Fiat

“Fiat: Let thy will be done. Fiat means accepting the will of God – all of it, which Mary did with grace. But fiat is not limited to Mary. For Joseph, fiat meant taking Mary as his wife, knowing she was pregnant with a child that was not his – at least, not biologically. It meant accepting his role as Jesus’ earthly father. Like Mary and Joseph, you were created for a purpose, but that purpose will not be forced upon you. God awaits your fiat. Like Mary and Joseph, you are being called to act in faith and humility. Like Mary and Joseph, you will find that God is calling you into an intimate relationship that begins with your fiat. Like Mary and Joseph, your fiat must be born out of trust and love.” – Catholic Diocese of Wichita

The truth is, I’ve written this sentiment down in a notebook 3 times in the past week, hoping that stashing my thoughts away would be enough to hold off the overwhelming but gentle urge of God pushing me into my vocational calling.

Call it overly spiritual or overly magical but I’ve listened to more than enough religious speak about how they too tried to ignore the call that God had for them. And how a gentle nudge deeply embedded in your core slowly grows into a wildfire until you’re consumed by it.

How they saw the path that God had for them and pleaded that he’d pick anyone else.

Literally anyone else.

I understand why Moses said that he was slow of speech but I also understand why Acts 7:22 it proclaims “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.”

Currently, this feels like a mountain, but I know in 6 months it’ll feel like a hill, in a year like a sand dune, and in 2 like a grain of sand. But right now it’s being told to climb up Annapurna when you haven’t trained for it.

I keep deleting my words, a rarity for me, but I currently feel like a vulnerable idiot as these voices in my head tell me that I can’t and no one will read my words anyways. Tears run down my cheek as I do something so microscopic and small–to the outside world it’s irrelevant and hardly a step but I’ve put it off for two years, cosplaying as a shadow hoping no one saw me.

Truthfully, I’ve scoured the internet for the past year trying to find someone who understands–big surprise, no one likes to share their vulnerability and fears on the internet–lord who would have guessed?

But I wish someone did. I wish someone said they knew their potential but it scares them to death. How everyone could see greatness in them but they were too paralyzed because there’s a risk of getting ready to go into an arena, only to end up center stage in a freak show.

Simply put, you can’t be online in this day and age without someone attacking your character or looks or your skill. The fact everyone is anonymous on the internet has encouraged people to project their insecurities on others and seek fellow minded assholes to trauma bond with so they can validate their gross bullying.

I’m too sensitive for that. The day God was handing out a thick skin and strong unshakable sense of self, I must have been absent.

While I’ve never really cared about impressing others or manipulating myself to fit in, I’ve found myself being target practice too many times to not wince when I’m in the presence of mean or manipulative people. I’m someone who naturally longs for community and I struggle with being able to brush things off and not take them to heart.

Early internet was a fun think tank for creativity but whatever the hell right now is, it’s a giant high school where the insecure rip apart anyone who makes them feel inadequate. Unfortunately for us, that’s pretty much everyone but themselves. This environment fuels comparison and hinders celebration.

Being on the internet nowadays is a guarantee that you’ll have people be terrible to you. Who wants that bullshit toll on their mental health?

And if I’m being super honest, the only thing stopping me from fully going into my vocational call is I don’t want to deal with other peoples insecurities. I don’t want to be target practice for what other people don’t like about themselves. All I want to do is talk about beautiful interiors, books I like, share my recipes, and write about God and saints.

But nowadays to even share those things on a public platform is vulnerable because backlash is almost guaranteed.

I spent a lot of nights wrestling with God, wondering why he’d call me to this small step but make me so sensitive to the comments of others.

For months I tried to barter and offer up my skills on behalf of someone else, coming up with laundry lists of why I wasn’t qualified, putting off school work, and turning away from every moment where I could use my natural skills. You can pick literally anyone else. I’m not equip for this. I begged. But silence.

God picked me and I have yet to understand why, other than I’ve been doing this since I was 2. Honestly younger if you count attempting to move furniture around when I learned to walk and drawing on walls–attempting to make wallpaper when I was a baby.

I don’t care if it’s a small step, it’s still a scary thing to me. I’ve never given the internet something that I’ve genuinely loved. I’ve only ever allowed people to see my “save the world” ventures and ambitions that were cool but weren’t personal to me. This is the first time I’m letting anyone into what I actually love.

People get to see me. Normally rejection is just a risk of being fully vulnerable but on the internet, it’s a guarantee that you will be rejected.

