Last Post of the Quarter

After a fretful day of rambling, I am almost done for now! I don't really know what to talk about so I'll tell you about myself I guess. I really like raspberries and dark chocolate; they are absolutely heavenly. Purple is my favorite color, although I also like blue and silver because glitter is great. I want to go on a safari someday. I've always loved reading books and used to read constantly as a child. I was also a little horse-crazy from ages 7 to around 12 or 13. I used to draw a lot but I don't consider myself a very good artist. I do wish I was better at it, though; but I don't really have the patience. Procrastination is my downfall. Every few months I get a major burst of inspired poetry writing and then it stops. I practically live in my bed but sometimes get tired of watching the world pass by through my window. Every so often I desperately wish I could be a little kid again, but most of the time I just want to grow up and be independent and find my place in this big, beautiful world.
I hope all of you have wonderful adventures this spring. I will update you on mine next quarter!

Joint Hypermobility

I don't want to make this post sound whiny but it might so sorry. A few weeks ago I went to a rheumatologist which is basically a doctor that works with the joints. There, I was diagnosed with joint hypermobility syndrome, which is a connective tissue disorder. It means that the way my body produces collagen is messed up so my joints bend further than they are supposed to. This causes hyperextension and pain and easy injury and it's the reason why I'm so tired and in so much pain all the time and the cause of all my childhood injuries and more recent issues (like random periods of being unable to walk when I was 14 and 15) and it is not fun. It's also why I can do so many strange contortionist tricks. I'm going to another rheumatologist in a few weeks, this one at Duke, to see if I would benefit from physical therapy and also because I might have something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Some doctors say it's the same thing as Joint Hypermobility Syndrome but others think it's different.
This is not what I would have asked for my life, as I was once very involved with running and dance, and had dreams of running marathons and dancing ballet on a professional stage. But, life doesn't always turn out the way you wish it to, and I'll just have to make the best of it and enjoy what I can do.

Adventures

I'm writing this after a very long day. I should tell you it's March 8 because I probably won't post this for a while.
I was supposed to have the SAT today, but it was postponed because somewhere on some road where some person lived there was like a tiny piece of ice. This annoyed me as I was all ready to go and literally almost out the door and I had studied and eaten a good breakfast and everything. But then my friend who was going to pick me up texted me and told me to go back to bed, and so I did.
I'm glad, because I went to this thing at New Life Camp and it was fun but also very tiring. I met some nice people and hung out with my friend but we played this game and it was very intense and kind of hard for me to keep up and at one point I fell in a mud puddle and that made me sad. As I am so tired and in so much pain I am going to bed now.

Travel

I have always loved traveling, but have not had much opportunity for it. Growing up, we always had the seemingly mandatory one week family vacation to the beach or the mountains, a couple times to Disney world, and one time out West. And I've been on class field trips, but these typically only last a couple days and don't go any further north than Virginia.
But last year, I went to Boston for a whole week. I went for a missions trip, but I also fell in love with the big-city atmosphere. I even liked taking the subway! Everything was so new and exotic to me, from Little Italy to downtown to the metropolitan area.
And this year, I'll have even more opportunities to travel. I'll go to Islamorada, Florida, for Camp Caleb in July with my friends. I'll be kicking my senior year off with a trip to New York City. I honestly am so excited about this, because I've never been to New York City. Whenever I asked my dad if we could go, he would always say, "You'll go your senior year of high school, just wait until then." And then I'll be concluding my senior year with a trip to Europe, my first time out of the country. I also want to go to California sometime. I hope when I'm older I will have the flexibility and the money to be able to travel a lot.

Future

I have so many hopes and dreams for my future. I don't yet know what college I want to go to, but I know I want to study biology/pre-med, and maybe minor in a couple of things. I will always have an interest in literature and writing and Spanish and music and philosophy, but obviously I can't minor in all of them. I want to stretch myself, find my wings and spread them and fly. I want to find myself at university, and my independence. And of course, I'll save up some money somehow, because after I graduate I want to go on to medical school and that's pretty expensive. I don't yet know what kind of doctor I want to be, but I know I want to help make people better.
Of course, I will always continue writing. At first, I wanted to be an author, but I think if someone told me to write I would lose interest in it and wouldn't want to do and would have trouble making money that way. It's better to keep it as a hobby and if I sell a couple of books, well, then I've still made some money and had fun doing it without any of the pressure of deadlines. I also don't know if I want to get married yet. I think if the right person comes along, I will know. I probably will want to adopt little children. Pregnancy and childbirth have always seemed really daunting to me, and there's such a need for adoption.
Anyway, the future is before me. I want to make the most of it. I hope I have the courage to live a good story.

