Day 5: Slightly emo musings on the politics of friendship

Last night I got a bit of insomnia and didn't go to bed till I think just before 5am. I didn't wake up this morning till 1. I did not get my blog post written before I had to get ready for work. So here I am at 1:12 am after work trying to write something. Alas, I am not in a particularly writerly mood. I guess this is a good exercise in writing even when you don't feel like it.

Today's prompt is supposed to be what my favorite of the lesser holidays is. But my problem is that I don't feel like writing silly posts like that. On the other hand, I also don't feel like writing something intense and requiring of much thought. 

I guess I'll just share a quandary with you all that I've been mulling over today.

What do you do in a relationship when you find your trust in the other person is called into question? 

One of the core tenets of my life philosophy is a firm belief that there are some aspects of a person's experience where they must choose their truth. I think that the clearest example of this in my life has been my relationship with the church. I chose to continue believing in it regardless of the fact that I never got that spiritual confirmation most people base their belief on.

But should this philosophy apply to relationships? 

I have been trying to develop a new friendship recently. It's so difficult to make new friends and I am so abysmally awkward at it. But I have been working hard to overcome the awkward and, more significantly, my natural assumption that all people everywhere find me unbearably annoying and I should not force them to interact with me. I think that I've been doing pretty well. This person seems to like me. They talk to me, sometimes even initiating the conversation. They share things with me that they know I'm interested in. They appreciate when I share things with them. They have done nice things for me. These are all signs that I have to remind myself indicate a good chance that the person I am trying to befriend does in fact like me.

But the other day I learned something about my relationship with this potential friend that could be interpreted multiple ways. It could be something completely innocuous and insignificant. Or, it could be something that is quite hurtful. Unfortunately, I do not know the person well enough to safely assume one way or the other. 

I keep asking myself...should I just decide to act as though I know nothing? To believe, whether it is true or not, that there is nothing questionable about what I heard? I would have been so much happier if I had never been told. It's too easy a thing for my insecurity to latch on to as a reason to shut down and close off. And I don't want to wonder if this person who I like very much is not a safe person for me to invest in emotionally. 

I decided to continue believing in the church because I decided that even if it wasn't true, I would be happier believing that it was, and doing so would not hurt me or anyone else. Do I decide to believe in my friendship with this person even if doing so opens up the possibility that one day I might get hurt? If someone is doing something hurtful is it better to know and be hurt, or no know and be happy? Is that answer still true if it is only the possibility that the hurtful thing is occurring? Really, I'm asking if it is better to be cynical or to be idealistic. 

I'm sorry, this post is ridiculous. It is vague and adolescent. But it is the question which has been plaguing me all day and I would appreciate perspectives. 

Day 4: Heavy thoughts on the state of the the world

Today's prompt was "What is your favorite fairytale and why" which is something that anyone who knows me knows I should be pumped about. I'll probably do that one later on, because I do love fairytales.

But today I'm not feeling fairytales. Today I am thinking a lot about the world we live in. Last night I decided I want to try to take a break from Facebook for a while. I realized that for the last couple of weeks the time that I have spent scrolling through the feed and interacting with people has left me feeling unhappy. I feel anxious and depressed and hopeless.

This is not news to anyone. If we thought things were contentious before November, it only got worse after. To be fair to everyone, I am pretty sure it would have been that way no matter who won (except maybe Bernie Sanders). I will say that the despair would probably have been less dramatic (if no less impassioned) had Hillary won, if only because not a lot of things would have changed. Many people said that Hillary's presidency would be Obama's third term. I give Hillary a little more credit than that, but I do think that transitioning from one democratic president to the next would entail very little grand change. Conservatives could go on hating the government and all presidential policy, and liberals could continue complaining that things weren't changing fast enough.

Trump's victory, however, and the additional election of a Republican congress is a bit different. I'm not talking about Trump as the antiChrist rebirth of Hitler. I just mean that we are completely changing track, if not turning around and heading back where we came from. Trump campaigned on the promise of change, and that is what we will get. And that kind of huge dramatic change causes ripples. Republicans were looking at essentially a continuation of the status quo if Hillary won. Democrats are looking at not just moving ahead in a new direction, but the destruction of everything that they have fought bitterly for over the last several decades. And while that probably sounds like music to the ears of Republicans, I think that they should not be so surprised and disgusted that people are taking it hard.

But that brings me to the meat of the issue. And that is the bitter hatred each party seems to have for the other. There is no level of understanding. Republicans are in full victory mode. They won, so now they get to do what they want, no matter how petty it might be. And they're going to tear down every single thing that Barack Obama ever so much as looked at and smiled. Regardless whether it actually worked, or helped people, or wasn't overtly "Democratic". And Democrats? They are either despairing that the world is ending and we're all going to die in a nuclear winter, or gearing up for an all out war made of the last 8 years of Republican tactics we all couldn't stand just a few months ago.

Society is divided into an Us and a Them. The lines might vary depending on who you are and what you believe in, but what doesn't change is that there is a winner and more importantly, there is a very clear loser. In fact, for it to really count as a victory, your enemy must lose, and hopefully suffer in their losing. Because the word compromise has become synonymous with failure

I think the most depressing part of this is that it is aggressively encompassing. I grew up Republican, with liberal leanings given me by my mother (who I don't think ever realized how brave she was being a Mormon Democrat before there were facebook groups to support her). I migrated into unaffiliated territory as I grew up. I didn't identify as liberal till the last couple of years. And even then I was a conservative liberal. But all of a sudden I find myself digging in to debates on Planned Parenthood and the ACA. I find myself writing impassioned micro essays in facebook threads. But most of all, I come out of those encounters filled with disgust and anger, and absolutely no more understanding of anyone else's opinions but mine than I started with. I was literally raised in the ideology that I am now arguing against, I still have plenty of friends and family who believe it, and  yet I cannot fathom most of their opinions.

I saw a post yesterday calling out Obama for the hypocrisy of his farewell speech, talking about liberty when he had personally enacted "the biggest threat to freedom this nation has ever seen" (also known as the ACA). I said something about how putting the ACA on par with Japanese internment camps and slavery is a bit melodramatic. In his response he said "why do you like the ACA? You're the first person I've spoken to who has." I'm just stuck on that. The internet brings the world to our fingertips and yet we manage to pare it down and edit it to the point that the only way someone can hear something they disagree with is because you somehow became facebook friends with your wife's one liberal cousin and now it would be awkward to unfriend her because you see each other occasionally at funerals. I don't mean to call out this guy specifically. It is true of everyone, including myself.

But later on, on that same status someone else commented in response to me that the ACA IS slavery. Any time the government forces people to buy something they don't want it is slavery. The level of social insulation required to make that statement nearly made my brain explode. But to that guy, and more significantly, to everyone else on that thread who didn't say "I'm sorry, are you insane?", his statement made sense. It was true. I don't know how you navigate a world with divisions that fundamental.

And that's the problem. I fancy myself an understanding person. I like to think that I can listen to people and understand them. But I feel like I'm losing that. I feel like the world is losing that. I feel like communication is dying, and all that is left is propaganda and the need to be right and prove other people wrong. If I can't stop it happening to myself, what hope is there of stopping it happening to the world?

The Road Untaken and the Talk Not Given - musings on spousal selection

A couple weeks ago I was asked to speak in church.  I went through this process of writing out my whole talk, and then at 9 pm Saturday night I decided I wanted to talk about something else.  I mentioned this whilst I was speaking and a couple of my friends told me they wanted me to post my un-given talk on my blog.  So, here it is, more or less, adapted to secular blog instead of theological oration.

