On coming home.

10 days. That's all the time that now stands between me and everything that is familiar. 10 days until I'm greeted by my family at the airport. 10 days until I get to sleep in my nice, big, fluffy bed again. 10 days until I can eat all of the foods that I've been missing. 10 days until I get to watch movies with my best friend again. 10 days until I'm home.

But that means only 10 days until I walk away from my dream. Only 10 days until I give in to this terrible thing I've been fighting. And while it's true that it has already been ruling my life for so long, I feel like this is me finally admitting that I'm no longer in control; the mess in my brain is.

In case you were wondering, that's not a fun thing to admit.

I am not coming home simply to celebrate the holidays with my loved ones, that would have me much more excited about what waits for me on the other end of my journey. The timing just happens to coincide with Christmas. I think this makes things a bit tricky. There's family to see, things to do, places to go. I want to want to do all of that. I want to be excited for that. I wish I was coming home to celebrate the beauty that is this season.

The reality is that I am coming home broken and weary. All I want when I get back is to crawl into my bed, curl up under my cozy blankets, and stay there forever. That's not meant as a hyperbole, either. I just want to sleep and never have to face the world. In fact, some days all I can do is sleep. I get out of bed each morning only because I would feel even worse if I left everyone to cover my classes for the day.

I've finally been able to shake the guilt of leaving but only because the school already has a replacement lined up. But I'm still greatly conflicted about all of this. I feel like it ultimately it wasn't my choice at all. I never would have chosen to walk away from all of this. But I also would never have chosen to try and keep fighting for my life here when I felt I was bound to eventually lose. So I'm doing  what I have to do to at least give myself a fighting chance here.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at here is the fact that I need time. Part of me cannot wait to see your lovely faces, to be wrapped in the warm embraces of my loved ones, and to share stories of the past 4 months with you. A bigger part of me is terrified. I am overwhelmed by the mere thought of suddenly being surrounded by so many people, of suddenly having to appear ok for all of those people. It's hard work to put on that smile and pretend that it's all alright. Not that I necessarily think I have to do that all of the time, but I'm sure you are uninterested in seeing me when I'm in my bed that I haven't left for 2 days and my face is tear streaked and I don't even have the energy to feed myself. But that's my reality more often than not. So please don't think it's anything personal if I don't see you right away when I get back or if I'm not up to doing something with you.

Thank you all again for your love and support, it means the world to me.

Keep Climbing

Lately, I have made a point of going out for a walk each day after school. I don’t mean a casual stroll, either. You see, Copán is built on hills. Not gently rolling hills, either. These hills are huge and steep. But I set out every day and make a path around town that has me climbing all of the biggest hills around. I usually get about half way up the hill before I start cussing myself for doing such a thing. My legs start to burn. My lungs start to protest. I want to stop. But every time I want to stop, I remember the days when I used to run.

I remember the lessons I learned from my cross country coaching friend, Rachel, about running hills.

“NEVER stop on a hill, it’s harder to get going again.”

“Make it to the top, your rest will come on the way back down.”

“Don’t look at the top of the hill. Head down, focus on the step right in front of you. The top will be there before you know it.”

“Slow down if you must, but DO NOT STOP.”

What I’ve realized is that I love how these lessons relate to life as a whole. We’re all going to have to climb hills in our lives. Some are bigger than others. Some hills seem like they will never end. Sometimes we just want to stop climbing because it is so hard. I’m there right now.

I’ve been there for quite some time. The hill I’m climbing seems like Mt. Everest most days because I’m looking at the top of the hill. Not a day goes by that I don’t want to quit. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish for just a quick break. But that’s not how life works, it keeps rolling. Take a break and it may pass you by. So I know I can’t stop. But I can slow down when I need to, as long as I never stop moving. I’ll reach the top eventually and there will be rest.

If you are where I am, let me encourage you to keep climbing. Don’t look at the top of the hill. Put your head down and make the step that is right in front of you. Never quit making those steps. Slow down if you must, but keep moving forward. You will find rest one day.

Keep climbing.

What if you fly?

The prospect of uprooting your whole life and moving to a new country is a scary one, I would know. 

The prospect of uprooting your whole life and moving to a new country when you're in the midst of a terrible bout of depression is absolutely terrifying. 

Unfortunately, I also know that all too well.

Yesterday marked 4 months exactly since the day that the switch was thrown in my brain. 

4 months of darkness.

