-Because there's no better title at this time.-

I never thought I'd be able to drive. I couldn't figure it out, and as the hours went on I became convinced I'd be that anomaly in a world of automobile drivers to be inept at functioning behind the wheel. I started looking at how life would be without the luxury of a car, or even the capacity to operate one. I knew there were millions who could do it, but I'd never be one of them. I couldn't do it. I couldn't see myself doing it.

I've felt the same way about a lot of things. Marriage, giving birth. I don't think it's a low self-esteem issue, something like believing I'm not good enough for it. That's not the case, and I think that's something people tend to misunderstand about me. I'm not self-conscious. I mean yes, I have my moments were a feel pudgy or not so glamorous, but everyone does; it's human nature. I'd be lying to say I'm 100% satisfied with myself 100% of the time, but those are just moments, not layers of chronic self-deprecation. I don't underestimate myself. I once had a guy tell me there was no way guys wouldn't be interested in me--like he was trying to boost my self worth so I'd leave that "relationship" with him and enter the world confident in my ability to attract men.

I've never doubted that. I've never felt I wasn't good enough for a guy, I've never felt no one would ever want me.

I've been worried I won't find the right one.

I can't see myself being married, even as marriage becomes less of a child's perspective of what her parents did and what all the old couples in the ward did and more of a thing my friends do and things my friends talk about with their boyfriends/girlfriends, I can't see it happening. *Again, I remind you, it's not that I don't think I'm good enough to get married, it's the idea that the opportunity will never fully come, the idea never realized.* Which is absurd coming from a 21 year old who's only been in one 'official' relationship and has only been seriously on the dating scene for just over a year. It's ridiculous.

But I was reminded of it as I checked my facebook just now and saw a Junior High friend's pictures of the child she birthed nearly six hours ago, and I was awoken to the fact that I can't see myself having kids. I can't see that ever happening.

It's more than that. I can't see myself as a good improviser, I can't see myself as a competent missionary, I can't see myself as a theatre teacher, I can't see myself as an accomplished author, I can't see myself as a functioning adult in society with a working knowledge of politics and taxes and current events.

I can't see these things. I've set up this barrier that prohibits me from fully experiencing life. I've created a rule for myself to hold back and hesitate just a little, because you never know. I've let my existence be wrapped and warped in doubt.

And the only way I can think to get past it is to keep going. I've used it before, but I'll use it again. I couldn't see the Improvables letting me into the troupe after those auditions. So I didn't want to go. But I pushed through and went.

I need to stop thinking life is easy, or that I can make it easy by holding back. You'll never learn to drive the car if you don't sit and focus on what you're doing. You have to train yourself to understand. You have to train yourself to perform the task. It takes brainpower and concentration. It takes focus and effort. It takes the will to try, and actively doing it constantly. But one day you realize driving's not that hard, and you just needed to relax a little bit and give yourself time.

I can get married, I can have babies, I can become sufficient at improv, I can follow my dreams and accomplish them. To do so, I have to stop telling myself they need to be in the immediate foreseeable future, and I need to kick the nasty habit of waiting for "next time."

A little thing called courage.

It's been a while, and having just updated my personal journal I decided to delay studying for my chemistry test/sleep a little longer by updating this.

For the sake of congruence, abide by the convention that one day doesn't actually end until you've gone to sleep for the night, so while the clock says it's November 14th, I'm still awake on the 13th. Otherwise the post is pointless.

A year ago today I auditioned for the Improvables.

This was a big deal, for reasons that can be revisited in a post from back in March, but it was also a big deal because that one choice led my life to what it is now.

Let me elaborate. The decision to meet Jason Mraz was a huge, obvious choice, but had I happened to miss the VIP memo, or been unable to get tickets before they sold out, or been unable to travel to see him in concert, I would for the most part--as far as hindsight lends me to see--be the same person with one less amazing story and one less glorious profile picture.

Now this isn't 100% true, but I'm using it on the basis that when I returned from Colorado I was the same girl with a new experience under her belt. I still went to Weber, I still lived at home, I was still badgered with existentialist notions...

Auditioning for improv changed me.

I didn't want to go. It had been years since I'd regularly done improv, and I'd gone to a troupe workshop once during my first year at college and had felt like a child and moron the whole time. I didn't go back. I couldn't stand the idea of being inadequate. And as I walked through my house to the door into my garage, dressed in my jeans and a purple shirt and my new purple boots from that trip to Colorado, I told myself no. Turn around, go back upstairs, get in your pajamas and get on the internet. Don't even bother. You're not going to get in anyway. You don't need to leave the house.

And a small, weak, uneducated voice told me "Then what have you got to lose?"

We've recently been counseled to doubt our doubts. Elder Holland gave a talk a few conferences back about clinging to what we do know, not dwelling on the gaps in our faith or understanding. Doubt your doubts and draw faith from the things that are solid enough to hold on to. Build up the others as you may, but don't let them be the focus.