I want to talk to you guys about one of my favorite books.  I've written about it before on this blog, in my list of the five books everyone should read, but specifically every girl should read before she turns 20.  I'm rather proud of the fact that that is in my list of top 10 most popular posts, btw.  Anyway, I'm talking of Little Women.  I would like to assume that, as readers of my blog, you have of course, already read Little Women after I recommended it before, or you have already read it on your own because you have superlative taste.  But if neither of those things are true, I shall give a brief and incredibly inadequate summary for you.  Little Women, published in 1868 by Louisa May Alcott, tells the story of Jo March and her 3 sisters as they transition from young girls to women.  Jo, the penultimate child, is the classic tomboy bucking against the restrictions of gentility and societal expectations.  Early into the story she befriends Teddy Lawrence, the boy next door, and he is quickly adopted into the family as a brother.

Ah, wee baby Christian Bale...you did a pretty good job I guess

At this point I supposed I should warn of upcoming spoilers, but guys....the book has been out for 150+ years, not to mention made into at least one major film.  So I feel like you should probably get over it.

So anyway, Jo and Teddy grow up as best friends, sharing the same sense of humor, the same interests, and enjoying the same activities. And as they get older, Teddy starts trying to lay the ground work to take his relationship with Jo to the next level.

Here's the thing guys.  I just finished this book for the first time in many many years, only this time I listened to it as an audiobook.  I don't know if it was the woman reading the book or just my frame of mind this particular go through but for the first time I found I kind of had a thing for Teddy.  I never appreciated how funny and sassy he is before.  But I realized something else, too.  I've conducted 20-odd years of thorough study on this via film and TV and I can tell you definitively....Jo and Teddy are legit made for each other.  They are the text book definition of chemistry.  At least by modern romantic standards.  Think about it.  Isn't that what ever rom com tells you to look for?

Your perfect match.

I love puns so much

Love, and consequently marriage, is about finding that perfect match.  In practical terms that looks like someone who will validate you.  It's like "You watch the Great British Baking Show? OMG, I, too, watch the Great British Baking Show!!   At last I can stop feeling weird and just watch and love the Great British Baking Show with someone....which is all I really ever wanted."

In contemporary society, where long-term monogamous relationships are approved of at all, they are marketed as the ultimate bff validating relationship.  Your spouse is that person who will always be on your side, who likes what you like, and who reassures you of your place in the world because they occupy it with you......But guys.  Jo doesn't marry Teddy.

Teddy goes off to college and when he comes home he asks Jo to marry him.  He, like me this time through, believes in the idea of a perfect match.  But Jo says no.  She breaks his heart.  She breaks his heart because she understands that there is another way of loving and another way to choose a spouse.

Instead of a perfect match Jo wants a perfect complement.

eheheheheheh

She knows this because it is the marriage she has watched her whole life--that of her parents.  Early on Jo's mother talks to her about her hasty temper, explaining that it will cause her so much grief if she doesn't learn to control it.  Young Jo bemoans how impossible it is to remember and her mother makes a confession.  She, too, struggles to control her temper.  But her greatest strength in her efforts is her husband.  He knows her struggle and when she needs help he gives her a small sign to remind her of what she wants.  .

This was another aspect of the book I'd never really appreciated before.  Essentially it was a portrait of a much less common type of relationship, even back then, but it gave a whole different idea of what a marriage could be.  One person loving the other enough to patiently help them when it was needed, and the other person loving enough to humble themselves and accept that help.  In this sort of marriage the goal is not to comfortably validate you, but gently and lovingly push you towards progression and improvement.  In this marriage two people join together to share the work of becoming the best people they can possibly be.

I don't think it is a coincidence that the modern idea of love is the philosophy of matching and validation.  It is easier.  It asks so much less of us.  A complementary relationship takes work.  It requires humility and love and dedication.  But if you put in that effort you will have a partner who is as invested in helping you attain perfection as they are in achieving it themselves.  Can you imagine any greater or more valuable asset in our progression as individuals?

I do not love these actors as these characters, but what can you do?

Jo does eventually find her compliment in a really lovely gentleman named Professor Baehr.  He possesses the strengths she lacks and she provides for his deficiencies.  They form a partnership that is stronger together than  either of them were on their own.  And almost it is enough to help me overlook the creepiness of a 40+ year old man courting a 22 year old girl.  Almost.

1/3 Life Crises

This post is none of the nerdy and analytical posts I've been mulling over lately.  This one is a spur of the moment musing mainly to (as usual anymore) give vent to some of my life angstiety (do you see what I did there?).  Because tonight I finally forced myself to get back to that loathsome task of looking for a new job.  I got that interview last week and I sort of just stopped thinking about the job hunt.  But I was supposed to hear back from them on Friday and I still haven't, and even if I do and they decide to offer me the job I am deeply divided about taking it.  Which is all to say that I need to find some other options.

So tonight I decided to look for some other jobs to apply for.  Interestingly, I'm realizing I don't really want to continue in my current field.  To be sure, in the end I might not have any choice.  But I still have a little bit of time to look around, and so I found myself trying to find alternative employment to PCB Assembly (what you google if you want to find jobs like the one I currently have).

Of course, my immediate thought was "Ok!  Let's see what kind of jobs are available in the world of publishing!" because I have no grasp of reality.  After too much time wasted wandering around the internet, conducting penetrating searches like "publishing jobs" I had the brilliant idea to google instead "how do you get an entry level job in publishing?"  I came across this very interesting and useful article which, unfortunately, convinced me merely that if I wanted to get a job in the publishing industry I should have started the process in January.

Mulling over this failure of time management of course led me to consider my other planning-related failings, specifically, my absolute lack of life-planning.  Once again I looked at my trajectory in life thus-far and marvelled at the absolute lack of navigation.  It is astonishing that such a haphazard existence has not yet crashed into a metaphorical telephone pole and combusted vigorously.  It began as soon as I graduated high school with the selection of which college to attend.  And by "selection of college" I mean that I simply neglected to reply to any other schools which admitted me, and thus ended up at BYU without putting any real thought into it at all.  Once in my carefully selected school I proceeded to spend a very long time getting a very little education.  I did manage to score a degree...in a superlatively generic field of study.  And I did nothing else in my decade-long tenure as a student that might be useful to me now, like an internship or involvement in any campus programs. Despite my father periodically asking me about such things, somehow they still never registered on my radar of activities I should (or indeed could) actually do.

The thing is, even if it had ever crossed my mind to look for an internship or to get involved in some campus program, I wouldn't have had much idea which ones to pursue.  Because my ultimate problem is a lack of real ambition.  This is no new revelation.  I have known for some years now that I have no idea where I'm going in life because I have no idea what I want.  Or, those things that I do aspire to I immediately write off as unrealistic fantasies, and thereby avert the anxiety and hard work of actually pursuing them.

But tonight, reading about the process of wedging a toe into the publishing industry, I found myself experiencing a magical fusion of two previously entirely separate branches of my anxiety.  As I sat here thinking about my life and where I want it to go and how I need to find a goal...suddenly I had the mental equivalent of one of those creepy Vertigo zooms.  I leap-frogged right over picking a goal and started looking at the process of achieving that goal.  Specifically how long it will take.  And suddenly my 10 years of college became so much more of a waste than they've ever seemed before.  Most people my age have spent the last 5-7 years slogging through the initial stages of that process, but here I am literally starting from scratch and on the eve of my third decade.  Even if I start right now, by the time I get through the same things I could be nearly 40.

You could say that this job hunt, delayed and ignored and put off, is a microcosm of my life--when I finally decide to take it seriously I am on the verge of too late to find the right thing and may simply have to settle for the most expedient.  And I don't know which is worse: to continue drifting haphazardly through life or finally deciding on a direction only to realize that my chance to pursue it has come and gone.

TL;DR job-hunting and life-upheaval is stressful

I have been thinking with some guilt on my complete failure at blogging this year.  My general goal is to post at least once a month; this year I have fallen far short of that goal.  Partly I haven't had anything I want badly enough to write about and partly I just spend very little time on my computer anymore (phone and tablet have essentially taken over my internet needs).  But the urge to blog has at last returned to me, as it so often does, because I am having a lot of emotions and I need to vent them.  This is why my blog is so entertaining...

