trying

I was so happy while in Garnet Canyon and the letdown after that high has been heavy. It was a true high like I rarely feel anymore. I had all this surplus energy and smiled so much it gave me headaches. I introduced myself to new people at Ward Prayer the night I returned to Provo; Madison commented on how out of character that is for me.

Today I am the usual me again and I don’t like it. The day started with a call home in which I related my desire to curl up in the nearest elephant graveyard and die. Classes were daunting—it was the first day—but I attended because missing the first day is never good.

I think I give off some kind of danger aura when I am feeling like I often feel; today the people I sat next to in my classes moved to other rows so that even in crowded auditoriums I had an entire row of chairs all to myself. The crowds were overwhelming and like a coward I retreated from them and hid in remote hallways where I read Matthew Kelley’s Perfectly Yourself. 

After classes I picked up fliers about a depression support group and a tutoring program at a local elementary school and then I signed up for a Folk Music Ensemble audition to be held the day after tomorrow. The better groups tour a lot and are way too intense for me right now, but I’m hoping for a just-for-fun quartet or something like that. They’re heavy on violinists though so we’ll see if they even want me.

This blog is always supposed to be positive so here are ten happy thoughts:

• siblings
• movies
• pillows
• french fries
• salads
• mountains
• cliffs
• waterfalls
• red lipstick
• toothbrushes

I don’t like nights

when I am unhappy without valid reason, but tonight I’m having one. When logic and emotion disagree it leaves me feeling frantic and discouraged.

TRC (teaching resource center at the missionary training center) today was disjointed and in some ways difficult, but it was clear that the Elders were trying and I felt their testimony as they spoke. They teased me about having different husbands each time that I volunteer, and on the way home Becca and I discussed the difficulty of giving up not only drinking but also all that comes with it (we played the part of drinking buddies in the scenario today) such as the magnificent wine collections many people have and what should happen to them if the owner joins the church.

My hands are healing excellently from my fridge cleaning adventure and I’m contemplating subjecting them to outdoor rock climbing. I tried on climbing gloves today but found it hard to give up the integrity of skin on rock. It is intimately painful and makes me feel entirely in control. The gloves of course were in a store and that was REI, where I collected an excellent sleeping pad that folds up to the size of a water bottle and weighs just 23 ounces. The selling point is that it’s thick enough once inflated to keep space between my bones and the sharp rocks beneath the pad. I can’t sleep with pressure on my bones.

Tomorrow will be a good day and the day after will hopefully be better, and soon I’ll be in school again. I am currently registered for

Personal Finance

Intro to Computer Programming

Self-Defense

Intro to Linguistics (Modern)

The Doctrine and Covenants

LDS History 1805-1844

I want to add Survey of World Religions with the famous Gaskill, and if I succeed in that endeavor I plan to drop LDS History since three religion classes at once is getting a bit heavy.

serotonin sunday: raw thoughts

On Friday I forgot to take my meds, the aftereffects of which convinced me that the only dose change happening in the near future is an increase. The low hits me somewhere between 10 and 30 hours after the missed dose, and it’s an unhappy place to be.

I’ve had a good weekend—fun times at the MTC with a friend, successful cleaning check (I think I’ve checked the sheet 100 times to see the little check mark next to “Pass”), some schedule organizing, inspirational hike with Becca, lovely dinner at Chadders with Becca and Marat, enjoyable Sunday spent primarily outside. Logic tells me I’m happy but the rest of me can’t feel it.

Always with depression comes more intense questioning than usual, challenging the basic truths that are supposed to guide my life. Most dominant among these questions is: why am I here?

I know that theoretically I am here to learn and grow, make and break covenants and suffer consequences and repent and vow to live more righteously. Somehow this 80-year journey is meant to prepare me for godhood and perfection. During it, I am supposed to become better.

The problem is, I don’t feel like I do. I make positive changes—the most drastic being the change from being a secretive child with a chronic lying habit to being a fairly open and almost always honest adult—but I feel like as I kick each bad habit I just move on to new ones and my overall goodness level remains about the same. Some habits have more religious significance than others, but even the ones that don’t get me in trouble with the church cause stress and unhappiness and I don’t see that they are necessarily less detrimental. This makes it hard for me to feel motivated to actively try to improve. I think I’m a decent person as is, and each time I try to eliminate something negative from my life it just seems to get replaced with some other negative—which, though disheartening, seems human. Part of mortality is being constantly flawed.

I suppose the point is to gradually decrease the seriousness of our flaws. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I feel like I’ve reached good human status, and that the flaws I possess now are just evidence of my humanity. I’m good at getting back to good human status when I slip below that, but progression past good doesn’t seem to mesh well with my humanity. So I keep changing my behavior without feeling that I’m making progress towards perfection.

But then I wonder, if I’m not progressing, what am I doing here?

white glove red hand

Dear Management,

I better pass the cleaning check tomorrow, because I would hate to put my hands through this again. On the plus side, my fridge looks totally awesome.

Catherine

Update: I passed!

sisters

no trespassing

    The same week I went back to the farm, I found that I love corn on the cob. Once it’s cut off the cob, that is.

return of the phantom blogger

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking lately. For once, I believe it has been beneficial. I’m starting to see a light at the end of a long, difficult tunnel I wandered into quite some time ago. I don’t know all the steps needed to get out, but I believe I’m on the way. With faith in Christ, it will all work out.

This week I’ve taken a break from reading the Old Testament to study Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the New Testament. I can’t praise it enough—it’s simple, clear, easy to follow. It reads rather like a novel, with no verse numbers and subtle chapter breaks, and I’m often surprised to find after what feels like a short time that I’ve read fifteen pages. Bible reading is normally a slow thing for me, with more than three pages feeling like a chore. Lattimore’s New Testament has brought me extraordinary peace this week. I bore a stuttered testimony today of Jesus Christ, and felt a trust in him that is brand new to me. He will provide.