Stories of our Lives

"We accept the love we think we deserve."
Why is this? Why do we settle? Why do we put up with something less than what we dreamed for ourselves?
We fill our childhoods with dreams about the future, hopes and wishes about what life will be like and all the wonderful things we will do and see and experience. And then we grow old, and we listen to society and what they tell us we should expect out of life, and we settle for that instead. We forget the days when we wanted to be a doctor and a lawyer and an astronaut, all at once. We grow up and marry the first person that offers, and yeah, maybe we do love them, but we forgot the days we dreamed of a prince sweeping us off our feet, or carrying the beautiful princess away in our horse-drawn carriage. Love and romance becomes something fabricated, sold to us by Nicholas Sparks books and jewelry store commercials. And we find ourselves old and tired and sad because we didn't grab hold of our dreams when we had the chance. We thought we could just sit back and let it happen like in the stories, but no, you have to reach out and make it happen. You hold the pen. You write your own story. So write one that you'd be proud to let people read.

Today

Today I went outside and laid out underneath the sun in the old sandbox I played in as a child. I listened to the waves using an app on my ipod and read The Old Man and the Sea and drank lemon water and pretended I was at the beach. And oh, was it lovely.
I am almost done with my homework and it isn't even Sunday yet. Usually I think about doing my homework around 7 PM on a Sunday evening and say, "Well, I'll do it when I finish this TV episode. But oh no! That episode ended on a cliffhanger so of course I have to watch the next one. By maybe 8 PM, I've gotten ready to start. And while I always tell myself every Friday that this weekend I'll work ahead so my week will be less stressful, by the time I've gotten around to doing my homework I'm tired and only do what's due the next morning. But this time I've actually worked ahead a little bit because I'm having dinner with my grandma on Monday and helping at food shuttle on Tuesday.

Love II

“Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?”

I would rather love someone and lose them. I would rather know what love is like than go through my whole life wondering. When your heart is broken, you understand love, because you realize that in order to have given someone so much of yourself, to have let them in and trusted them so freely, you had to have cared about them a great deal. Loving others teaches you about yourself. Even if they don’t remain in your life forever, you will always remember what you learned from them. You will always remember the good times you had with them as if they were postcards from your childhood that you found in a box in your attic. And even if heartbreak hurts, you heal. You move on. And you know a little more about yourself, and when you’re ready to love someone again, you will.

I don’t think you ever really stop loving someone. They may leave your life, you may never talk, you might even avoid them, but you will not forget them and how they have changed you.  

Failure and Success

A few weeks ago, I failed a math test. A big red 62 at the top of the page. It was a simple test,  based on memorizing charts and graphs. But even though I studied I doubted myself and I panicked and got everything mixed up. I knew I hadn’t done well, but I had no idea how badly I had done. And when I realized I had failed it, my first F since the Canadian provinces quiz in 5^th grade, I was devastated and upset and cried for a long time. But then I got up, and resolved to do as well as I could on the next test. I worked hard. I paid attention in class, I did all my homework assignments and made sure I understood them. I aced the quizzes and took notes on anything I didn’t completely understand. I studied and worked through every problem and made a practice test for myself. All my work paid off-I aced the test and got a 100.

Sometimes, failure drives you to success. It’s a motivating factor. You want to do better the next time, to redeem yourself from the previous failure, to remind yourself that you are not someone who fails. You want to learn your lesson, and so you do. I would never have been driven enough to achieve a 100 if I had not failed the previous test.

I wonder, what if we worked that hard at everything? What if we studied that much, no matter what our grade already was? What if we truly gave everything our best effort, instead of sliding by on the bare minimum? How much better would we be?

Prom

Prom is coming up in a few weeks. This is my first time going. I’m not entirely sure what to expect, since my school’s prom is technically a “junior-senior banquet” but I’m excited. I’m picking out my dress and accessories (everything will have just the right amount of sparkle!) and talking to my friends about pre-prom and after-prom plans, like where we should get ready and where we should take pictures and whether we should go dancing or bowling or laser tag or to the movies after the prom. Either way we will have a great time.

I doubt any guy is going to ask me. This sophomore guy I know pretty well asked me if either I or one of my friends would take him, so technically if I did that would be me asking him. One of my other friends is going with her special friend and this is a happy thing.

