Owning October

This is my time.
This is my month.

September usually treats me much better than most months. But this year.... lets just say September ended up dropping me into a new kind of hell, emotionally, and the last week or so has been harder than I could've imagined and I've been in a darker place than I ever thought I would be. I'm working on it...

SO

Yesterday, being the First of October, I decided that I was going to claim this month as my own. This is my month. I will own every moment of the next 30 days and focus on the things that will make me feel whole again. I will work on sponging away the anger and hurt and tainted memories by replacing them with art and friendship and joy. I will extract the toxicity from my life and embrace the people who truly know what love and friendship mean. I will be healthier. I will be busier. I will take (reasonable) risks and start anew. 

first step- chop off my insanely long hair:

My hair hasn't been this short since I lived in Tallahassee. It took a literal and figurative load off of me when the stylist sliced off 9 inches of dead ends. It was time. And it was a tiny outlet for some of the scary, destructive energy I've had stewing inside of me.

Yesterday I also completed my run in the "Utah Idol" karaoke contest. Last night was the Finals round, and out of the 45 people who made it to finals (not to mention the 100+ people who entered the competition) I managed to rank in the top 15 performers. It was insane. I sang "No Good Deed" from Wicked as one of my songs last night and it was the most terrifying, exhilarating, and wild feeling I've had as a performer in a really, really long time. My dad filmed it.. I'm working on getting it from him and posting it somewhere so the peeps who wanted to be there but couldn't get a chance to see it. It was ridiculous, and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to do it. I want to sing more. I want to get back into voice lessons and get better at what I love to do. 

And last, but mostly- I just got a new job!!! You are reading the writing of the newest Enrollment Counselor at WGU. I'll still be working with the Enrollment team, except now people will be setting appointments for me to talk to people and help them get enrolled in school. I will be in a full time, salaried position. With benefits. And they seemed understanding about my conflicts for Christmas Carol, and about potential conflicts for future shows. I move to that team on the 13th and I am so excited I can't stand it. 

October is my month.

I am Owning October. 

You hear me?

Owning It.

That 20-something Struggle

There are moments when I wonder if it would be easier to start over:

Clean slate.

File bankruptcy. Sell most of what I own. Quit my job.

Maybe it would be easier to start from scratch.

The difficulty is that it's usually when I'm in these throws of doubt and struggle that a glimmer of hope shines through. These glimmers of hope burn bright and hot and often cause me to ache and cry as the pressures I've been feeling momentarily lift just enough to allow me to breathe a bit. Sometimes the relief is overwhelming and sends me into panic attack mode- which is counter intuitive, but it's a thing. And then I breathe and pull myself out of it and feel better about things for maybe a grand total of 24 hours, when another seed of stress and doubt will creep in- usually in reference to that shining glimmer of hope.

During these ups and downs I usually start evaluating my life and (unhealthily) comparing myself to people I know. Trying to figure out how they manage to keep it all together. Then the 'vampires of despair' start to creep in and make me feel like garbage for needing to ask for help when there are people who are my age and who also went through college who have managed to get along just fine. I know this is bad. I know these are destructive thought processes. But that doesn't keep me from having them.

The one thing that I think is the most frustrating for me, at the moment, is the concept of affecting your own change. Not sitting around and waiting for things to get better, but actually doing something to fix your problems.

But what do you do when you've been actively trying to affect change in your own life, for weeks/months, and the things you're doing aren't achieving results? When you keep pushing and pulling and twisting at the webs you feel stuck in but you can't find a way to get out of them? I know I'm not helpless. I know things aren't hopeless. But I'm running out of ideas, and I'm running out of energy, and it's getting harder and harder to keep trying and working with no results.

Someone recently told me that everyone's 20's are awful. "Wait until you hit 30." They said. "That's when things smooth out."

Well. There are exactly 

3 years, and 4 months until I'm 30. 

Let's get there already.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

Several weeks ago for Father's Day my siblings and I spent the day at the home of our Goertzen Grandparents. While helping my grandmother clean up the dinner dishes she told me the story of  her and my grandfather- their entire courtship was done through letters while he was over seas with the Air Force. They never actually dated. In fact, they were strictly friends- it wasnt until the end of his service out of the country that they even began discussing feelings. Their letters were never love-letters, but the day after arriving home Leonard Goertzen proposed to Nadine Buck and the rest, as they say, is history.

I feel like the written word is dying. And by written word I mean Hand-Written-Words. Everything is digitized and sent over wires and satellites and when it does end up on paper it is more often than not printed in ink by some machine.

While sorting through some papers yesterday I discovered a whole parcel of letters from the year or so after I'd graduated from high school. When my family moved back to Utah that year there were a few people who I exchanged postage with, friends who I didn't want to lose contact with. This was before Facebook took off, and though we were all on Myspace it was fun to write letters by hand and send them in the mail. There were gossipy pieces of news from my friends still at the High School. There were letters from boot-camp where a friend/flame was struggling with the rigidity of Army Life. 

