my own spring

These past few weeks felt like an ice storm on the frozen tundra.

This morning I woke up with an awakened sense of who I am and why my life is beautiful. Something is alive again within me that has been laying dormant, waiting for this season of pain and stress and hardship to pass so it could bloom once again.

I've been given beauty for ashes.

M

love letters to DC

Dear DC,

Thanks for being such a great city. Thanks for having so many free activities, great food, and so much to do. Thanks, most especially for hinting that spring is around the corner with cherry blossoms and warm days.

yours for now,

M

PS I'll forgive you for snowing tomorrow, but only if you promise to forget that silly business from now on.

Dear girls in my office,

I love that we spend our time discussing if the IT guy is dateable and which one of us could date him. Thanks for making work so much fun.

sincerely,

M

Dear Foggy Bottom,

First off, thanks for having such an amazing name. Each time I here it ringing from the intercom on the metro I smile to myself. That's is my stop. Thanks for being home to work and school and making my life so convenient. I love you and all your quirks like the man who smokes his cigarette in the same all red outfit everyday or the kid who belts songs right outside the metro with no shame.

heart,

M 

Dear ladies of the Mormon Mansion,

I love that you're always up for an adventure and that we get called the pack of gazelles. I love that we cook brownies at midnight and purchased three different kinds of ice cream to go with them. I love that we can laugh and cry together. And mostly I love that anytime someone has an event we are all there, giving our opinions on clothes, curling hair last minute, grabbing purses, lending shoes. The six of us make great team.

xoxo,
M

south by southwest

sometimes those graduate school things and work things and study things wear you out so you jump in your car and you drive.

Along the way you think and sing and laugh and talk to your friend for three hours on speaker phone and then you get to the place where the peaches grow and it's like coming home because there are people here that know you.

***

I work with women who have cancer.

I watch these women spend their lives going to doctors appointments for months on end. I watch them lose their hair. Surgery, radiation and chemo take their strength like thieves in the night. Then I watch them pull their lives back together. Wearing wigs, doing yoga, working in between treatments, meeting with each other, breathing in and out.

***

The busier I get, the more tied down I get, the more I need to be here in the present and focused, the more my feet want to move, the more I want to leave all this stuff (this "stuff" being my current life and responsibilities) behind. Is it all worth it? Somehow backpacking in the Grand Canyon or eating Belgian Waffles in Belgium seem like much better uses of my time. I have so far to go before I'm an actual grown up, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of this grown up stuff. The choices I make have much larger consequences. I am becoming the person I'll be for the rest of my life. It's pretty heavy stuff, you know?

So in order to counteract such serious business I hide a large cardboard cutout of this season's The Bachelor in my roommate's closet. I have pizza parties with my roommates that result in our house full of smoke and all of us laughing (and coughing) so hard we can't breathe. I dance it out in my room to "Tainted Love" or pound my feet on the pavement to "I Love You Like a Love Song." I read late into the night when I should go to bed and eat brownies for breakfast as I rush out the door with wet hair. I hope these things never change.

you know you're a public health grad student when... part iii

• you read articles about male involvement in PMTCT just for fun
• your mother sends you clipped out articles about disease outbreaks
• you discuss whether you like bacteria or viruses better with a friend (because they asked) and after you weigh the pros and cons of each out loud they respond with: you are so weird.
• You are really great at understanding acronyms (this also means that you live in DC)
•  the kid sitting next to you at Rite Aid waiting for a flu shot doesn't know what hit him when he asks you, "so they are injecting us with the stuff that would have made us sick, right?" "well..."

absent

I've been absent around these here parts for quite a while.

I've been getting my feet on the ground, settling in, learning to breathe somewhere new, spending time with roommates, friends, and family, taking finals, finishing internships, working, walking, laughing, crying, and oh yeah, learning.

For a while writing seemed like one step I couldn't take. My journal is despairingly sparse. My agenda has even lagged in the amount of lists and notes.

But over the last few days it just seems like it's time.