So what is going on?

What is going on is that it turns out I am kind of a major coward.  I do not like change, even when it is a change I have wanted for a very long time.  But, in the words of the immortal Lewis Carol, I shall endeavor to begin and the beginning and when I get to the end, stop.

The first issue that must needs be addressed is money, though I'll try to be quick.  Suffice it to say, I have none.  My finances have been dwindling since the beginning of this year.  I did that thing where I pretended like I was rich and carefree because I started the year not entirely broke.  It didn't take long for me to realize that was a horrible plan, and months later I'm still mentally slapping myself for it, but sadly the damage is done.  Things have been grim ever since, more or less.  My life now is a state of constant white knuckling from one paycheck to the next.

To be sure, I am aware of my good fortune.  I may not have any extra, but I have not yet come up short and I cannot begin to say how grateful I am for that fact.  But knowing that your life is the financial equivalent of that fork and toothpick trick and that the slightest bump will bring everything down around your ears is....wearing.

Perhaps this preceding stress will give me some excuse for my reaction, then, to the news Caleb gave me a few weeks back.

For over a year now Caleb has periodically come down to the basement to have a little chat with me about "the future of the company."  Every time he likes a different plan--release lots of new products one conversation, shift into high-end markets the next.  Then, about five weeks ago he comes to me again.  But this time his plan is to close CH Robotics down entirely.  This has always been listed in the possible options, but never seriously considered till now.  But it is all very vague.  He's going to look into selling, but maybe he'll just sort of go dormant, or maybe he'll officially close up shop.  He isn't sure.

Even though this sounded like another one of Caleb's ephemeral ideas--typically forgotten in a few days--it nonetheless sparked a pretty nasty anxiety attack.  That whole gratitude thing about always coming up flush no matter how close, it only works because I have this magical job that pays me really well.  Suddenly my rainbows and unicorns job has gone from anchor to...what is the opposite of an anchor?  The wind?  Sure, let's go with the wind.  Whimsical and dangerous to rely upon.

I prefer this sort of whimsy.  If you do as well, then might I suggest my whimsical pinterest board
where you shall find many more such whimsical images to make you feel happy

Things have remained in flux since then.  But slowly a picture has pulled together of what is probably going to happen.  Some time ago one of the components on our primary product was going out of stock with our supplier so Caleb bought out their entire stock.  The gyro/accelerometer IC.  This has become Caleb's countdown; as soon as I've used them all up he plans to shut down manufacturing.  At first he projected next spring, then February, and then this week he asked me if I could get them all built by the middle of November.  For those keeping track that means that the deadline of my own joblessness went from March to February to two weeks from now.  Though, I hasten to add that Caleb assured me that he will find things for me to do long enough for me to find a new job.  Bless his heart, he is doing his best to help me as best he can.  His deadline for closing the company entirely after we sell out our inventory is still the end of the year and from what he said I got the feeling he was assuming I'd stay till then as well.  Though I suspect he'll run out of things to keep me busy before then.

The thing is, objectively this really is not a bad situation.  I have been given plenty of warning of what is happening, and my boss is working really hard to help me out in every way he can.  It is a pretty decent bet that I could get another job doing what I've been doing at CH.  And then there's the fact that this is actually a great opportunity.  I have been dying to get out of Utah for years now and, since I finally graduated, the only thing holding me here theoretically has been this job.  Indeed, one could interpret the whole situation as a cosmic kick in the pants to get on with my life.

this is what came up when I googled "cosmic kick in the pants"
and I regret nothing

And yet...

Even though I know all of these things, the fact remains that I am, to use the vulgar expression, scared absolutely shitless about the whole thing.  I am terrified and anxious and perpetually on the verge of freaking out.  Like I said at the beginning, it turns out I'm a massive coward. But I feel like I need to explain why.  Like I need to justify my emotional response even to myself to prove that I'm not just a...a....a cotton-headed ninnymuggins.

First, know that above almost anything else I hate unsureness.  Which isn't a word, but you get the point.  To illustrate just how much I hate it, let me remind you all of the time I withdrew from BYU.  It was 2007 after my study abroad and I was broke.  I spent the summer trying to figure out how I was going to pay for school and taking my first steps down the road of churning anxiety with no outlet.  Ultimately I decided I was going to withdraw for a year and try to earn money.  At the time, if you didn't formally defer by a specific deadline then you were considered withdrawn and would have to reapply to come back.  I made this decision and I immediately felt better--I now had a solid point from which I could navigate further.  I then spent fall semester working, saving no money, and coming to the realization that I had made the wrong decision.  I should have gone back to school.  Nothing made this more clear than the moment BYU called me, a few weeks before winter semester was to begin, to tell me that their enrollment numbers were unexpectedly low so they were opening enrollment to students who had missed the deferral deadline instead of making them re-apply.  Now, I don't know the official numbers, but at the time that felt pretty dang specific to my situation.  Not quite a kick, but certainly a cosmic nudge in the ribs.  But I turned them down.  Because I had already made the decision. I so badly didn't want to have to revisit it, and consequently throw myself back into the marshlands of unsureness, that I consciously chose to continue making the decision that I very definitely knew was the wrong one (which, now I think about it, is possibly why the cosmos have upped their game to pants kicking).  So now apply that to my current situation and maybe you can catch a glimpse of my current unhappiness.  I don't know what is happening with the company and I don't know what is happening with my job and I don't know what is happening with my life and hate all of those thing.  So much.

I give up finding relevant pictures. I'll
 just give you more from my whimsy board

Second.  This one is kind of embarrassing.  As it turns out, I haven't actually had to search for a job in nearly a decade.  And before that I only ever really went through the process twice....eh....once and a half.  My last couple years of high school I worked but whatever...high school jobs aren't exactly critical.  After I graduated I moved to Portland to live with my dad for the summer before college with the vague idea that jobs would be more plentiful in the big city.  I proceeded to spend the entire summer searching fruitlessly until August when I was hired as the BB gun range instructor at a scout camp working 12 hour days for the astounding salary of $75/week.  That is the half.  The once was that same summer after my study abroad.  I was again living in Portland with my dad and I spent a month or two traipsing around Hillsboro handing out resumes (what was even on them??), falling down hills, and eventually getting a job at Target which I would hold for the next four years.  I spent a year in Hillsboro and then transferred down to Orem.  I cannot tell you how much easier it was to move back to Utah knowing that I had a job waiting for me there.  When I eventually left Target it was completely unplanned.  My brother had gotten a job at Vivint recently enough to suggest, in the glow of his employment honeymoon, that I too apply cause then we could work together and how great would that be?!  So I applied on a whim, was called in for a interview a couple days later, and walked out of that interview with a job offer.  Certainly not a change of necessity.  Then, three months later after I realized that the only thing worse than customer support in person is customer support over the phone, I was chatting with Caleb whilst he complained about putting many stickers on many sensors and I joked that he should hire me because putting stickers on things sounded like exactly my kind of work.  And a few weeks later he did just that.  In both cases jobs were basically handed to me.  I feel like I've forgotten how to find jobs, not that I was ever very good at it (BB gun range instructor for $75/week).  All I remember about the process is how ungodly awful it is.  And the couple of hours I spent peeking into the classified corners of the internet today only confirmed that impression.  How do you find jobs to apply for them???

actually...this is totes relevant

Third, and last...moving.  As I said, I've been dreaming of getting out of Utah for years now.  But dreaming of something is a lot different than being faced with the actual reality of it.  I've started thinking of exactly what a move would mean.  I complain about how few friends I have these days, but a few is definitely more than literally zero.  I learned this when I moved into my own apartment.  I told myself before I moved that my roommates were hardly ever home so it probably wouldn't be much different.  Once again, not many is distinctly more than none; rarely home is still more than never home because they don't exist.  If I moved to let's say Pittsburgh or somewhere in Michigan I would truly be alone.  I wouldn't even have acquaintances.  And the friends that I do have hear are dear ones.  I'd be leaving behind Caleb and Kara and Michelle and Taka.  And my brother.  There are all kinds of layers to my feelings about moving away from my brother and only some of them are social.  And as for the rest of my family, no longer would I be a comfortable day's drive away if I wanted to visit.  Add in the hassel of the actual process of moving, something I just went through a few months ago, and would have to translate into the greater trial of moving long distance... Suffice it to say, while I know that I don't want to live in Utah, I am becoming aware that leaving will not be an unequivocally happy decision.

this feels accurate....

