Sunday, June 15, 2014

My Dad.

I am blessed with two parents that have shown me what hard work is.

My dad is a supervisor over sheet metal for USAir.
There was time when my dad worked for a smaller airplane company.
There was a time when my dad went back to school.
There was a time when my dad worked in Target. (He gave us free slices of cheese when we went to see him.)
There was a time when my dad worked in Charleston, South Carolina for two years and drove home every weekend to see us.

I remember growing up and watching him play city league softball, the turkey bowl, and pick-up basketball games. He did tough man competitions and boxed men in a ring.

He taught me how to eat my entire plate of food..and more.
He taught me to love The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Jackson Browne.
He taught me to love boiled peanuts out of the can.
He taught me that when your sick colored gatorade is a bad idea.
He taught me that its easier to dance in front of people if you're in the middle of the crowd.

He helped me learn to drive.
He helped me learn how to ride a bike.
He helped me learn how to be comfortable with silence.
He helped me learn to persevere when times got tough.

Back in October my dad was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.  It's called Transverse Myelitis and his body was attacking his lower spine making him lose control of his legs (among other things). It all happened within 72 hours and before we knew it he was hospitalized and nobody really knew what to do. It really shook my faith in a lot of things.

I've always known my dad to be mentally and physically strong. I've never known him to complain. He chops the wood, carries all the groceries, and he eats sardines. The doctors said with this disease happening so fast they didn't expect him to recover much. He was eventually sent to a rehab center for spinal injuries where he was expected to stay for a month. He was out in 11 days.

People, my dad is a champion. It's been a long recovery for him but he has never stopped improving. He taught his body how to walk again, and he is teaching it how to run again. He looks at everything as a blessing. In one conversation I had with him he told me that he is grateful to learn how to run again because he never learned how to do it properly when he was younger and now he has the chance.

I enjoy mocking his bad eyesight, his bad hearing, and the swagger that he walks with. But, truth me told, I don't think everyone could have recovered like he has. Many people would have given up and said its too much. Not everyone can push themselves, and not everyone can retrain their body to do simple things.

My dad is one of my heroes. He has shown me that there is no obstacle too big for us to accomplish. He has shown he what its like to allow trials to help your testimony grow. He has taught me how to never give up.


I will always remember the things my dad has done for me and I hope that one day my children can have a father that sets an example like he has for us.

I love you dad.
Thanks for everything you've done for me.
and always Maim and Kill.





Friday, May 9, 2014

Ode To My Hairbrush


I have this hairbrush.
Everyone makes fun of me for it.
He's a tough guy.
He is missing many of his protective plastic balls which means that metal sticks impale my scalp on the daily.
But how do you know a brush is really working if you can't hear it ripping through your hair?
Also, i'm bad at getting rid of old things.
Exactly.

Adriana has been telling me for years that I need to suck it up and buy a new hairbrush.
But how could I get rid of something that has helped me through:
-Proms
-Boys
-Late night concerts
-Night swims/sprinkler runs
-Different houses
-Different states
-Hair crisis.

This brush has been covered with
-Blonde hair
-Red hair
-Brown hair
-Really really dark brown hair
-Red/Violet hair
-And every step back to blonde.

Well, my friends, today was the day.
I walked into Forever 21 and saw they were selling brushes for $3.25.
And finally, Adriana convinced me to get a new one.
So, tearfully, I am out with the old and in with the new.

I am not the proud owner of a hairbrush that won't tear my scalp to pieces and lets everyone know how I feel about them.


Hooray.

I'm alive!
I'm done with my third year of college.
I can breathe again.

I'm happy these days.
And its a different kind of happy than just a forceful chemical balance happy.
I really am just happy.

I have many different jobs because i'm crazy and have zero self control and I worry all the time.
I'm a nanny.
I clean houses.
I'm a coach.
I'm a caterer.

This has been my life.

Jesse was Shrek! I got to fly home and see him perform..four times. 

Also, all the kids were in North Carolina for a solid 8 hours together before we all split back up. 