Whatever happens, I want it to be special. I don’t want to look forward to it and then be disappointed. Sometimes I build up my expectations and then am let down, and I hope prom is everything I want it to be.

Reasons to Live

An important thing to put in a positivity journal is all the things you enjoy about life, so you can look back on them when life gets really hard. Here are some of mine:

Friends that cherish me

A family that loves me

Getting to know God and become more like Jesus

Graduating high school

Going to college and med school

Writing a book

Getting a dog

Meeting the love of my life

Adopting little children

Concerts

Sleepovers

Vacations

Road Trips

Books

Movies

Music

Coffee

Chocolate

Parties

Dancing

Sleeping In

The beach

Fireworks shows

Sunrises

Sunsets

And that's just a few on the list...

Positivity Journal

While I believe it's important to write about your feelings, both good and bad, it's also important to focus a lot on the positive side of things. I don't consider myself an optimist. But I'm also not a pessimist. I'm kind of a positive realist.
Writing down negative things can be helpful-it allows you to sort through them in your own head by getting them out on paper, and feel like you're telling someone without annoying others with your  constant needs to "vent", "rant," and "talk." But if you focus too much on the negative, you miss the good side of things.
Life will never be all good, but it also won't be all bad. It will be a mixture of the two, light and dark. Recently a friend of mine suggested I use a small journal to carry around with me and write about the good things of my day. I call it my positivity journal-in it goes inspiring quotes, my thoughts, bright moments, sometimes stickers and pictures. Whenever I'm sad, I can take it out and look at all the happy things that have happened and remember-everything will be all right in the end.

$$$

It’s important to find a job you enjoy. Otherwise, you will always be waiting. Waiting until the weekend, waiting for vacation. You’ll find yourself at the weekend or vacation and you will either be trying to do too much or not enough. You will go back to work on Monday or the next week and find that yoyu hadn’t had any fun at all and you don’t want to be anywhere.

Not only do I want to find a job I enjoy; I want to find a flexible job. One that allows me to live a life outside of work as well. One where I am not working 50 weeks of the year to get 2 weeks off in the summer; one where I can be more productive in a shorter amount of time along with enjoying the whole process.

I don’t want to work 40 hours a week at minimum wage. I don’t want to be constantly saving or worrying. I want to be both financially stable while having enough money to spend on what I want to do. However, I know money isn’t everything, and they say it can’t buy happiness, but being financially stable can decrease your worries and make you happier, and that's what I want for myself.

Introspective Thoughts About Living and Dying

We hear about death all the time, every day. But it’s different when you can relate to the person. When you knew them, or even something as simple as someone your age dying. It affects you differently. You think, “That was someone’s son or daughter. That was someone’s friend, someone’s classmate, someone’s lab partner. They were looking forward to their next game or competition or party or prom. They were excited about graduating. They had college plans. And now they’re gone.” You think, what if that was your friend? Your classmate? Your lab partner, your teammate, even the person whose locker was right next to yours that you never talked to? What if that person was you?

It reminds you that life is short; that we aren’t guaranteed anything. That today or tomorrow or next week you could die, and then your plans will have meant nothing. We shouldn’t put things off. Live in the moment, so that whatever the next moment brings, you’re okay with it, because who knows if tomorrow will come?  

Forgiveness

“I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you.”

We hear and say the words so often, but what do they really mean? Is it always possible to move on from being hurt? Is apologizing always required? Is forgiveness always necessary? We were raised to believe that yes, it is; but it’s not always possible to say the words and mean them.

When you hurt someone, whether intentionally or not, you need to apologize if you want to maintain the relationship with them. Likewise, if someone hurts you and they apologize, it’s important to forgive them. This way, the friendship can be repaired. But what if it can’t? What if the damage has gone too deep? Should you even try?

Yes, I think you should. Give it some time; that might help. Set up boundaries between you and the other person; go at the friendship a little differently this time. Try to move on, and know that if you can’t, it’s okay.

What if someone won’t apologize to you? Do you need to forgive them? What if you stand true to your actions, and the other person continues to take offense to it? Should you apologize, even if it’s a lie? No. The relationship might be severed, but sometimes there comes a point where you have to move on.

I think you shouldn’t treat them any differently than you would another person. Even if you aren’t friends any more, even if you don’t talk much, don’t avoid them. Don’t hold it against them. Yeah, it hurt, and maybe you can’t move on. And maybe, sometimes, that’s okay.