So does that explain it?  Do I have a right to my perpetual anxiety and stress?  Do all these reasons add up to legitimacy?  I don't know.  Sometimes I think yes, other times I think I need to get over myself and realize that everything is fine and it will all work out.  Most of the time I am thinking both of those things at once.  But I do feel a little better having written it all out, which is usually the case.  I guess that's a point for Allen, my long lost therapist.  He'd be so proud to hear me say that sharing my stress, even with the vagueness of the internet, makes me feel better.  I do often think of him and wonder if this would all be easier if I could go and tell him all about it.  Who is to say.

But if anyone else has persevered and read through this whole thing, well, I thank you.

Therapeutical Musings

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I mentioned in an earlier post that I've started going to a therapist.   I've now been to see Alan 3 times. Each time has been unique, and at any given moment my mind might have changed about how I feel about the endeavor overall.  But if you all would indulge me, I’d like to share some of my thoughts about it.

My first visit I had no idea what to expect.  The Bishop told me to go so that we could determine whether or not I have anxiety and, if so, get me some medication to fix the problem.  I was pretty sure I didn't have clinical anxiety, but why not check.  I then proceeded to have one of the worst, most anxious and stressed out weeks of my entire life just a little while before going in for my appointment.  It was really superlatively awful, but it sort of primed me to think that maybe I DO have prescription-level anxiety issues.  So I went in incredibly nervous about so many things.  Alan was very nice, but nevertheless, I left feeling absolutely emotionally disheveled.  I felt as though I'd just spent an hour having someone poke and pick at me and try to break me down into my constituent bits and I absolutely hated it.  Full disclosure: I sat in my car and cried for several minutes afterward, and spent the entire drive down to work fighting to regain my composure.

I tried to figure out what made that first visit so stressful and unpleasant and I came up with a few ideas.  I kept fixating on this one moment as I was leaving when Alan patted me on the shoulder and said “you did great”.  The sort of thing you say to someone who is clearly on the verge of melting down (which, annoyingly, was basically what I did as soon as I left his office).  He had said it because he could tell I was barely holding it together.  But why was I barely holding it together?  Why had I been so nervous?  I decided that I shouldn’t be nervous.  I decided that I should take charge on my next visit.  I wasn’t a person who struggles to hold it together.  I’m not a person who cries in my car.  He hadn’t really seen the real me.  So next time I was going to go in there and make it very very clear who the real me is, and let him know that I’m really a normal, well-adjusted human.  And that is exactly what I did.  I told him I was fine, things were fine, the world was fine, and his time would probably be much better used helping people with actual real problems.  And at the end of the visit he basically told me “If you actually want to work on anything then I’m more than willing.  But if you don’t then why come in again?” 

That was a very good question and I thought about it for the two weeks till my next appointment.  And the more I thought the less I knew.  On the one hand, I am by no means so arrogant as to think that I am the one person on earth who wouldn’t benefit from going to therapy.  And I certainly do have my fair share of issues I’d like to figure out.  On the other hand, I was having a really hard time understanding how talking to a random guy I’d met twice before in my life was going to help me.  What was he going to tell me that I hadn’t already thought of?  In spite of these doubts, I decided to go back for my third visit.  And in deciding I also decided to commit to opening myself up more like my first visit.  I just saw an episode of Blue Bloods where Frank goes to see a therapist and after several attempts the therapist says “Frank, you’re a very intelligent man and I have no doubt you’d be able to successfully evade my questions all day.”  In my case, it proved nothing to sidestep questions, and refusing to be at all vulnerable would shut me out from any kind of growth.  So I committed to letting myself be at least a little vulnerable. 

And I did.  I went back for my third visit this week.  I talked through many of my concerns and doubts about continuing to come.  Alan was able to explain to me more clearly the format he adopts in his sessions.  He believes that there is value in simply experiencing emotions with someone, and then understanding the whys and hows of those emotions and growing from them.  Very very foreign approach to me.  But I figured that if I was going to try then I had to trust him.  And perhaps his style, so very very different from mine, will be good for me. 

Alan’s format is, rather than to ask specific questions or address “assignments” from before, to have me simply tell him about my life and my concerns and what has been bothering me.  I was kind of shocked by how hard that ended up being for me.  Some of my friends, like Matt or Kara or Caleb, know that I can definitely vent when someone or something is annoying.  But to simply start talking to a relative stranger about all the negative things that I had thought and felt for the previous two weeks?  It was unexpectedly formidable.  And even though I’m trying to trust Alan and his system, I am still having a hard time reconciling myself to the idea.  To me, it feels like I am indulging in the worst aspects of my nature.  The parts of me that I should be working to change.  If I give voice to them then that is giving them that much more legitimacy. 

When I brought this up to Alan he had some explanation, but he also said that I don’t have to worry because he knows I’m a good person and nothing I say is going to make him think differently.  When he said it I had one of those uncomfortable moments of realization that yes, in fact, I am exactly like every single other human out there.  Everyone worries about making themselves look bad.  You don’t share your secrets with strangers because you don’t trust that stranger to judge you rightly.  So Alan was giving me the assurance that I didn’t need to have that worry; that he was going to judge me rightly.

But on the other hand, that didn’t feel like the whole problem.  I understand that this is Alan’s job and that he knows how to listen to people without judgment. 

But what about me?

If I start telling someone else all my struggles and all my emotions then how can I continue believing that I am a good person?

You know that feeling that they say we all get, that we are pretending in a world full of people who actually have it together?  That voice, telling you that you are a pretender, it is the voice I am so afraid of.  It is the constant conscience who will not be silenced.  The one who evaluates everything you are and finds it wanting.  The one that hears other people praising you and whispers “but they don’t really know…” 

All of the things that Alan wants me to share, they are the fodder for that voice.  If I keep them locked up and never allow them the life of another person’s hearing then I can keep the voice quiet enough to ignore most of the time.  I can go on believing myself to be strong and intelligent and sensible and together.  Yes, I have this endless litany in my head of all the ways that is not true, but I never speak them, I never let them out.  I never dignify them with acknowledgement.  I am terrified that if I do I won’t be able to ignore them anymore. 

I’m not worried that Alan will think I’m a bad person, I’m worried that I’ll finally believe that I am. 

No one wants to think that there is something wrong with them.  We all want to be well-adjusted, fully functioning human adults.  But ultimately I don’t think there is any person so normal and so happy and so sensible that if you look closely enough you won’t find that they are a little bit broken somewhere.  I know this.  So I guess talking to a therapist is supposed to reconcile me to it in myself.  They say the first step is admitting you have a problem…

Therapy session: Residence Upheaval Edition

According to my therapist (cause I have one of those now) I need to work on forming connections with people that involve more trust so that I can go to those people when I'm having all the anxiety because that is how you're supposed to deal with anxiety.

I respectfully disagree with my therapist.

See, I agree that I don't really talk to people when I'm in the midst of an anxiety-induced meltdown.  But that is because there is no point.  I mean, sure, talking to people about issues is probably a good thing, but only if you're in a state to use their added perspective and insight.  And mid-panic?  I'm not in a state to do or use anything.  Hence, as I told ye olde therapist, I will talk to people before a freak out, and after a freak out, and even when there are no freakouts in sight fore or aft, but not during.  During I just lay facedown on the bedroom floor and breathe deeply.