4 months of never feeling quite "right." 4 months of fighting the monster that is my own brain at times. 

4 months of trying (and usually failing) to stop self-harming. 

4 months of almost always having someone around or even not staying at my own house so I wasn't alone (my best friend is a saint, btw) and was safe from myself. 

4 months of finding out that recovery doesn't mean your fight is all over, it just means that you're still deciding to fight no matter how hard that is.

But here I am, still fighting. 

Here I am, marching forward into the future.

Here I am, doing what I have always dreamed of doing.

It is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my entire life.

There are days that I want to pack up and go home to what's familiar and easy.

There are days that I don't want to leave my bed.

There are days that I wish xacto knives existed in this country.

There are nights that my brain plays dirty rotten tricks on me and I wake up on the verge of tears.

But then there are days like today.

There are the smiles from my students.

There is time spent with my fellow teachers.

There are afternoons of laying in our new hammock.

Sometimes the cuts on my legs are healing nicely.

There is joy.

There is hope.

I'm not sure how many times before I left I asked, "But what if I can't do it? What if I can't handle it? I can't even handle normal life..." But I know that time and time again I was not only assured that I could, in fact, do this but also that if it came to it, I could leave. 

While I don't think I would leave no matter how bad things got, there is peace in knowing that I'm still here. I'm doing this. I'm still fighting. There is peace in knowing that I can do this, even on the hardest of days. Even if there are days that I don't want to carry on, I can keep living my dream. Because while those days have the tendency to be many, they will always eventually pass.

I have come to accept that fact that I may not get "better"while I'm here. I know this isn't the ideal place for healing with my support system so far away. But I know that I will make it through this year. I know that should I decide to seek professional help when I get home (I'm strongly considering it) I will have an amazing network of people who love me standing right beside me, holding my hands through everything.

I know that no matter how bad things get, life is not about asking, "What if I fall?" Life is about asking, "What if I fly" even when you feel like flying is the last thing you are capable of.

You Don't Know You're Beautiful

A few weeks ago I heard a commercial that seriously disturbed me. There I was, getting opening things done at work, rocking out to pandora as I usually do before work, when I hear a commercial for a tanning salon that I couldn't even believe. I wasn't really paying a whole lot of attention, because let's be real here, I obviously don't give a rip about tanning salons. Anyway, I caught part of the commercial and the part I caught said something along the lines of, "When you're tan, you'll feel better about how you look and the outside. And when you like what you see on the outside, you'll like what's on the inside better." So what I took from that was that in order to feel good about myself as a human being, I need to focus on my outward appearance first. Because how could you have any problem with you if you look pretty? After all, that's what's important, right? What we look like on the outside. Why take the time to learn to love yourself no matter what and focus on what your inner voice is saying to you about you when you can simply lay in the tanning bed and make yourself prettier?

It amazes me a little bit that we as a society seem to understand what's so very wrong here, but it continues to happen. We continue to tell generation after generation that they aren't pretty enough so they must not be good enough. We continue to create an unrealistic ideal that turns into nothing more than a general dissatisfaction with how we look. And sometimes general dissatisfaction turns into something so much worse. People's lives are ripped apart because they learn to hate themselves because they will never be as pretty or as skinny or as perfect as society tells them to be. It simply isn't acceptable that this is a reality.

In thinking about all of this, I found something I wrote a few years back and it fits rather well:

 Today in my writing 1 class we watched the Dove Evolution video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U) and were asked to analyze it. When asked what claim Dove was trying to make this old man in my class had the audacity to raise his hand and say that because the girl wasn't really pretty to begin with, Dove was saying that using their products will make you beautiful. This seriously pissed me off...first of all the freaking video says that it's pointing out why our standard of beauty is so unrealistic. He was seriously trying to argue that this girl was ugly and Dove was trying to pimp their products. Guys like him are the reason girls hate themselves and develop eating disorders! I grew up watching my mom ruin her own body by being anorexic because she has an unrealistic view of what it takes for her to be beautiful. Trust me, it's not pretty. I think guys like the one in my class and also the beauty industry as a whole should be ashamed for pushing such unrealistic standards on women. Little girls see advertisements or even hear adults talking and think they have to look like models for people to think they are pretty...I applaud Dove for trying to change this. Yeah, they're a business and are trying to make money, but they are also trying to make the world a little better for women everywhere and give little girls a positive start and the self-esteem they so desperately need.