So here I am. Starting to write.

you know you're a public health grad student when... part ii

• you subscribe to promed and eagerly await to hear about the latest outbreaks around the world
• you start looking for what statistical methods they used to examine their data in a research paper instead of skipping over that part
• you gasp when you see that your professor has sent you an email describing an outbreak of fungal meningitis that includes the case definition because you just learned what those are (and sometimes school is actually like real life)
• your professor passes around trading cards that have different pathogens on them complete with skill levels in categories like "infectivity," and "virulence"
• you get excited when you see " the follow-up period was 642.31 child-years of observation" written in a study because you know how to calculate person-years

please please please

WATCH THIS.

do I want to feel?

I've been thinking a lot about feeling.

Feeling hurts. It digs at our souls and pulls from the depths of our hearts. It leaves us raw, exposed. It causes us to reflect on the nastier moments in our lives, the times we'd rather forget. It can open old wounds. Even feeling deeply happy things can hurt.

So we try not to feel. We pile on distractions and comforts. We plug in to our computers, our TV shows, our movies, our ipods. We hide under books and under covers. We eat through cartons of ice cream and bars of chocolate. We sit in rooms full of people and talk about nothing. We do everything but feel.

And for awhile that feels like the answer. But if we never advance past that stage,  it just leaves us hollow. We become a version of the Grinch, with a heart two sizes too small and eyes that can only see ourselves.

I know that I've posted this quote before, but it's developed a new meaning for me. I feel that Mr. Lewis's words not only apply to love, but to feeling in general. We're human. We were equipped with a whole range of feelings that we were meant to feel. When we don't, those emotions don't go away, they harden us.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

These past few months as I've tried to cope with the ups and downs of The Big Move, I've begun to relearn how important feeling is.  If I don't feel, I am not really living, but simply passing time. If I don't feel, I can't give and love and grow. Sometimes I'm scared or ashamed of how I feel so I choose to ignore it. But that never solves the problem. It only hardens me.

But I want to testify that there is always a way out of the dark and twisty webs of being past feeling. It is called the Atonement. The Atonement can take our broken, small selves and help us experience what it is to feel again. Sometimes that requires that we feel pain in deeper ways than we thought possible, but I also testify that it allows us to feel joys that are beyond comprehension. The Atonement allows us to become people of feeling. People who are brave enough to face fears and have faith and be strong. People who are capable of looking beyond themselves to see and experience how others feel. In fact, it allows us to get rid of the self altogether. We become new creatures through Christ.

And that knowledge makes me feel light and happy and beautiful.

That's all for now.

love,
M

when fake life becomes real life

I got an email from someone in my ward today. I stared at his name and my first thought was, I think I know him, but his gmail profile picture didn't look familiar. I read through the email and then got distracted by other things. I just barely got back on gmail and looked at the email again. That name! I know that I know it! And then suddenly I realized: Roger Davies is a Harry Potter character.

I need to spend more time in real life.

you know you're a public health grad student when... part i

• one of the professors at orientation counts how many people take the stairs and how many people take the elevator
• you get a tube of clean water, a prenatal vitamin, and a condom among other things to represent innovation and intervention in public health
• you download the CDC's free app to get the Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report in an awesomely convenient way
• your mother texts you to tell you about the ebola outbreak in Uganda because she knew you would want to know
• you tell people when they ask what you want to do if they've seen the movie Contagion. And then you say: I want to be Kate Winslet, but I don't want to die.
• The girl sitting next to you in class says she tells people the exact same thing when they ask her.

the facts were these

13 days 4 hours 39 minutes and 51 seconds ago I moved to Washington, DC.


In some ways those days, hours, minutes, and seconds seem like an eternity and in others it seems like I landed here a second ago. Either way, guess what? I'm learning to really like it here.

Some great things I've come to love so far about the District (as a native, I'm told, would say):

• so. many. people. All kinds of people. I see men and women in uniform, monks, people speaking German, French, Korean, people that look like they are important, people that rap to themselves (or to the world rather) as they walk down the street. Lots of really great people.
• food. Oh how I am so excited about the food. Someone recently asked me what I'm most excited for in DC and that was honestly my first thought: really great food. I've already been to Trader Joes and Whole Foods and started scheming about things to make. I've started a restaurant list of places to hit up once I have a (somewhat) disposable income again.
• possibility. There is such possibility in this city. So many amazing places are found here and as a result there is so much opportunity in the air.
• free museums. oh how I love them! I feel that I could spend a whole day in just one exhibit. I can't wait to slowly eat my way through each of them.
•  the way people walk and drive. I'm still a little (or a lot) scared of the driving part, but I love that when, as a driver or pedestrian, you see an opportunity to go, you always take it. It keeps things interesting and fast paced. I like it.