But because there's no point going to see a therapist if you just dismiss what he tells you, I am writing this blog post as an initial foray into the sharing my feelings mid (or rather, on the tail end of) a major stress out.  That said, this is likely to be superlatively boring, so feel free to move along.

Today's stress is brought to you by the letter M, for Moving.

Tomorrow I sign a contract on a new apartment.  A faux studio apartment (technically there is a separate kitchen and bedroom/livingroom).

First, let us establish the advantages of this decision.  The apartment is very cool, located in a historic building, with oodles of personality.  And it would be mine exclusively.  I would, for the first time ever, have a home that belonged to no one besides me.  My own bathroom.  My own fridge.  My own sink with no dishes in it but the ones I put there.  And speaking of dishes, the only person to break or lose them would be me.  Indeed, there would be no one to break, ruin, or damage ANY of my stuff besides myself.  I literally cannot express to you how amazing that sounds...

But now for other side of things.

This place is small.  I mean, seriously tiny.  My current bedroom might very well be bigger than the main room.  And there is no other additional storage space.  When I try and think about condensing all of my stuff down into one very tiny room my brain just blanks out.  I have a few vague ideas but ultimately I'm not actually sure it will be possible.  And while I can probably get rid of a lot of stuff, there is a lot of stuff I can't get rid of.  Like the boxes of stuff from my grandma.  Like my books.  I don't know what I'll do...

The rent, while incredibly reasonable for a one-person place, is still a significant increase from what I'm paying now.  My disposable income is basically going to be decimated.  This includes my food budget.  I'm going to have to make a major adjustment in my lifestyle...though honestly that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Just difficult.

The apartment will be available at the beginning of March, which means that I have less than a month to figure everything out and get all packed up and ready to go.  Which leads to to the final and most stressful of all the problems.  Thusfar, all my issues are things that ultimately I can figure out.  It might take some work, but I have the power to manage them.  The last problem is somewhat less under my control, and that is the problem of my current contract.  Just after I put in my application for the apartment I found out that my old roommate Callie was moving back to Provo through August and we both got really excited about her buying my contract.  But as it turns out, it probably will make a lot more sense for her not to buy it.  Which is awesome for her, but rather drops the floor out from under me.  I now have only 24 days to find someone to buy my contract and I am seriously stressed.

Everyone keeps telling me that it won't be a problem.  I'll be able to sell it so so easily.  But the fact is the one time I ever tried to sell a housing contract I ended up paying double rent for three or four months before I managed it.  I was fortunate to be able to manage it then, but there is literally no way I can do that this time.  And I have a lot less cushion before that becomes an issue this time, too.

In addition to all that general stress, I had the particular stress of trying to figure out how, by tomorrow, I was going to pay $360 of rent for my current place plus $450 of deposit for the new one, and I only had $273 in my checking account.  This problem swerved into a detour of hunting desperately for the checks I ordered last year that truly seem to have dissolved into their constituent atoms because I have literally searched every single place they could possibly exist.  Luckily, during my 2nd or 11th hour of searching, Blair informed me that I can go to the bank and pay them $1 per check to print them out for me right there.  I am not exaggerating when I say that this information brought tears to my eyes.  And with it, I am able to MacGyver my way through to Friday when, mercifully, I get paid.  Timing has not worked out for me this week...

And there you have it.  I am sharing my anxiety with others in the hope that doing so will somehow alleviate it.  And, score one for the therapist, I'll admit that on most of the points I do feel marginally better for laying them all out.  Selling my contract remains the aggressive gorrilla in the room, but the rest has diminished to conceivable proportions.

Or perhaps I've simply run out of energy to continue stressing tonight and will begin afresh tomorrow.  Only time will tell...

Arithmetical Theologic Pedagogy

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong.  No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. -Terry Pratchett

Tonight I went to institute.  First time probably this year.  The lesson was essentially about getting your priorities sorted.  It was based on this conference talk about refocusing on the spiritual rather than the temporal.  The teacher took the idea a different direction, focusing instead on media consumption.

Overall the lesson was fine.  But I had a problem with one of her final statements.  She said she hoped that we all felt a little chastised by the lesson.  She referenced some quote about how if we aren't repenting every day then we aren't doing our best so we should all remember that and bring our A-game.  Aside from her use of the phrase "bring your A-game" pretty certainly placing her forever beyond my social circle, I was more annoyed with her stated hope that her lesson had made us all feel chastised.

Contrast that sentiment with the lesson I got on Sunday.  Relief Society was mercifully changed into a combined special meeting with our Stake President, who had been invited by our bishop to share with us a compressed version of his bishop training program.  Fun fact:  in real life our stake president works as an addiction counselor.  I really really appreciated everything he had to say, but what is relevant to this post is when he said that the best and, indeed, only way to fight darkness is not to try to remove the darkness, but to add light.  Though he is not the first person to characterize things in such a way, he still struck a chord with me.  I realized that darkness is an absence and you cannot remove an absence.  All you can do is fill it.

Which brings me back to what bothered me about our institute teacher's chastisement comment.  At first I thought I was annoyed because she was telling me I need to repent.  But that wasn't quite right, because she's right, I DO need to repent of many things. I am all too aware of that fact.  Rather, it was her blatant negative angle.  She hoped, not that her lesson had inspired me to do better, but that it had chastised me for not doing well enough.  It felt to me that she was attempting to remove the darkness rather than add light.

I have had this debate with some of my friends and I understand that some people respond well to negative motivation.  So I suppose what she said was a perfectly legitimate sentiment to express because it was effective for some members of the class.  But I have to wonder...while negative motivation works for some people, I would imagine that positive motivation works for all people.  Is that incorrect?

Telling me that I should feel bad for not "bringing my A-game" implies that my failure with whatever principle you're talking about is based on complaisance and laziness.  For every simple principle that one person writes off as a theological gimme, there is another person for whom it stands as an insurmountable obstacle.  For that person it is at best insulting and at worst actively damaging to tell them that their failures are due to laziness.  We all have our darkness, even if it isn't all in the same place for each of us.  That is, after all, the entire point of our lives.  The darkness may have got there first, but we strive to bring in the light to overcome it.  To fill it up.

So this is my friendly reminder to myself and to you and to that institute teacher who will never read this blog post.  This is me reminding us all to use positive motivation.

Let's add more light.

More gym issues...

I think I just have to accept that, rather than a steady pull that builds like a literal snowball from the really annoying awkward shuffling around just sort of patting a tiny ball in the snow to a giant cartoon pinwheel of snow thundering down the side of a mountain, my efforts at self-improvement will happen in broken fits and starts sort of like a manual car being driven by someone who doesn't know how to drive stick.  Momentum is not something I will ever have on my side.

In the end, I think, the best I can hope for is to cut the time between each new effort down more and more until it might seem, to an outside observer, that they are, in fact, all one consolidated effort.

Tonight was yet another of those renewed efforts.

A month or two ago Kara put me on a two week challenge to eat better and to work out regularly.  The requirements were: breakfast every day, followed by at least one other real meal a reasonable number of hours later, including one serving of fruit and one of vegetables every day; cardio three times a week; and some sort of strength building twice a week.  I think I came up short some cardio both weeks, and the eating fell apart on the weekends, but overall it was a good experience.  Then the two weeks were over and I entered into the two weeks of insanity at work.  My tender little habit seedlings didn't stand a chance and were crushed mercilessly under the boot-heels of 10-12 hour work days.  As is my custom, after the crazy work subsided I made no attempt to reinstate Kara's regimen.  I think since then I've been to the gym 2-3 times.

But what is life but a daily opportunity to improve today what you failed to do yesterday?