That little voice has grown, strengthened, become a regular occurrence in my head. I'm not that girl anymore. I'm not that girl that doesn't talk, that doesn't contribute, that sits back and wishes life would happen to her. I'm not that girl that hides in words. I'm not that girl. I became something else last year, and it wasn't meeting my idol that did it. It wasn't having his arm around my shoulder or his gaze locked in mine. It was girding up my loins, grabbing my jacket, and getting in my car on a chilled November night, driving to a theatre I'd never be a part of, to audition for a troupe that would never recognize me as more than a patron, to an audition that would prove fruitless, to return home and amble back into my life of nothingness; that endless staircase to nowhere because I don't have enough stars yet to get to Bowser.

But by leaving the house, by enduring that audition, I was doing something besides scaling a staircase. I was earning stars. And a few months down the line I'd have enough.

I wanted to write tonight because of something that it's becoming clear to me I've already said a million times on this blog. But I'm saying it again anyway, so just deal with it. Everything happens for a reason. I can't see myself as anything but what I am now. I'm so grateful this person has been formed from the ashes, and that I gave myself the opportunity to burn up the old me and rise again. I'm grateful for the trial and error, for the experimentation, for the heartache, for the patience, for the surprise, for the friendships, for the revelations, for everything that's happened to me in the past 12 months, because I can attribute it--all of it--to one day in November. One ordinary day that brought forth everything but ordinary outcomes.

Here's to another year. Here's to earning more stars and fighting more bosses. Here's to a little courage.

Heavy Hearted

She cut me like a knife. I staggered back and felt the air fill the gash where skin used to be suspended. I slowly clenched a fist against my heart and wished it didn't sting as much as it stung.

I've never been scathed by something she'd said before. I'd been miffed and confused, maybe exceptionally irritated, but never scathed.

It was as if, for the first time in my life, my mother had dumped boiling water on me and then pushed me down a flight stairs to let the blisters bloom. I knew she didn't mean it, with each step I crashed past I knew it was just a mood she was in, but that didn't stop her words from ripping everything I've ever held in consolation from my fingers, every picture of hope off the walls.

He did it well enough, in high school. He showed me that love was a fragment of my own mind, something of my own make that would never be reciprocated and never reciprocated in the way I expected. Love would always fall short, and time and time again experience proved him to be right. He showed me the dark side to men--the dark side of everyone; the side that plays more into our prideful pompous hearts than leans into the thought that perhaps I'm doing wrong by someone else right now. Perhaps I'm crossing a line.

But the Barbie doll house didn't go up in flames until my mother had to tell me I was wrong. And as much as I knew she didn't mean it, as much as I knew it was frustration at a thousand other things and that was the thing she chose to vocalize about, it couldn't help but hurt when Mom said marriage was pointless. It couldn't help but hurt when I was so elated by the idea that someday-someday-I'll have that thing I reached for as a five year old, that thing I acted out with dolls, that thing I idealized with Disney cartoons: that someday I'll have love.

And she spat in my face.

My parents aren't getting divorced, I don't want people to think that my life is crumbling to pieces. It was a bad day on her part. But it's made every day since that much more worse for me, because suddenly I have this nagging fear at the back of my mind that I had quieted. This doubt that keeps rising that it's still just a construct of my mind, it's still just part of my imagination, and that love won't find me and that I won't find it, and that even when I do it doesn't matter.

Because it's pointless.

I wanted to say, If that was true, then why do so many people do it? If that was true then why has unity between man and wife withstood the test of time, why has that lasted? Why am I here if a procreation of love was pointless? Why would God let something so beautiful be pointless?

I know He wouldn't. He couldn't. But this dense tar of doubt clings to each glorified expression, growing stringier and needier with each desperate yank I make to rid myself of it.

I have optimism. I'm not saying I don't think anyone will ever find me attractive, or that anyone will ever be a kindred heart to mine, I'm just...

When you wake up as a teenager and you're awkward and your hair is greasy and you're chubby. And you have braces. And clothes make you look like a bloated box and you sound like a man and the only thing pretty about you is your eyelashes, but you fiddle with your eyelashes and pull at them because you've been doing it since you were a child and they're getting thinner and thinner... you start to doubt that any of those really cute boys that you keep talking about with your friends will ever actually look at you and remember who you are. And when that part of you dies, when that awkward phase ends and that part of you dies and you start to look the way you'd always hoped you did but acknowledged deep down you were terribly far from, you have to rebuild yourself and say that you weren't making things up when you were a kid and everyone was equally as ugly. That you just took a minute longer than everyone else to stop being hideous.

And you build yourself again.

And the last thing when you want when you're constructing yourself anew and establishing footing in a skin you didn't think you'd ever appreciate, is to hear that the thing you've been rooting for your entire life, that all encompassing goal, the end all of end all of everything, isn't as great as it's cracked up to be.