And to all of the girls reading this...You are all beautiful ♥

I still stand by everything I said that day. But what will make this better? That Dove video was new 4 years ago and today I don't see anything changing. I think we as women perpetuate the problem at times. We buy into it. We turn to the right clothes and the right way to do our makeup and best way to get a bikini body to make us feel better. But is there a real solution in any of that? Isn't all of that just fleeting? What about when you wash that makeup off and change into your sweats? Do you still love you? Or do you only love the you that you allow people to see out in the world? If that's the case, how terribly tragic.

In my mind, change will happen only when we all learn to look within. When we train our inner voice to speak with kindness. When we learn to be more gentle with our selves. As much as this is a societal ill, I think there is a problem that lies within each of us as well, one that won't go away until we can truly learn to accept ourselves and love ourselves each and every day no matter what. On bad days, guess what, you're still living! And just living can be hard enough sometimes. Why make it any harder on yourself?

One of my yoga instructors said something in class somewhat recently that has stuck with me ever since...she said, "Practicing non-violence with others is usually second nature to us, but we often forget to practice non-violence with ourselves."

Moral of the story today? Um, I'm kind of all over the place I suppose. But as a society, we have got to stop telling people that their worth is only skin deep. And as humans, we have got to stop believing that our worth is only skin deep. Then and only then will positive change happen.

My two cents on the matter...

I've been trying to decide if writing this was worth the waves it would inevitably make. Trying to decide if I wanted to potentially put myself at odds with the church and, most unfortunately, members of my own family. I don't like to speak up, I prefer to fade into the background and let people do their thing while I do mine. But this time, I decided that I would be doing some people who I love very much a disservice if I just stayed quiet. So I shan't. Be warned, many of you probably won't like what I'm about to say, you might want to leave now. Though if you know me at all, you likely already know where I stand.

While I am not really surprised in the least, I am ashamed of my community today. Honestly, I don't understand why in 2015 we need laws to tell us to treat other human beings like human beings...and I REALLY don't understand why anyone would fight to take such a law away. Oh, that's right, it's totally ok for you to be an ass to other people in the name of your religious freedom, but it's not ok for people to be gay. And heaven forbid those gay people expect you to treat them with the same decency that you treat straight people, that's asking too much of you! After all, you don't agree with their life style so you shouldn't be forced to treat them like other people.

Let me just start in on this whole "religious freedom" argument that I've heard. I'm really not sure what to say besides that it's utter nonsense. First of all, you do realize that by law no one can be discriminated against based on their religion, right? You can't be fired or denied housing just because you're a Christian. So why would you want to deny anyone else those same protections? Oh, right, because they're gay. How dare they! It's not your religious freedom you're afraid of losing, it's the right to be an ass and claim that it's because of your religious convictions that you're afraid of. Because if it isn't a religion issue, that would just mean that you're a crummy person who wants to treat people as less than because they're different than you. Furthermore, if this truly was a religious freedom issue (it's NOT), why should your "rights" as a Christian trump some else's as a human being? Please, do tell.

And here's another question for you: why is this what we're fighting against so hard? Why have we picked homosexuality as the sin that we want to attack? See, I've heard this scenario about how it isn't fair to expect a Christian owned bakery to bake wedding cakes for a gay wedding...but what if an unwed mother wanted to get a cake for her kid's birthday? Would people be clinging to their religious conviction then? She made a choice to have sex before marriage so shouldn't you deny her business just as you would the business of that gay couple? What about that employee that just cheated on his wife? You should probably fire him because he's making choices that you don't agree with. Read that Bible that's clutched so tightly in your hand, you'll find out that ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That doesn't make someone else's sin worse than yours or mine.

And can we PLEASE stop saying that we "love the sinner but hate the sin" because trying to deny someone a job or a home is not loving them. Telling them that you should get to decide to treat them like you treat everyone or turn them away is not loving them. Seeing them as anything other than human beings is not loving them, because once you've lumped someone into a group that you hold preconceived notions about, that's all you see.

What this comes down to for me is the fact that human beings are human beings, point blank. That's all there is to it. To be fair, I realize that I'm hating on people for hating on other people. BUT let me assure you that I don't think you should have any rights taken from you just because you don't agree with me.