So tonight I went to the gym.  I did not want to.  But I went and was blessed in the form of Ever After playing in the cardio cinema.  With credits, I arrived an almost perfect 30 minutes before the end of the movie.  It was like Fate or Jesus metaphorically patting my head and rewarding me with a biscuit.

I ran my customary 15 seconds to crank my heart rate up to near-heart-attack rates as quickly as possible.  The great irony of my life these days is the fact that I actually could theoretically run longer--perhaps 30-45 seconds even.  And the struggle is not, as you might be thinking, the bosom issue.  I have acquired an impressive torture device sports bra that manages to lift and compress my chest into a sort of clavicle-level squshd boob battering ram that minimizes the bouncing from a full on coordinated beating and smothering to simply a muted pounding on my chest.  The side effects of this impressive piece of engineering have been winnowed down to a feeling that my lungs are slightly collapsed and basic arrhythmia as the pounding on my chest confuses my heart as to which rhythm it should actually be following.  Both of which are completely manageable.

No, in the end, it is a different jiggle problem that stops me running.  As it turns out, I am fat.  And my particular fat likes to hang out in two major places: boobs and waist.  The boob situation may be under control, but alas, the waist remains free to jiggle all it wants.  And jiggle it does, to the point that after only a few steps I am in danger of my shorts shimmying right off.  And while it may be dark in the cardio cinema room, I am confident that it is not yet dark enough that no one would notice the shining white legs of the girl whose pants fell off whilst she was running on the treadmill.  Thus, every few steps I have to jump off the belt and hitch my shorts up, then jump back on and run for a few more steps.  Why there are not people working on solving this problem I do not know, because I do know I'm not the only one suffering.  In the end, it is my frustration with this ritual which puts an end to my running, not my lungs, heart, or even legs.  Oh irony, truly thou art a bitch...

Sadly, tonight was not the night I conquered the bros and the machines.

Instead I came home and improvised some very technical body-weight and strength exercises.  One of the bonuses of being fat is that you come with weights built in and ready to go.  If, however, I feel that I need to augment my own natural heft I have managed to find a successful free weight alternative.  Because who wants to buy fancy rubber-gripped weights if you don't have to?  Owning  a 12" cast iron gnome means you don't have to.  Miles actually makes a really good free weight.  And somehow, lifting a gnome is just more fun than lifting a boring dumbell.

And so tonight I began again the endless battle.  Attempting to take control of my life and my body.  Fat jiggles and free weight gnomes and all.  Tomorrow I am hoping to make it to the grocery store after my hair appointment to restock on yogurt so I can make another attempt at being a person who eats breakfast.  Somehow telling the interwebs about the struggle helps, so I shall try to continue to update on my repeated attempts.  Wish me luck!

Prompt 24: A Letter to Someone who has Hurt Me Recently

Sorry, this ended up being kind of intense... :-/

Dear friend,

I ran into you the other day.  I hadn't seen you in a couple years, since before you had your baby.  I was excited to meet him and to see you.  I smiled at you and your spouse and crouched down to see your lovely little boy.  I'm so glad I got to meet him in person.

But when I stood back up I noticed that you weren't really smiling.  Not a real smile.  I know because we used to be best friends and I was very good at making you smile.  I tried to start a conversation but you only replied with one-word answers.  Your spouse and I chatted easily, but you stood there in silence.

You're married now, so it makes sense we wouldn't be as close as we used to be.  But I know that we were growing apart long before you ever met your spouse and that a large part of that was my fault and it hurt your feelings.  I'm so sorry about that and I've been trying to make it up to you for years now.  It was something I needed to do and I wish I'd known how to do it more gracefully, or at least how to tell you what I was doing.

But I thought that maybe you had forgiven me for that.  You invited me to your parents' house for your wedding.  You were almost like the old you.  You invited me to dinner with you and your spouse and brother and again, you were friendly and I thought maybe we were, if not the friends we once were (there was a reason that had to end) at least friends who remembered that we used to be inseparable.  Friends who were ok with the fact that we couldn't maintain the relationship we'd had in college, but would always care about each other.

But when I saw you standing there, acting polite of all things, I knew that I was another victim of that selective memory I had witnessed so many times.  The memory that turned exes you had thought about marrying into random people you'd hung out with a couple of times but were never really serious with.  I saw that our relationship had met the same fate.  We weren't dear, close friends...I was just someone who you'd known a few years back.

And that hurt me.  You hurt me.  Your polite fake-smile and your one word sentences.

That's why I left so quickly.  I didn't want to force you to keep being polite, but much more I didn't want to keep listening to you as you told me that you, someone I will always care about so much, no longer cared about me.

sincerely,

me

Current Events

Guys, I'm legitimately curious about something.  A while back I saw something about OKCupid calling on all of its members to boycott Firefox because of Mozilla's appointment of an "anti-gay" CEO (I have no idea what criteria they used to declare him as "anti-gay").  Today I saw a headline declaring that that same CEO has resigned due to that boycott, employee protests, and upper level management resignations.  This reminds me of the uproar over Orson Scott Card writing for Superman (not to mention the production of Ender's Game) despite his outspoken condemnation of homosexuality.  Again there were resignations and protests and calls for him to lose the job (I don't know if he actually did or not).

While I definitely appreciate that people have the right to withhold their business from those they find offensive, and I also appreciate that companies can hire and fire who they like, and I even agree with many of the underlying beliefs with prompt these people to protest....I can't help but feel uncomfortable with these stories.

Particularly when I see celebratory comments announcing that this is a win in the fight against hate.

Is it?  Because...I'm not exactly feeling a lot of love from the protesters...

This is the OED definition of "coerce"

To constrain or restrain (a voluntary or moral agent) by the application of superior force, or by authority resting on force; to constrain to compliance or obedience by forcible means; 'to keep in order by force'

It concerns me that when you cost someone their job because you disagree with their personal beliefs--beliefs that thusfar have had no demonstrable effect on that job--you are possibly crossing the line from expressing your own opinion to coercing those who disagree with you.  

So my question is, in the quest for equality are some lines being crossed that maybe ought not to be?  Or am I just suffering the pangs that all privileged individuals feel when their privilege begins to be taken away?  Is it coercion to actually stop someone working because you disagree with them?  Does it matter if it is?  I'm not sure...

What do you all think?

In Defense of Earnestness

How long has it been since I wrote a blog post likening dancing and life?  Too long, I think.  So I think I'll just fix that right now.

So I have this friend Spencer who is known throughout our local dance community for his rather...flamboyant dance style.  Words like "infamous" or "melodramatic" might be used to describe it.  And certainly Spencer's dancing does have more drama than anyone else in our scene--involving a lot more sweeping hands and passionate embraces than you'll see anywhere else.  And much as we love Spencer, I don't think that there is anyone that hasn't made at least one good-humored joke about, or attempted over-dramatic parody of, his style, myself included.

But say you're a person like me who gets the occasional song obsession.  You know, where you hear a song and it feels like it had to have been written specifically for you at just this moment in your life.  You listen to it over and over and when you even try to listen to something else it just feels wrong.  Well, maybe you don't know that feeling.  But it's a common enough experience in my life.  And I just happen to be in the midst of another iteration of it right now.  With this song:


In the midst of my obsession comes ULX, and I get to play my current favorite song during one of the dances.  Dancing a favorite song is serious business because you want someone who will do your song justice.  Who do I want to dance with?

The answer is Spencer.

Why would I want to dance with the drama queen of our scene?  Isn't he just going to turn my song into a big joke?

The thing about watching Spencer dance is that that is exactly what you're doing--you're watching him.  You're not dancing with him.  And from that outside perspective it is hard to take him seriously when every dance looks like the same.  There's the hands.......there's cheek to cheek connection......there's sharp turns......yep, it's all there...  It's one thing if you see someone who dances "normally" most of the time dancing like that.  Clearly they're having some serious connection and something intense is happening.  But when every dance is like that?  Well they can't all be serious and intense right?  No one has serious intense passionate dances every time they dance.  So he must just be putting it on...