I’ve spent two years trying to convince God that I’m not pretty enough and people will attack my looks. I’ve been told by former friends that I’m both too pretty to be taken seriously or I need to look more blonde and dress more revealing. (You really can’t win with people.)

I’m afraid that I’m going to misquote something and suddenly people will call me stupid or a liar. Or I’m going to be screamed at by the internet because they disagree with my interior design choices and some asshole convinced people you can’t decorate a house away from the original architecture without ruining it. Nowadays people get triggered when others paint their walls white or spray paint their kids toys the wrong color.

Typing it out, it’s stupid because really it’s being afraid of someone who peaked when they were a high school bully that happens to have an internet connection and a lot of time on their hands. From a psychological reason I know it’s because they don’t feel heard or seen in their day to day. From a neurological reason I know the brain makes snap judgments within 3 seconds and not everyone has the strong neural pathways to change their perspective or regulate their amygdala’s response to fear or jealousy.

Like I fully understand this is stupid.

But right now I’ll be a damn idiot and admit I’m afraid of high school bullies with nothing else to do.

The thing is though–God really bother himself with the opinion of bullies. The entire story of the Bible is his redemptive love story to us through the salvation of Israel. The first line (and probably my favorite thing ever written) of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man.”

While the wonderful and blessed John Paul II says, “It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”

While Mother Teresa exclaimed “People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive
them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”

My point is, I spend a lot of time drawing close to God. I have more holy hours than some nuns and I’ve checked. I’ve used drawing close to God as a form of procrastination and honestly the past 6 years, I’ve used this cycle of self improvement to avoid being vulnerable. I wanted to be perfect enough so my risk of backlash was smaller. God knows that and has allowed it up to a certain point, but now he wants me to prove that I know he’s God.

I’ve made friends with my fears and sufferings. I know them. Happiness and receiving my dreams is foreign. I may pray that I want those things but when God asks me to hold out my hands, they’re balled into fists unable to take what he’s trying to give me.

While some people react that way because they don’t believe they deserve it, I react that way because I don’t know what to do with happiness or things being easy or enjoyable. If I’m ever asked to describe what happiness feels like, I’d probably sit in silence for a solid 90 minutes, even longer if you ask when the last time I was happy. I’m sure there’s been moments but I don’t know how to identify them.

I know the call that God has on my life. Truthfully everyone since I could walk knew it and attempted to usher me into it and somehow I still missed it for the first 20 some years of my life. I have to trust that even in those years God was doing something.

Just like right now I have to trust that God is who he says he is and he’s going to do exactly what he says he will.

This ironically on the feast day of Saint Rose of Lima, is my fiat. My way of borrowing Marys Magnificat and saying “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,  my spirit rejoices in God my Savior for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.  From this day all generations will call me blessed:  the Almighty has done great things for me,  and holy is his Name.”

So let’s get proper introductions out of the way..

My name is Diana pronounced like DEE-AH-nuh, not DIE-AN-nuh. You pretty much pronounce every letter d-i-a-n-a. Pretty much up until a few years ago, no one respected me enough to say it right or even attempt to. Which I never understood because it’s not that complicated.

Diana means light bringer, so does Lucifer. The ancient Romans used to shout Luciferia Diana when they needed a blessing in war, hunting, or childbirth. Diana who brings light. The goddess is one of the only pagan symbols of her time held in reverence by abrahamic religions. I read the purpose of life is to fulfill the meaning of your name and that always felt like a very tall order.

I was born a little more than 3 months early and doctors thought I was going to die. It was a medical mystery how I managed to stay alive despite getting sicker and sicker with every experimental treatment they tried. When they stopped treatment, I got better. I think that’s why when I was little I believed God had plans for me. To be alive is a miracle enough, to have no abnormalities or illnesses from months in the NICU where I got sicker and sicker is even more proof that God exists.

I used to go to a daycare in a church and when he met me, the pastor told me that God had a plan for me, he could tell. I was fiery, passionate, an absolute light with more bravery than I could contain–he said he knew it instinctively and throughout my life others echoed that sentiment. I used to hide in the pew and watch rays of sun dance through the stained glass. Despite never hearing about God, that was the first place I encountered him. It wasn’t a sermon, it was through a beautiful interior.

Something poetically ironic about that. But life only makes sense looking back.

I somehow grew up in a very interior design and construction focused family. The hobby of both my parents. I don’t know who fell into it first, me or them. I just remember responding to interiors and decor as a toddler and hearing stories of year old me painting walls and attempting to move furniture around, begging to go to furniture stores and estate sales.

