The one that I tried to keep light but some heavy stuff snuck in (THE STRING PROJECT)

I'm gonna try to keep it light because this blog seems really heavy sometimes. But I'll keep it light for the first bit.

Life has been pretty nuts. I haven't been HOME home in ummmm a month. We spent the last week of June with my family in Utah, came home for a week-ish, went to Utah again for Joe's brother's wedding, came back to house sit for a while. I still make it home every day, to make sure the candles and paint and electronics aren't physically melting in this heat. But it's just not the same. That's ok though. We're coming to the end of the craziness here.

Life with the kid is pretty neat too. He's 6 months old. He crawls. He yells at me. He laughs a lot. He stands. He grows much too fast.

Life with the husband is wonderful as usual. He's 327 months old. He walks. He doesn't yell at me. He laughs a lot. He stands. He doesn't grow anymore physically because his growth plates have closed but he grows emotionally and mentally and spiritually.

Oh it's my birthday this week? So now when I tell people I'm 24, I won't be lying! (Note: I've only been saying I'm 24 for the last few weeks. I'm a rounder. I round. Makes life more spicy.) The spoils for my birthday have been spoiled already, with a sewing machine from my mother that I use to make dresses that make me look like a hospital patient (because I'm not great) and dozens of pillow cases. You can just let your mind imagine what I'd do with that many pillow cases. And the other spoil is yoga gear that my Joe needed me to pick out so I wouldn't raise eyebrows at him when he presented it to me.

I've been seriously kicking my butt with yoga and kicking yoga's butt with me. It's an every day thing. It makes me feel alive and wonderful. It gives me the connection I need. I'm ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE NOW where people are all "Oh I have this problem" and I'm all "OH YOGA FIXES THAT ASAP."

So I fill my days with yoga... having a kid that likes to yell means I'm interrupted a lot, and I read books to him and play with him until he's fine with me leaving him alone for another 5 minutes. So while normal people can do the routines I like in an hour, takes me about 3. I don't mind. I love it.

I fill my days with website testing, where I go on this website and they have me record myself saying "Oh uh yes this head bar is really uh... striking. And I like the... intuitiveness of the... intuition... buttons." But I make pretty good money doing it. I mean.... as much as a baby sitter would make. But I don't have to actually baby sit anyone besides the baby that lives in my house already! Score.

I miss teaching. Oh so much. I don't think a day goes by where I don't think of it. I feel blessed to have found my passion in life as fast as I did but it makes it hard to miss. What's that saying... "How lucky I am to have someone that makes missing them so hard..." Except replace those human words with like.... teaching word things.

That sentence there is a prime example of what makes me a fantastic educator!

And now for the deep stuff.

This week has been hard. I do a good job of keeping the hard stuff to myself. I think it's the lack of home-ness? Part of it is that my home is tidied and in tip-top-spark-joy fashion and being away from that for extended periods of time causes me to lose things and feel out of place. That doesn't make me boring. I think it's good for a person to have found a place of tranquility, and even better if that place is their own home. So it's fine for me to miss it. Do I love travel and visiting and such? Oh so much yes. But yeah, I miss my own home, and it brings challenges.

Also maybe it's the time of year? The extreme heat that drives me to clothes that aren't my comfort zone (sweaters and long pants for life... that doesn't make sense for a desert girl but then again I don't make sense, pretty much ever, so c'est la vie, which is pronounced Say - lah- vee- and not pronounced phonetically, which I learned recently.) Because this time last year was hard too. So here I am again.

But I've become much more disciplined. The hard times I just take rather than panicking over and worrying about. I know they come and I let them hit me and pass. I don't enjoy the hit but I let it pass.

Anyways what am I talking about.

Let me preface by saying that I appreciate my friends and family and well wishers so much. And when you say things like "You don't need to worry about that, you look great!" I really appreciate it. I know you mean it and I know it comes from your heart.

But I deal with body dysmorphia. That means essentially that whatever it is you see, I don't. Maybe my eyes are broken or something but I truly see someone different in the mirror.

Yoga has been a passion of mine because after my first month of doing it, I think I saw the real me for the first time since I can recall. That was wonderful. It didn't last forever, but I remember that. And things have been much better since doing yoga, in general.

And yet those hard times I talk about still come. And I don't let them totally consume me but they do hit me. And I look in the mirror and think about throwing out all of my clothes because who am I kidding, they don't fit, they make me look like a sausage in casing and blah blah blah.

Melece, my dearest friend, has gotten the brunt of my venting. I feel bad about it but I think it may be because she doesn't think it's the end of the world for me when I do come to her with my challenges. So she gave me homework last night.

"Take a roll of string, and think about how big you are in the place you think you are biggest. Take that roll and cut the string to the circumference of what you think the biggest part of you is. And then actually hold the string around you, to see what you really are."

Well, essentially that. Sorry if I slaughtered your words, Melece! I didn't go for the biggest part of me, but I went for where I was bothered at the moment.

It took me a while. To estimate what the circumference of "where I was bothered" was. (So many "w" words there.)

I wanted to be honest. In the moment I was struggling, but whenever I held out the string my mind kept saying "No, that's too big. Be honest. Be honest with how you feel right now. Don't be excessively mean right now, because you will know that you weren't being honest."

And yet I wondered what would happen if I estimated myself too small. I think that would be even worse. I think that would have ruined me. So I sat there for a good long while, holding up different lengths of the string until I came to something I thought was accurate.

*Snip*

And I held it around me.

And I took the ball of string and wrapped it around me once and cut the string to compare what I thought I was with what the reality was.

There was a marked difference.

And as Melece said "You will see that you tend to be mean to yourself."

I held the strings in my hand for a while, and stared at the difference, then wrapped them into loops and put them in my wallet as a reminder that I'm better than I think.

I stared at the strings though, for a good long while. And I thought about how I treat myself vs how I deserve to be treated. You always see those things that say "Find a man or friend or something like that who treats you how you deserve to be treated" and honestly that wasn't that hard. I live by the golden rule and people treat me with fairness and kindness, because usually I treat them the same. But I don't apply the same principle to myself. My body has done me so much good and I think of it in such low regard. That's not something I intentionally do. It's not something I can just fix with a flip of a switch. But those two strings helped more than I could have helped myself in that moment.

And then I thought about Melece, and THIS IS WHERE IT'S BOUT TO GET SAPPY Y'ALL but have I ever told you how I met Melece, or most of my dearest friends? It's because once upon a time I sent out letters once a week to some guy and I needed  a support group while I did that for some reason, so I joined one, and met my friends. Sometimes one of them would message me and we'd start talking and become soul sisters, and sometimes I got the guts to message them. But that's what happened and I was lead to people like that. People like Melece, who, in that exact moment of my life knew exactly what to do to help me.

I'm grateful for my family and husband who do that so often, who I met through just being born, or met through a blind date (hint: That one is about my husband)... but those random friends I met on the internet are something unusual, I think. And I'm so grateful for them. Call these things what you will... fate, karma, "the universe", or God (personally, I attribute it to my God), but these were friends I needed for various stages in my life and I believe they were put here for a reason.

So now this got WAY more deep than I intended but there you go. I guess I got bored and needed to write. So.... yes. Ok bye now!