Now I can't know for sure because I'm not in Spencer's brain.  But if ever there was a person who really was having (or at least trying to have) the intense passionate dance every time he dances, it is Spencer.  Or, to put it another way, he is willing to commit himself 100% to any given dance and to feel it with no fear of looking stupid or...melodramatic.  He is earnestly passionate in his dancing.

And that is why I wanted to dance Favorite Song with him.  Because when I dance with Spencer I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience dancing.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in your dancing that elevates your movement beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the dance you wanted to have to your favorite song (and anyone who has ever experienced "expectation vs. reality" disappointment will, if they take a moment to think about it, understand how significant that actually is).

Now, I want you to reread that last paragraph, but replace all the dancing words with relationship words:

And that is why I wanted to date him.  Because when I'm with him I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience in a relationship.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in the relationship that elevates your emotional vulnerability beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the relationship you wanted to have with your significant other.

It works pretty well, doesn't it.  Try it with anything at all that involves any sort of relationship with two people and I suspect it will still work equally well.  Because the core of why I love dancing with Spencer doesn't actually have anything to do with his specific dancing.  It's about who Spencer is as a person, which is a person who is earnest without fear of judgement.

 Earnest.

When you hear that word you probably think of the delightful Oscar Wilde play "The Importance of Being Earnest".  You should.  It's a great play (the movie with Colin Firth and Rupert Everett is also great).  But that play is actually a satire about the lack of earnestness (earnesty?) conveyed by people of the time.

Because western society has actually been suffering a drought of earnesty (I'm gonna go ahead and use it cause the OED says it's a word...albeit one that hasn't been used since the 1500's) that has gradually been intensifying since around the turn of the last century.  In the wake of the first and then the second Great War society was faced with a crisis of philosophy, culture, and identity.  Faith came under fire as people wondered how any god they had ever heard of could have let these atrocities happen.  Institutions and authority that had previously been inviolable were questioned.  And the continuing progression of time and events has only reinforced the trend.  Looking at all the "isms," from Modernism to Post-Modernism, including absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism, you can see the decay of western society's moral convictions.  That is not to say that morality was lost; rather the infrastructure of morality was lost.  We didn't stop believing that there was a "right" and a "wrong" (well, sort of...) but we lost our conviction that we understood what they were or who made that decision.  I've said before that World War II is a war that could never happen in today's Western World.  We lack the conviction for it.

But as we lost our conviction and our ability to definitively know things we found a great big gaping hole in our collective world view. And as a society we've come up with plenty of things to fill that hole.  You have the rise of the cult of rationalism--"I believe only in what can be rationally and verifiably proven".  You have the obstinately faithful--"the more archaic you prove my beliefs to be the more desperately I will cling to them".  But most of all I think society has filled the hole with apathy--"It was too hard to decide what was right and what to believe in so instead I simply stopped caring."
*Disclaimer: At this point my brain is seething with counter-arguments, exceptions, tangential points to make, and a million other things...but as this is a blog post, not an academic paper, I'm resolutely going to ignore them all.  I just had to acknowledge that they're there*

Somehow caring about things has become unfashionable.  I can think of no better way to describe this than, somewhat counter-intuitively, to invoke this infamous quote

Nerd culture has become strangely in vogue over the last couple of years as people have, much like the quote above declares, realized that it is a society in which it is still acceptable to care about things.  But I can't help but notice a few things about that.  First...why on earth do we have to be told that it is ok to care about things?  Why do we have to proudly (or not proudly) label ourselves "Nerd" before it is ok to be enthusiastic?  Second, even within the world of nerdly enthusiasm we have adopted a sort of reflexive, self-aware lexicon that allows us to distance ourselves from our enthusiasm.  If you're feeling brave, take a brief trek through the wilds of tumblr, imgur, or reddit fandom communities.  Nerds don't talk about feelings, they talk about their "feels".

You don't get excited, you "squee".

You don't care about a relationship between two characters, you "ship" them.

It's like nerds have to prove that they're aware that they care about these things more than they're necessarily supposed to.  Or like their feelings for their nerd-topic of choice are separate from their real, more reasonable emotions about real life.  And lastly, is the compartmentalizing of enthusiasm to "nerdy" things just another attempt to strip passion, enthusiasm, and conviction from the rest of our lives?  If nerds are the ones who are allowed to be "unironically enthusiastic about stuff", then what about the rest of the world--the ones who don't self-identify as "nerds".  Are they not "allowed" to be passionate?  Or must their enthusiams be cloaked in the ubiquitous coping mechanism of our post-modern world: irony.  Things you can't like openly you can like "ironically".  I can't decide if irony is the bane of modern society or its saving grace...

And now...are you ready for it?  Now I'm going to bring us full circle.  Back to my friend Spencer.  Who dances passionately every single dance.  I described him as being earnest.  Because I think that earnestness is the opposite of apathy.  It is certainly the opposite of irony.  Spencer does not dance ironically, though when we watch him we suspect that he does.  He is earnest.  In his dancing, in his conversation, and in his interactions with life and people.  And though I am a part of this nerdy, ironic, post-modern world of apathy and cynicism, when I dance with Spencer I get to let go of my protective shell of never being too invested in anything and be unabashedly passionate.  Not passionate in a nerdy way, that makes fun of itself as it revels in its feels.  Passionate in a completely authentic and up front way.  A way that we can't help but make fun of when we see it because we can't imagine that such simple, upfront and un-nuanced emotion exists anymore in this world.  That is earnestness.  And even if I make the occasional joke at its expense, and I don't think I'll ever be able to claim that I am a perfectly earnest individual, I have to stand up for earnestness.  Because when I dance earnestly with Spencer I am completely happy.  And I think that has to count for something.

My story...

A few days ago I posted a link on facebook to a blog post from the website FreeBYU.org.  As the site was created by and maintained in large part by one of my best friends, I've become more involved in their movement than I likely would have otherwise.  So I came across these two profiles: Travis and Tucker.  I know both of these guys, but I had not previously heard their story in terms of the church.  Reading their stories, so similar to so many other stories I've heard, made me want to try and put my own experience into words.

When I was younger I had this reputation for being quite a scriptorian.  Whenever we'd play games in primary revolving around Book of Mormon stories my team would always turn to me when it was our turn.  And I almost never disappointed.  Clearly I had a deep love of the scriptures.  Or, something neither I nor anyone else around me considered, I might instead just have an amazing ability to recall stories.  Years and classes later, after being the go-to student to summarize the reading we were all assigned for homework last week, I've come to believe it was most likely that latter explanation.  Because one thing I don't remember growing up is ever doing a single thing to deserve that reputation I had.  I mean, I read my scripture with some regularity because my mom made me bookmarks and charts and any number of other devices to remind me to do so.  But I don't recall ever particularly loving them.

I can remember one and a half times in my life when I've ever felt what could be called The Spirit.  The first was on some teenaged birthday (perhaps my sixteenth? I don't have the journal from that time to verify).  It was late enough in my life that my grandma was already starting to show the earliest signs of dementia.  She and my grandpa had given me a card with some money, perhaps $20, and as I laid in bed that night I had one of my first ever panic attacks as I worried over whether or not they could afford to give me that money and what was going to happen to them both as they continued getting older and their lives continued getting harder.  I was so afraid for them, and I felt so helpless to do anything about either their futures or my own current anxiety.  And though I cannot now remember the actual feeling (and I am actually often tempted to discount my memory of what happened), I do know that that night I felt comforted.  I was finally able to stop worrying, trust that my grandparents would be ok, and fall asleep.