I went to conference. 


My LITERAL best friend forever got married. 

I went to Texas to see Lyndsi, Ken, and baby shortcake. 



I'm also dating this really cute guy who is so patient with me and likes to hold my hand.

I'm learning how to put myself first. 
I'm learning what I need to do to make myself happy.
I'm learning time management. 
I'm learning.

Hooray for summer. Hooray for this girl still being my other half. Hooray for sunshine. Hooray for learning. 
Hooray.






Sunday, February 2, 2014

7 Reasons Why..

Last night I went to a ballet at BYU, Swan Lake to exact.
I felt very cultured, important, and ritzy.
Until I actually started to watch the Ballet and then I realized all the reasons I didn't fit in there.

1. I like to put my feet on the seat in front of me.
2. I make more sound breathing than the ballerinas do leaping across the stage.
3. Everyone claps so politely. We're talkin pat-your-palm-with-only-your-fingers-polite.
4. I am the least graceful person ever.
5. I'm a sloucher.
6. I like to take my shoes off when I get places.
7. What's a whisper?

Nevertheless, I stepped on some toes, slouched, clapped loudly, and took my shoes off.




Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Words Are All Around Me


I have this project for one of my Literature classes..
We have to create a work in the language of beauty.
What?
Exactly, I have no idea either.
But she said it can replace one of our papers, which is great because I am missing one.
During class I kept getting this feeling I needed to write a poem.
I don't do poetry. 
But I began writing down words instead of listening.

Its no hope at the end of the tunnel.
Its grey.
The trees are dead.
The grass is dead.
Dead.
Depression.

I've found this subject all around me lately, only this season i'm not the one struggling.
Its in my best friend.
Its in my family.
Its in the boy down the street.
Its in my coworker.

These days i'm working retail.
I have a coworker who just got off a mission in LA.
We opened the other morning at 7:30am - no one shops that early.
We had a lot of time to talk.
She told me all about how depression was something she struggled with on her mission and it caused her to come home early. She also loves a boy. When she came home early this boys mom told him, "You can be friends with her, but I dont want you to love her. She has a lot of problems." She told me she understood because she was kinda broken and no one wants their kid to be with someone who is broken. But depression was part of who she was and it hurt that someone was going to hold her accountable for something she couldn't change.
She really loves this boy and she just wants him to love him back.

I couldn't shake the feeling I had after my conversation with her.
So I wrote this missionary and told him all about it.
Literally pages about our conversation and depression and how its real and how I know people don't understand because I didn't understand. I think the letter was more for me than for him.

*****

I have this roommate.
I think she is really cool and I really want to be her friend.
Shes a freshman, she has a blog too.
Every new year we have to fill out a survey about ourselves, we saw that she liked to blog.
We googled her.
Which I guess makes us pretty creepy..

*****
I wonder if my younger brother knows how great I really think he is.
and I really want him to think i'm cool.
I texted him the other day at 11:30
"You should cover Christina Aguileras new song 'Say Something'"
"Uh no, that by 'A Great Big World"
"You should cover A Great Big Worlds 'Say Something"
"Okay!"
He had it up that night.
I just love him.

*****

I'm grateful for people who just accept things and don't ask questions.

"I need to pay off my bill you guys, can I just do that over the phone?"
"Sure, your balance is 458.97. How much will you be paying today?"
What a nice way to put it. Really they meant, "we fixed your car over six months ago, give us our money".
"I can pay you 400 right now and 58 in two weeks"
"Great."

"Mr. G, I won't be able to finish my observation hours by Wednesday because i'm currently snowed into my apartment complex and can't get my car out."
"...Are you from here? Driving in the snow can be scary but its everyone else you have to worry about. You can turn it in on Friday, be safe driving."

*****
It snowed 8-10 inches over night.
I'm giving myself a snow day.



Monday, September 2, 2013

You're Too Sugary

It still amazes me how much the girls I nanny retain from our past conversations, this is part of one I had with the oldest one, Skylar, a few weeks ago.
The three girls and I are all laying in Skys bed, Cambree and Kylie are playing on the computer and Skylar is sitting on me at the end of the bed.