There’s photos of me getting dressed up to go to Menards and Home Depot because I loved it there so much. In fact I wanted to go to Menards on my 2nd birthday. Most of all, I remember being 4 years old and watching Trading Spaces on the learning channel and for whatever reason saying that when I grew up, I was going to be Ty Pennington.

Which made sense. No one batted an eye because that was the world I already existed in. Most kids couldn’t draw a somewhat accurate floor plan before they could do basic math but I learned to through pictures in trade books and the contractors at Menards my cousins worked with.

I used to walk around furniture stores and learn about furniture, fabric, and color. My days were spent learning to read through comics and architecture and design books. My parents used to take me to thrift stores, estate sales, and garage sales where I’d pick up any trade book I could find.

Books on Feng Shui taught me about flow, space, and what made a room feel good. I couldn’t necessary explain it but through trial and error, I developed a seemingly innate knowledge of it. I was afforded the ability to decorate and paint, to dream up whatever furniture I wanted to exist even if it didn’t exist or was out of a price point. I have a dad who can build stuff which allowed me freedom to develop a style and a taste for myself.

My house changing decor, colors, and layouts every few months was a normal occurrence to me. Having a role in how things changed was something I never really thought about. For most of my life, I thought this was a thing everyone did because it was what I knew. No matter how hard things got, how an environment looked was always a priority because how you felt in a space matters.

In high school I sat in on CAD and art classes, skipped marketing classes for trade and construction classes. It’s amazing I even majored in marketing. But by that point in my life, I forgot I wanted to be Ty Pennington and I was so depressed and sad that I wanted nothing to do with interior designed. For years I withdrew from decorating and was annoyed anytime I was asked to participate in how the house looked because I was just so deep in a pit of sadness and hopelessness that lasted for a good 7 years.

One day I decided to enroll in an interior design program and everyone in my life was ecstatic. You would have thought I told them that I won the lottery. It was my attempt at choosing happiness.

Truthfully, I watched people I care about in terrible relationships and marriages where they felt belittled and unsupported–seeing the effect it had on their health and ability to pursue their passions. I saw the effect not following your dreams has and how terrible not being aligned with your vocation and Gods will really is. But I also saw people who were killing it in every area of life and the only difference between those two groups is the ones who were killing it and happy, genuinely happy, they married a good man who felt safe, which allowed them the confidence and grit to follow through on all of their wildest dreams. The other group didn’t marry someone who offered them safety.

And as silly and maybe controversial as it was, I looked at my life and said if I believe that one day I will marry a good man (which of course I do), what would I want my life to look like? What would I want to have set up for him to feel safe in himself but also as a base to build an actual life on? What would I be doing in my life that would allow me to be so happy that I could support and love the man I marry with my whole being?

The answer was my 4 year old self knew way more about herself than I did in my early 20s.

To be happy was to do whatever the hell Ty Pennington did and as an adult that meant, I want to build a brand in the interior design and construction space that allows me to give back to people, inspire and empower people to make their spaces reflect who they are, and do fun stuff.

I know that if I’m in line with my God given purpose, I’m going to be happy and that happiness is going to allow me to love whoever God puts in front of me to my fullest extent.

I know that my joy has a purpose beyond myself, whatever the hell that may be.

If you asked me why I want to even be in the interior design space, the answer is because I never knew a moment where that wasn’t my world. To return to it is holding my inner child and honoring her. Honestly, it’s the most natural thing I know to do.

And if you ask me what the hell the next step is, I have no idea.

I honestly didn’t even think I’d get this out and I still think it’s. bunch of babbling that no one will ever care about, even in a few years. It all seems so irrelevant and silly to me. All I know is right now this is an act of vulnerability and that gets to be enough for now.

One day I’ll start a trade school that focuses on design and construction. Another I’ll have a line of home decor that raises money to help the resettlement of refugees, an organization that redecorates the homes of wounded and fallen soldiers, projects where I renovate VA housing and help support veterans on housing struggles. One day I’ll have a Sports bar focused diner and coffee shop that provide jobs to vulnerable members of my community and help create resources for dementia and Parkinson’s patients and their loved ones that help raise money for research. One day I’ll advocate for ADA and homeowner policies and regulations and help create beautiful spaces that allow for independence that don’t feel like a sterile hospital–and maybe one day that will be a norm instead of stripping away the dignity of other humans by putting them into those environments because they’re sick, struggling, or dying. One day I’m going to do so much and I’m sure this list will expand even more but right now it starts with a blog post probably no one but my agent will read.

But God can do a lot with little tiny inches.