Cast off the chains

Momentary abandonment of nearly all reason creates a surprisingly euphoric sense of liberation.

Doors open up before me. Barriers previously deemed so important crumble like miniature versions of the Berlin Wall, inhibitions and worries and fears fleeing before the dawn of endless possibilities flooding my mind. Faith cannot coexist with fear, and when fear is gone, the sun can rise on a beautiful new day. I pride myself on my practical nature. Abandoning practicality for a moment or two feels like skydiving into a whole new world, feels like standing on top of the tallest mountain in the blazing sunrise, feels like leaping into a pool of the clearest water imaginable.

Freedom. Sometimes the chains that bind us are not those imposed by dictators or wars or prison guards. I am my own captor, and my prisoner is myself. As binding as the chains in a prison camp are the chains of fear and insecurity, the defenses against all the "what if"s that I ask myself a thousand times a day. Release from the bonds of needing to see the end from the beginning is learning to live in the sunlight instead of the shadow.

Forever memories

The sense of smell is the most powerful memory in the human mind.

You never really forget smells. You might forget what they are, but even if it's been years and years, you'll recognize a smell when you smell it again.

Today I was walking down a street in Spain, talking about something with a friend, and suddenly I wasn't in Spain anymore, I was in a tent with the sun shining through the pine trees, using an old foot pump to blow up an air mattress that smelled strongly of plasticky rubber.

Memories attached to smells are so vivid.

Some of my best memories smell like bubblegum chapstick, warm apple cider, wet grass in the early morning, movie theater popcorn, salty ocean air, new suit straight from the store, french fries, and mountains.

If only I could capture it, remember it, hold moments in a bottle, perhaps preserved like cologne, keep them in a closet labeled Scents of the Past, release them only in the desperate moments where I feel like the memories are rapidly unraveling, slipping through the cracks of my mind, keep them from escaping the confines of my heart.

Slipping away

Today was a super-reminiscent day.

Does anyone else ever look back at the past and feel like it wasn't actually real, that it didn't actually happen, that it was all just a long ago and faraway dream? Sometimes I feel like that... I'm not sure I like it. Some things, yeah, I'm fine with letting them slip out of memory, but others I want to hold on to them forever, preserve them just real and vivid as they were when they happened.

I feel like that's going to happen when I leave Spain. I'll go back to my life, and this land of Spanish and train stations and cathedrals is going to seem like a faraway, foggy sort of dream, that passed so quickly.

I don't want it to. Why can't all the good memories just stay there, perfectly preserved forever?

Interviews

So applying for jobs is pretty much my definition of the misery, because I hate all situations where I have to try to make myself look good. But if the whole application process is misery, job interviews are the absolute pits.
It all starts when you spend two hours staring at your closet trying to decide what the best outfit would be that would make you look like you'd fit at their company or office. Then you spend more hours memorizing every detail of the job description, practicing in front of the mirror, writing power statements, reading your resume...
Then you go to the interview and sit there and sweat while they ask you ridiculous questions, and then you leave and you don't get the job anyway because they decide you didn't answer their questions as directly and fluidly and confidently as the next guy, never mind the fact that you're more qualified for the actual job.
I get really stressed in interviews, even though most of the time I have a pretty cool head, so it's unfortunate that people typically base their decision to hire on the interviews. Usually after an interview I a) burst into tears, b) call my mom and burst into tears, c) sit on a bench until I don't feel lightheaded and sick to my stomach anymore, or d) all of the above.
Let's just say I wish that we would chuck interviews out the window and find a less intense way to determine who would be the best candidate for the job. I feel sick just thinking about it.

Not really superwoman.

So tonight after a long conversation, one of my good friends told me I was so strong.

After all, I spend time at home, I redo rooms of the house, I paint, I sew, I teach relief society, I cook occasionally, I clean up backyards, I take care of flowers, I have lunch with friends, I refinish furniture, I work 40 hours a week, I write to missionaries, I sketch, I play the guitar, I have deep conversations with friends, I go to bridal showers, I do pretty much everything. I'm some kind of warped LDS version of superwoman.

She's wrong. I'm not strong.

I set ridiculous goals for myself. Like to pay off a 7000 dollar loan in nine months. To read the entire book of mormon in Spanish in a month. To singlehandedly demolish four sheds, remove the materials, level the yard, build flowerbeds, tear out bamboo, and plant grass in one summer of weekends. To rebuild a broken relationship all at once. To be perfect, I guess. Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing anyway? Working toward being perfect?

I haven't met any of those goals. And I won't. I can't. It's simply not humanly possible. But when I don't meet them, I tell myself it's okay, but somewhere inside I feel like I failed just when it was most important. And so to make myself feel better, I reset the goals, along with others, just for good measure. And pretty soon I'm caught in a cycle of failure and restarts and a lot of impossible expectations.

I'm actually pretty proud of the last year of my life. I met a lot of goals. I learned a lot of things. And don't get me wrong, I'm a very happy person. But still somehow it's never enough for me. There's always something I didn't do, something I failed at. Maybe that's the way I deal with stress - setting high goals and racing toward them, even when I know I'll crash and burn and fail miserably. It's the one thing I can control - myself, and what I do. When there's things that happen that I have no control over, I prove that I can control myself and my own life. I'm on a crusade to prove myself so people will say, See? All that going on in her life, and yet she's got it all together, never falls apart for a minute, look at how amazing she is.

I'm not strong. Insane maybe, yes. But not strong.

the monster under the bed

I learned about another person who has cancer today.

I suppose I should confess that cancer and disease are one of my deepest fears. I try very hard to keep that part of life separate from my own, keep from seeing it, thinking about it, encountering it. I guess maybe it's one of those "if I pretend it isn't there, it won't be" kind of things. But it seems that especially lately, cancer has been encroaching on the edges of the territory of my life, and it frightens me. I hate the thought of a disease that has no known cure, one the the treatments debilitate you to the point that many times it seems life isn't even worth fighting for anymore, a disease that takes the young and the old and everyone in between with no real predictable rhyme or reason, a disease that tears apart families and changes lives forever.

And it it's not that I'm afraid to get cancer, because while that would be an immense trial, it couldn't even compare to the pain of losing a family member, a child, a parent, a spouse prematurely, or even just watching them suffer like that. I like to tell myself that I am a very strong person, equipped to handle any trial that comes my way, and I do know that I could overcome anything with a lot of help. But I don't know how I would handle something like that. It would be incredibly difficult, and it scares me, because it's a reality for so many people in the world.

My heart goes out to anyone who has suffered from or watched a loved one suffer or pass away. I admire your strength and your ability to overcome.