Sky, you know the grocery store Maceys?
Yeah
I have an interview there tomorrow, do you know what an interview is?
Nope.
They're gonna sit down and talk with me to see if they want me to work there.
YOU'RE GONNA WORK AT MACEYS THE GROCERY STORE?!
Maybe, they need to talk to me first.
Well, they may not think you're a good fit..
Whys that?
Because all you've done is take care of old people (cleaning houses) and answer phones (Vivint).
Well I watch you guys, and I worked at Baskin Robbins.
Right, but since you worked with ice cream you're too sugary. They might not want you to work there.
Too sugary? They have ice cream at Maceys, so I could still work with ice cream.
Yeah, but you're too sugary. If they don't want you to work there its cause you're too sugary. 

I'm still not entirely sure what she meant by that.

Skylar also recently bought a fish with her own money.
It is a beautiful purple and pink Beta fish with a small fish bowl covered in colorful rocks and a purple and pink princess castle.
The fishes name is Thomas.
(Skylar had a friend at school in kindergarden who is still kinda her friend, but not really, named Thomas. For Halloween he dressed up as a train.)
I asked her why she bought Thomas and she told me it was because he was going to be her best friend, and she really wanted someone to sleep with her.
...Thomas sits next to the sink in the Kitchen swimming in little circles in his bowl.
She always reminds me that she needs to feed him after dinner.
(Thomas recently passed away, apparently Sky really wanted to hold him...)

I was able to go to dinner with their dinner the other night and I mentioned how Skylar was going to be a heartbreaker when she got older - she looked at me with worried eyes and said, "What?! I'm not a heartbreaker!"
She will be.
I just think Skylar is so cool and I can't wait to watch her grow up.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Winter Semester, Freshman Year.

I have so many things I want to talk about.
I've been keeping this mental note in my head about everything that matters to me and why and what I think they mean.
Whenever I decide to write my thoughts down I choose to sleep instead, except these days I have a really hard time sleeping. And now its 2:30am, my stomach is full of greasy Denny's and I am defiantly not going to sleep anytime soon, so here I am.

I want to write about so many things!
About whales, or how I tore up all of our Ensigns so I could make a collage of a Volcano (it didn't end up working), or more stories about the girls I nanny because, lets be real, i'm obsessed with them.

But thats not what I want to say.
Lyndsi told me about this blog today, Hyperbole and a Half.
She has these two posts about Depression. One and Two

Clinical Depression is something that runs in the Women of my family.
In that group I am included, but it took me a really long time to face that.

It all really came forth the winter semester of my freshman year.
That part of my life has now become a joke, literally. I refer to it all the time by saying things like, "listen, that was a really dark/rough/awful time in my life." But I say it with a laugh because I don't know how else to feel about it. I look back at it and kind of scoff because I don't know how I didn't realize I was depressed, or why I wouldn't accept it.

I have few very distinct memories from that time.
I remember sitting in my bathroom and texting Dorian and telling him that I don't feel anything anymore, and all I could relate it to is being in a very deep hole, surrounded by darkness and there was no way for me to get out.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table with CJ and crying because I didn't want to be medicated for how I was feeling, I wanted to figure it out myself. But I never did anything to try and fix it, I just wallowed in it.

My mom would ask me a lot if I was depressed, I would always say no.
Corey would tell me he thought I was depressed and I remember getting SO angry at him because I didn't want people to know, I didn't want to feel weak, but I didn't want to fix it.

That was the weird thing for me about how I was feeling.
I knew I was this way but I didn't want to do anything about it, I had zero motivation.

I skipped school a lot, I rarely got out of bed, showering became even less of a priority, I didn't really sleep, I didn't eat and I watched a lot of Law and Order.  I stopped praying, reading my scriptures never crossed my mind, and I physically went to church but my head and soul weren't there, I went just so the people around me wouldn't worry.