This is a subject that hits home with me so it's hard not to rage about it. Because it affects people that I love, it says that in Springfield, Missouri my cousin, great aunt, and many friends don't have the same rights as me. You see, my cousin Ashley is one of my favorite people in the whole world and I have looked up to her my whole life...she is super smart and she moved out to Boston from small town Iowa after high school to pursue her dream of becoming an architect. These days, she is indeed an architect and is also taking flying lessons and has plans to buy and renovate properties around the Boston area so she can get into the rental business. Then one day she wants to spend some time living in Europe, and I have no doubt that she'll actually do it. And in October I finally got the opportunity to meet Ashley's wife, Jamie. And you know what? She's awesome! They are amazing human beings who opened their home to me and my best friend and were more than hospitable to us.
But I saw the pain on my cousin's face when the conversation came back to our family, most of which has decided to pretend she no longer exists. It was awful. No one should have to say that their grandmother has gotten better because she actually calls on their birthday now rather than just ignoring it. And let me just tell you, if anyone ever tried to deny Ashley and Jamie jobs or housing just because they love each other, I would lose my shit.

Human beings...not a general label of "gays or homosexuals or whatever else you may come up with"...but someone's brother, sister, daughter, grandkid, son, best friend, cousin, aunt, uncle, mother, father, etc, etc.

Human beings are human beings, end of story. Let love win, guys, that's what it's all about.

...

People tend to balk at me when I say I don't believe in love. They say I just don't understand yet, that one day the right guy will make me believe in it. And the thing about it is...I suppose I do believe in it, but to me, it isn't worth it.
Argue with me all you like, you won't change my mind.
Because you see, when I think of love...I don't think of hearts and kisses. I think of the pain I saw in the eyes of my father so many years ago as he lay on the floor next to me, crying because, "it was almost over." It being my parents' marriage. When I think of love, I remember my big sister crawling into my bed sobbing late one night because she and her then fiance had broken up again. And then I think of how helpless it felt to watch her walk back into that relationship that I knew was bound to keep causing her pain.
In discussing all of this again today, my darling big sister told me that it didn't matter what people said to her, she was in love and she knew what she wanted...so why listen to anyone on the outside of that?
So where did that leave me? Constantly worrying.  Not knowing if or when she'd turn up crying again. Not sure of what to do if she did. Angry. Angry at someone for making her cry. Angry at her for being dumb enough to go back to someone who would treat her like that. A rift formed between that couldn't heal until she could finally see that all I ever wanted was the best for her. All I ever wanted was her to be happy. All I ever wanted was someone to love her like she deserved.
But she was in love, you see. And who ever listens to the little sister who doesn't believe in love when it comes to matters of the heart?
To quote that sister of mine, "Love is terrible, it blinds you to a lot of things." It's hard to be on the outside looking in, and I don't claim to really have any idea what I'm talking about. But I can tell you that the worry that comes from seeing someone I love walk straight into potential heart break is one that keeps me up at night.
But maybe I just don't understand yet. I can certainly tell you that I don't want any part of understanding if it means laying my heart out there to be stomped on. Go ahead and call me callous and jaded, I already know that I am.

Namaste

There is an amazing peace that washes over me every time I step onto my mat.

Knowing that all I have to do for 80 minutes in breathe, is absolutely freeing.

No thinking. 

No talking. 

No worries.

Just breath and focusing on what happens on my mat.

Just me.

No matter how many people are in the room.

No matter how my day has been.

No matter what's to come.

All that matters is that I breathe, listen, and respond.

And I love it.

I was introduced to Sunit's Hot Yoga 5 years ago. And at the time it was just another workout. Just more calories burned. I loved it, but it was nothing more to me than time to build strength. Through the years, I returned off and on to yoga classes here and there but I never made it a priority. 

Recently though, I returned to class and have made it a point to make it to my mat as much as I can. But it doesn't matter to me that it's a great workout. Obviously, that's a benefit, but that's not really what I care about when I step into that 105 degree room. 

What matters to me is feeling centered.

What matters to me in feeling balanced in a world that so often feels unbalanced.

What matters to me in feeling grounded in the moment and not letting my mind run wild as it so often likes to do.

What matters is not feeling like a crazy person because my brain isn't running wild.

What matters to me is knowing that I can push through any difficulties in life if I just slow down and breathe through it.

What matters to me is dealing with each day and what it brings as it comes.

What matters to me is learning not to look back or look ahead, just to be in the moment.

What matters to me is learning to love what I see in the mirror that I'm staring at for 80 minutes.

There's not much than can get me out of bed, happily, at 7:30 in the morning when I could totally sleep until noon if I so chose. But yoga does. And I'm so glad it does.