it's Creating a New Mind, by Paul Lample). But maybe I don't go to every single devotional that's within reasonable transit distance, maybe I let myself read a few more romance novels before tackling more Adib Taherzadeh.
It's hard not to feel guilty. I keep hearing the voice in the back of my head that tells me that maybe this is just another hyperfocus. Every time I forget my obligatory prayer, or I can't make it to Feast, or I don't go to someone's devotional because I have something else I'm doing, I worry. I worry I'm just going to some day just...drift out of this.
It's kinda scary to admit that, out loud. I talk about how the Faith has changed my life (and oh my gosh, it really has, but that's another story for another day), how I love my community, how I like that I have a way to participate within my own capacity for service with the newsletter and the social media bits. But I don't talk so much about how I am scared my brain is just going to decide I'm done, someday.
I know people will tell me that if it's important, it will stay. The way I've kept friendships alive and my marriage alive and my cat alive - they're important, beyond hyperfocus. The things that are part of the very core of me, those don't go away. I'd love to believe that my Faith is in there too, in the core of me. But I don't know yet. In the grand scheme of my life, I've been doing this Baha'i stuff for....maybe 3 percent of my entire existence?
I know the answer is to just keep on keeping on, the way I do. To keep finding ways to serve the Cause, to keep connecting with my local reality and my friends and my life, and to keep integrating the Baha'i concepts into my everything, as I've been doing. But I thought it might be good to also talk about being scared. I don't think we do that enough, admit we're scared sometimes. We all want to be good people doing good things in good ways that don't let people down.
So hi. I'm Ash, I'm not always good at this, and sometimes I get scared. Sit with me, if you're scared. We don't gotta even talk about it, we can just be scared together, and then we can maybe keep walking, lanterns held high, pushing back the dark.
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