I think I have always been a happy person, I like to laugh, I like to have friends and to know the people around me. I like the sunshine, I LOVE EATING, I hate being by myself.  None of these things mattered to me anymore. I rarely laughed, I HATED being around people, I tried to stay away from the sunshine, and I choose to be by myself all the time.

My Junior year of High School I had Mono.
My mom once told me that Clinical Depression kinda works like my Mono.
The Mono virus will always be in my body and it can attack me again as soon as my immune system gets bad enough.
The chemicals in my brain have always been unbalanced but they weren't able to take a tole on me until something big happened that made them go crazy and 'attack' or 'take over' my body.

I remember breaking up with Dorian and thinking my life was over.
I knew I would love someone else again but that thought seemed so far off in the distance, and I didn't want to love anyone else.
I remember calling him and telling him I needed to talk to him and I couldn't get through three words before I was bawling my eyes out and he couldn't even understand me. I remember hanging up and feeling like my world was crashing down on me. I wouldn't say that was the exact moment I became depressed, but I know that that is what triggered it. When the depression came I didn't realize it and I didn't take it seriously. I thought I was just upset because I was going through a break up and thats what happened. By the time I realized thats what was going on it was totally out of my control.

I told Dorian I couldn't be with him, I told CJ that we couldn't really be around each other. And I stopped feeling.

But lots of things continued to happen that Semester too.
Lyndsi came home from her mission,
Bradley got baptized,
I met Max,
I got a job.

During these few moments in my life I started to feel little bits of emotion.
I was so happy Lyndsi was home, I was so happy to see my family at Bradleys baptism. But both of those plane rides back to Utah were probably some of the worst rides I have ever had.  I didn't want to go back to Utah because I wasn't happy in Utah, all I wanted to was to be by myself but I forced to sit on this plane with many other people. These instances showed me that I really had the ability to feel emotions, but they could also come crashing down just as quick.

I was always happy when I first started hanging out with Max, it was very easy for me to be around him. We were also getting to know each other so I knew I couldn't be some sad, depressed girl. So I told myself I was going to be happy, I put a face on, and eventually I was truly happy. But the second I would leave maxs apartment and get into my car it would hit me. I remember many different times when I would drive down University in the dark and Provo below would be lit up and I could see the outline of the Mountains against the sky. That hill was always so hard for me to drive down, it made me feel so alone.

I worked at Baskin Robbins and people were forced to rely on me. I was okay when I was distracted but the second I left work it was like this feeling was waiting for me right outside the doors. I would clock out, and along with that I would put this weight back on my shoulders until my next shift.

It wasn't until September that I finally decided to do something about it. Lyndsi wrote this post about Depression and it finally made me realize that this was not something that I could keep ignoring.
I went and saw a Doctor in Utah and he wouldn't give me anything, instead he wanted me to talk to someone and read a book about Depression.  I cried, I was angry, I threw away the number of the 'professional' he wanted me to talk to and I can't even remember the title of the book. I think this method could work for some people, but I knew sitting down and talking to someone about being depressed wasn't going to make me any less depressed.  So I went home to North Carolina and saw my family Doctor and he prescribed me some medicine. The change wasn't automatic for me, I didn't wake up the next day feeling instantly better. But I did recognize little things that felt better.  I remember leaving Maxs, driving down that hill on University and not feeling sad or alone, I remember feeling motivated and wanting to do things, I remember I started feeling happy more than sad.  I was starting to feel alive again, I was starting to feel like myself.

I still have bad days, sometimes I can feel my depression creeping up on me, but the good days far outweigh them.

I do things now that I know will make me happier.
I go outside, a lot.
I don't listen to really sad music.
I pray a lot to my Heavenly Father to help me be happy.
I love the girls that I nanny and I love that I can't be upset when i'm around them.

I love how I feel now.
I love feeling alive again.
Never again do I want to feel nothing.

Depression is real.
Depression is hard.
But depression doesn't mean its the end.