M

move.

three days ago I shut the door of the car, wiped the tears from my eyes, and headed east.

Everyone (justifiably) keeps asking me how I feel about THE BIG MOVE. Nervous? Scared? Excited? All of it? And truth be told, I don't really feel much of anything because the realness hasn't settled in yet. I keep thinking things like "when we drive back west we should stop at that restaurant" or "when I get back to Provo I'll have that thing I left in the fridge" oh yeah, not going to happen.

Although it still feels surreal, the universe seems to be telling me its time for this chapter to end. Everything from world events to my moisturizer running out tells me that it's time to go. The Olympics ended on Sunday--just in time for me to watch the closing ceremonies before jumping in the car the next day. All my roommates & I were moving out to head different directions. As we past into Missouri, we saw the hint of fall on trees with tinges of red and yellow leaves and lower temperatures. I spent last week helping my mom paint my childhood room from the oh so fashionable light pink to a much more sophisticated gray.

Amongst the endings, however, there are also signs of new beginnings. I thought painting my room would make me sad, but really it made me happy. Happy it has a new life, a new fresh start. Darling, sweet Finn was born into the world, a new bright light in all of our eyes. Just thinking about leaving him and his family still makes me cry.

In my life there is so much that is ending. So much that has already ended. But, as I will keep having to remind myself over the next couple months when the loneliness and unfamiliarity settles like a rain cloud over my head, there is so much beginning. Beginning means potential, excitement, hope, newness, rebirth, dreams, laughter, growth, life.

move. that's what life is all about.

on reading

"Reading requires a loner's temperament, a high tolerance for silence, and an unhealthy preference for the company of people who are imaginary or dead"

-David Samuels

"Marginal Notes on the Inner Lives of People with Cluttered Apartments in the East Seventies," Rereadings

{un}published part iv

while I'm waiting for my voice to speak new words, I thought I'd add another installment of thoughts I started, but never finished. Once again, I left them just as they are. I think there is something poetic about unfinished thoughts, but that may just be the romantic in me. Read the rest of the series by clicking on the {un}published tag at the bottom of the post.

loves,
M



Went to a fireside on Sunday. Spoke to women about combating common problems such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, etc. One of the slides said:

Anxious people are usually:

• Conscientous
• Responsible
• Perfectionists
• Worriers
• "Have to do it all..."

Oh dear. If you know me at all, you know that I am all those things.
I went on an amazing trip a couple of weeks ago, one in which all of those qualities seem to vanish and I was just happy and carefree. Since coming back and facing reality, my stress level has increased exponentially and I have some big decisions to make.

• The other morning I got to sleep in (until 8. It's a Christmas miracle!). I woke up to the light filtering through the blinds, illuminating my room. I was warm and cozy and awake, read to begin a new day
• I love being awake when the rest of the world is asleep. Either early morning or late at night, there is something magical about the air when you feel as if you are the only one who it is speaking to. Up early to study for a test or walking home late from work, those times I feel my mind is cleared and my heart focused to listen
• People are healing. Lately I've had so many people from random points in my life make my day. I'm terrible at asking for help. making someone else's day
• having my day made by someone else
• blasting and singing those songs that let every emotion out
• fitting into your sisters high school dance dress
• seeing people you love and haven't seen in forever
• choosing to dye hair when you only have 48 hours to spend with one of your best friends
• having days where you are reminded why you are doing what you are doing and that you do indeed belong
• playing catch phrase with botulism terms

read 2594 pages (that's right. count them: two thousand five hundred ninety-four pages) of C.S. Lewis.

discovered that I love tomatoes. Hello Mr Tomato, where have you been all my life?

realized that I didn't have to put meat on a sandwich. Here's a novel idea: veggie sandwich. Brilliant. Best realization I've ever had.

heard my professors say things like:



just finished my last first day today. I spent the morning running from class to class, laughing at quirky professors, using new skills and trying to remember old ones (haven't used those math skills in uh... 5 years? oh dear). Spent the afternoon talking to my roommates, wasting time, wasting time, and wasting time. Spent the evening wasting time, running and talking to friends. Overall good first last day.