Useless Wishing

Do you ever wish you could go back in time and change something? Do something over again, so that maybe this time you wouldn’t make as many mistakes? I think at some point we all feel this way. We all wonder what things would be like if we hadn’t done this or that, or if we had taken that risk and stepped out of our comfort zone and done that thing we regret not doing.

But it’s useless wishing you could change things. You won’t be able to. There is no time machine. Life doesn’t give us do-overs. That only happens in fairy tales and science fiction. What’s done is done, and there’s no changing it.

But you can learn from it. You can make sure it doesn’t happen again. Next time life hands you an opportunity, you can take it. Next time you feel selfish or get upset, you can think of the future consequences of what you might say. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Maybe it’s about time we learned from our mistakes the first time.

Some of My Favorite Quotes From Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz

“Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.”

“I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the things we need…the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.”

“There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz. And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk in love for her.”

"I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His presence and afterlife. I understand that I am temporary, in this shell of a thing on this dirt of an earth. I am being tempted by Satan, but I am preserved to tell those who do not know about our Savior and Redeemer… Mankind must be rescued…I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human. I am human because God made me. I experience suffering and temptation because mankind chose to follow Satan. God is reaching out to me to rescue me. I am learning to trust Him, learning to live by His precepts that I might be preserved."

"There is something broken in the world and we are supposed to hold our palms against the wound. "

"Inner strength comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. "

Love

Love is when you put someone else’s needs before your own. It’s not a word to be casually thrown around; it’s not a feeling; it is meant to be shown. It is not selfish and it is not manipulative. It isn’t easy. It’s very hard to love, especially to love unconditionally. “Conditional love” is just another way of saying, “I love what you can do for me”, and that isn’t love, it’s selfishness. Love requires honesty-you can’t show love to someone by lying to them. Lies can be a form of manipulation, which creates distrust, and you can’t have love without trust.

Love requires not being picky. If you are really going to show love, you can’t leave people out because they’re awkward or they have different political or religious views or their lifestyle doesn’t match yours. You can’t love and be judgmental. So often at church, I heard not to talk with people who were gay or Muslim or atheist or pregnant and unmarried, etc. That’s not how you show people love. The church has lost sight of loving others like Jesus did-Jesus loved everyone, even the social outcasts. Following Christ is not so much about following the church guidelines as it is about loving like Jesus loved.

Youth and Government II

Even though I probably won’t post this for a while, I want to write about Youth and Government. I just got back from the most awesome three days of the year so far. I got to spend time with my friends and make great memories. I had a lot more fun at the conference than I did my freshman year (I couldn’t go my sophomore year). I was more confident and outgoing and talkative-I felt like I had an outlet for my thoughts and opinions. Even though I didn’t say much in chambers, I did say more than I said my freshman year. I think part of it is the clothes. I felt really awkward my freshman year because I had absolutely no idea what to wear. This year I looked stylin’ and it may be superficial to say that clothes increase your confidence but they do. Also, I knew a lot more people from school that went as well-more of my friends attended the conference than not! And I met so many great new people. It really is an opportunity to get to talk to people I otherwise wouldn’t meet. We live in a sheltered little bubble, with most of our friends being from church or private Christian school, but at YAG, people have all sorts of political and religious views and it’s interesting to hear. Along with the bill debates were some awesome parties in the evenings and I had fun dancing and laughing with my friends. I really hope I can go next year.

What I've Learned

Ah, here we are once again. The end of the quarter, a time
during which frantic blogging occurs. I promise, once keeping this blog is no
longer a requirement, I will want to blog all the time. That’s usually how
things go. Well, at least this quarter, I have learned a whole lot more than
any other time in my life, I think. Not just school stuff, although that has
occurred too. That tends to happen when you take eight classes.

But no, I’ve also learned other things, more important
things. About life and love and friendship and trust and forgiveness. About how
to care about someone besides myself. About how to appreciate things, how to
enjoy the little moments in life that make it worth living instead of focusing
on making everything perfect, because you can’t ever reach perfection, not
really. How to live in the moment, because sometimes you sense that this is a
time you are going to look back on and remember fondly. Like that night with
your friends when everything is wonderful and your problems are on hold and you
just want to hold a picture of it in your head and your heart forever. And so, I
will blog about some of these things, the seemingly meaningless but somewhat
life-shaping adventures of me, the wandering heart.