And then there were the letters that my family sent to me once I'd moved to Tallahassee. Doodles and drawings and misspelled notes from my youngest siblings who were growing up in my absence. Encouraging notes and cards from my mother. A letter from my Goertzen Grandmother sending love and courage and pride from home. Letters from a very dear friend serving a mission in a foreign land. 

It was emotional, hilarious, touching to read through these hand-penned memories. I tucked them away in a scrapbook, with plans to lay them out flat and preserve them better very soon.

And then I had an Idea.

Many of my friends will shortly, if they aren't already, be living in a completely different state from me. By the end of the summer, my dearest people will be spread out around the country in various places- and while the advent of Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat have made it easier than ever to keep in touch, I want to begin writing letters. Maybe not lengthy detailed tomes, but I'd like to be able to exchange cards and notes and little friendly tokens via good old-fashioned snail-mail. 

SO- here's my plea. If you live somewhere outside of the state of Utah, and would like to be part of something fun and simple and sweet, let me know. We're likely Facebook friends, go ahead and shoot me a message with your address, and I will be delighted to include you. Besides, the more people I write to, the more people I'm likely to receive mail from in return (though it is not expected or required). Lets have some fun and remember our penmanship lessons from grade-school and possibly make some memories in the process.

:-)

wanderlust: take me away

 i want to sit in the middle of a field while it rains and watch the clouds.

 i want to sleep all day and only get up to make irish coffee and turn on a film to fall back asleep to.

 i want to sing for an hour or more in an empty theatre.

 i want to hold your hand while we stroll down city streets neither of us know.

 i want to drive aimlessly and only stop when i'm too tired to drive. then stay the night at some cheapish hotel in whatever random city i've ended up in.

 i want a take-out feast of whatever brilliant hole-in-the-wall take-out joints are within 5 miles. a random assortment of appetizers and dishes to share and discover and enjoy.

 i want to float on an tube in the middle of a lake, letting the waves carry me out as far as they like.

 i want to ride on a speedboat, feeling the spray on my face and the wind in my hair.

 i want to pick berries and eat them off the vine. bite into a tomato like an apple.

 i want a challenge to sink my teeth and my nails and my soul into.

 i want to run away for a week and not tell anyone where i've gone. disconnect and just explore new places.

 i want to wake up excited about the job i'm headed to do each day.

 i want to breathe easy for more than one day in a row.

Un-Equipped

I do not feel I was built to process being an adult.
Somehow over the last two years or so my anxiety has grown exponentially, and the normal every-day stressors of adult life feel massively overwhelming more often than not.

I mean. I cried at work today. Cried. Not because any one specific thing happened. But because I was tired from getting up early enough to call for a tow truck for my misbehaving vehicle, which then had to be postponed, and the thought of sitting in a desk chair for 6 hours making phone calls all day was just too much. I was telling my boyfriend how tired I was, and how much I'm hating living by myself and how I feel like the distance between me and my friends has been a result of how easy it's become for me to turn into a hermit because I live alone and have no money... and our conversation got really introspective and made me start thinking about why I'm struggling so much.... and that's when my adorable co-worker came by my desk to say hello and ask how my day was and the emotional roller-coaster that had been climbing the hill all morning took a complete 90* drop and I was suddenly crying quietly at my desk.

I hadn't even been on the clock for 15 minutes. I had to go sit outside on the balcony off the break-room to pull myself together. And this is not a new occurrence... though it was the first time it's been that bad at work.

Lately, as a reaction to the number of stressors in my life, I've been feeling exhausted, lethargic, weepy. My back has started tensing up in new places, so it now is basically a rock of knots and kinks. There is a lingering headache that floats behind my right eye, that gets worse when I start to think of my bank accounts, or my car, or my job (that I'm slowly growing to resent).  There's a sort of perpetual ache all over, one that seems to stem from right behind my sternum.

I've been inhaling my Lavender oil like it's going out of style. I've tried to up my water intake and cut back on caffeine. I am trying to list positive things every day so that I remember the good things in my life. I logged off of Facebook (three days FB sober now), because I know it is often a negative trigger for my emotions. I'm starting to feel like maybe I could really benefit from a low-dose anti-anxiety medicine, because even when I'm doing all the things I can think of to keep myself from having a breakdown, I still end up hitting some level of panic and melting down.

Maybe I'm lame for feeling like i'm not equipped. But even when I do fight through the panic and do the responsible adult-things that are needed for each situation, I still end up with tightness in my chest and a feeling of dread and I'm wishing I could go back to being a kid without any decisions more stressful than who to invite to my sleepovers.