I found this in one of my many old journals, written hastily in the corner. I've been thinking about it today because I have several friends going through some pretty tough things:

I woke up today and you were performing open heart surgery. I could see my heart beating in my chest. You tried to work quickly, tightening muscles here and there. I cried out in pain, blood gushing everywhere.

C.S. Lewis, in grieving the loss of his wife, questioned whether God was the Great Vivisector.  When I heard that phrase, I was reminded of those words I had written long ago, crammed in the corner of my journal. I understand what you mean, Mr. Lewis. I understand.


M

blogging

has eluded me the last little while. I've composed at least 5 posts in my head, but when I sit down to put them into words I just... can't.

I want to tell you about purpose, worth, and reality. I want to write about how cooking makes me feel. I want to share the fun things I've been doing and want to do in Utah. I want to share thoughts on loneliness, phases of life, sacrifice... the list goes on. I want to open my brain and dump it's contents into blogger, for that would be so much easier than trying to find that place within myself that constructs coherent and meaningful words.

I want to speak, but not quite yet.

when I'm ready.

Until then,
M

the ultimate song for introverts

my hometown

Hey guess what?
I'm from Provo.

I know that when I say that around the BYU crowd I am automatically judged. But guess what again? I actually like living here and I think you should too. Sure, I absolutely agree that Provo has its downsides, but it has way more upsides than most people give it credit for.

First of all, the Provo that you hate is the BYU bubble Provo. But there is more to Provo than the bubble. Real people actually live here and they are quirky and charming and dare I say diverse (well, relatively speaking of course). Mostly I think people hate on Provo because they think they are supposed to hate on Provo. But guess what again again? You don't have to.

Being from Provo, I've done a lot of great things here, but I decided that this summer (as in summers past) I'm really going to live it up. I've already begun my summer adventures and I plan to continue making the most of this little college town and the surrounding area.

A couple of weeks ago I hiked Squaw Peak with some friends. As the view met my eyes, I couldn't help but feel so lucky that I live in this place and that these experiences are so easily accessible to me.

Want suggestions of great things to do in the area? Just let me know. If you want to join in on the fun, just let me know too.
(I sound like a PSA, but whatever. I don't care)

love your little Provo girl,
M

dear you

dear world,

thanks for being so beautiful this summer. I can't get enough of you.

sincerely,
M


dear Mr. Forster,

thanks for writing such great novels. Not only are they witty, but relatable and intelligent. I could not ask for more.

regards,
M


dear nice girl in my ward,

when you wrote me that nice note and told me that I should be a character in a novel, I'm pretty sure that was the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me, so thanks.

cordially,
M


dear summer,

don't go too fast.

yours,
M

rebel

"A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood--a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions--her own soul"

-A Room with a View, p 118

desert

wholly and deeply dry.

That's how I feel about my creativeness and ability to give lately. I find it ironic considering I just got back from places where the fruits of creativity surrounded me at every turn. I had moment after moment in front of monumental works of art that I've waited my whole life to see. Pieces of art that literally changed the world were right there to touch me.

And they did. Their beauty and power permeated my tough skin and sank into my heart, to be written on its fleshy tables. But the conversation stopped there. Usually I have something to say, to give in return. Usually I'm inspired and thoughts and feelings flow from me instead of just into me.

But here I am, days after my trip and each time I sit down to write or think or give, I come up dry. The answer as to why has come to me in bits and pieces and here it is: I have nothing to give because all I have has been put back into myself.

Over the past six months I've lived a particularly self-centered existence. I had huge decisions to make and in an effort to keep my sanity and pass my classes while making them, I gave myself all that I had. And by doing so, the amount I was able to give slowly diminished until here I am, with a dry soul (and ironically an extremely dry throat). This scripture never rang so true.

As I settle into this summer, which may prove to be my last spent in sleepy little Provo, I find myself beginning to be ready to give. I have the chance to take care of myself and the ones that I love and most importantly: to give even when I don't feel like it. Because as I do, I feel my capacity to give and to create grow hundredfold.

beginning anew,

M