The other time, the one I call a "half" time, was when I was about 20.  I was living with my dad and my step mother and my two step brothers and I was, all things considered, not in a great place in my life.  I'd come home from my study abroad completely broke and I made the decision to leave school for a year and try to earn money.  In retrospect I can say without reservation that it was the wrong decision, though a few good things did come from it.  So I spent a year and a half living with family, working at Target, and literally doing nothing else with myself.  I would wake up between 11 and 1 every day and surf the internet till I had to go to work.  I would work from 3 to 11 and then come home and stay up till 3 or 4 or 5 watching movies or TV shows.  I avoided my family and had almost zero social interaction.  Literally the only good things in my life were my cat and my ward.  I loved that ward (and the cat, but that's not relevant to this story).  And it was eventually my ward and my bishop that helped me get back on my feet.  I started thinking about serving a mission.  I was nearing the age and I can't even count the number of times I'd heard that if I wasn't married by 21 it was my duty to serve a mission.  I talked to my bishop about it, and we discussed the preparations I would need to make for a mission to happen.  I knew I didn't feel like I was spiritually "fit" enough for a mission yet, but I was hopeful that I could become so.  But as I considered the mission I kept thinking about school.  I was thinking about all my friends and how I was already a year behind them now.  If I went on a mission I'd be another year and half on top of that.  Basically all my friends would be done by the time I got back.  So one day I was praying about whether or not I should go on a mission or I should go back to school.  Now, depending on who you talk to either I just had a moment of clarity or I received an answer to my prayers.  Either way, I realized that when making my decision it was ok for me to factor in what I wanted to do.  School and mission were both good, worthy choices; this wasn't an issue of right or wrong.  So I wasn't somehow sinning to consider what I wanted to do as I made the decision.  And what I wanted to was to go back to school and all my friends.  Which is what I ended up doing.

If you ask me right now to tell you about all the times I've felt the spirit, those are the two stories I'd come up with.  I would also tell you one more.

The actual decision to come back to Provo was somewhat abrupt and I ended up moving into the first place I could find.  I moved down in the middle of the summer of 2008 and I lived in the place I found through winter semester of 2009.  I can't tell you exactly when this event occurred besides sometime while I lived in that house.  Essentially, one night I had a...spiritual breakdown shall we call it?  It began simply with loneliness.  I've always been susceptible to the latenight lonelies.  But that night it got worse and worse.  I remembered all those New Era articles I read about how other people had felt lonely and then they prayed and they "felt the arms of [their] dear Savior surround them and His love fill them."  So I asked God to let me feel that love.  Let me feel those arms around me.  I didn't feel anything at all.  And as I waited to feel the love I'd been promised was there waiting for me I started to ask myself a question.  It was the question that I think a lot of other people my age are also asking themselves.  What if none of it is true?  What if it is all just a big lie, or manipulation, or even just a well-intentioned wish?  What then?  I think I can say that it was the worst night of my life.  Because as I asked myself that question, I also asked God.  The God who, in all my twenty-some years of life had only had anything to say to me maybe two times.  And all this time I'd been ok with that.  I knew I wasn't good enough or devout enough to warrant the sort of constant spiritual intervention that I'd heard about other people having.  I didn't blame God for thusfar leaving me be.  But that night was different.  I needed something, anything at all.  I would have been content with a brusque "get over yourself" even.  I just wanted the tiniest shred of reassurance that my entire life hadn't been built around the world's greatest self-sustaining con.  I eventually cried myself out and fell asleep exhausted.

I woke up the next day with the the question in my head "What now?"  What was I supposed to do?  I'd been let down by God.  I had asked and He had said nothing.  But on the other hand...I had survived.  I'd made it through that awful night, and, thankfully, in the light of day I didn't feel the same passionate anguish I'd felt the night before.  I was just confused.  I didn't know what was supposed to happen.

A few days later in one of my classes we were assigned to read a book of poetry called The Stream and the Sapphire by Denise Levertov.  In it I found this poem:

Suspended
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.

I have never ever cared for poetry, but that poem practically slapped me in the face when I read it.  There it was.  I had grasped at God's garment that night and my hands had slipped.  But what she said appealed to me.  "For though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted."  Neither had I.  I had made it through my night of pain and abandonment and I came out the other side.

There were many more hours of thought that went into it, but this is where I ended up.  God didn't answer me.  Not even when I was desperately begging Him to do so.  I could interpret that two ways.  God couldn't or wouldn't answer me because He either doesn't exist or doesn't care, or He didn't answer me for reasons of His own that I don't know but trust to ultimately be for my own good.  I have at least one friend who, upon reading this, will quickly point out to me that those two options are actually the exact same thing, except one includes me basically making things up to make myself feel better.  And to him I say yes.  He's exactly right.  Because those two options ended up being a microcosm of my entire attitude toward religion.  Which is this:  Either God doesn't exist and everything I've been taught and believed in my entire life is a lie and I've been wasting all my time and energy on nothing more than really persistent myths.  OR.  It's all true and there are things I don't understand and probably never will and I accept them and try to figure things out as best I can.  Those may not be the options for everyone, but that's what they were to me.

So I made a decision.  I chose to believe.  I chose to tell myself what may well be a straight up lie because when I weighed my options, my life looked better through that lens.  In the church there is a lot of talk about faith.  I doubt a sacrament meeting goes by that doesn't have at least one mention of it.  Faith, we are told, is the foundation of our testimonies, and through it we progress to knowledge.  Well, knowledge is something that I have accepted to be pretty much beyond my reach.  Because I just don't think I could claim knowledge unless God or the Spirit told me something straight out.  And that doesn't appear to be something that's going to happen.  But if I'm being honest, I have to say that I wouldn't even classify what I have as faith.  What I have is hope.  Hope is the very lowest rung on the spiritual ladder in my head.  I have hope that this church I've committed myself to is true (though certainly not perfect).  I have hope that one day I'll understand the world and my place in it.  I have hope that God loves me.

That was five and a half years ago.  Things haven't been easy since then.  I've seen a lot of friends go through similar experiences to mine, but with very different endings.  They couldn't accept hope as a good enough reason to stick with the church.  I don't blame them.  In fact, I often worry that the real reason I stay with the church is simply because I don't care enough about topics that should be much more important to me.  Maybe I just lack enough conviction one way or the other.  It's actually a pretty constant issue in my mind.  But whether that is the case or not, I will say that I have thusfar stuck with my decision.  I may have doubts and questions and hurts and plenty of issues with the church...but I have decided to stick with it.  I think the hardest thing for me these days is jealousy of my time.  Lacking the devout conviction of my fellow saints I find it difficult to sacrifice my time so willingly.  I'm working on that.  But I will also say that having an...academic? reasoned?  well, either way, a far less emotional attachment to the church has had its upsides. I think I have been able to offer a supportive and understanding ear to my friends who have suffered through the disillusionment and pain that comes with a lost testimony (at least I really hope so). I am able to hear a lot more criticism of the church without getting angry or defensive (unless that criticism is idiotic and unfair ;).  And I am able to look at the church more objectively and see places it needs improvement without writing it off entirely.  And that is, I think, the biggest "blessing" that has come from my story thusfar.  Because if the ones with questions and concerns just leave, and all that is left are the devout and unquestioning, then how will anything ever change?  Each side serves it's purpose, and you need both of them.  So I am grateful, I guess, that I can be a questioner.

I told my bishop an abbreviated version of this story a few weeks ago.  It is something I've mostly kept to myself.  I've been ashamed of the fact that I can't claim to have faith or knowledge.  It is hard not to think that, if I was a better person--a better Mormon--I would have those things.  But my bishop, instead of calling me to repentance, said "I think that is a great story."  Small as it was, that little bit of acceptance was so comforting to me.  It inspired me to try and look at my story in a different light--to recast it from a failure to a success.  It's hard to even write that.  And maybe I'm not quite at success level.  But as I've gone back through it all and written it all out, I have been able to see more goodness in my story than I ever have before.  Enough that I can hope to call it a success one day...