"These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow."

Shakespeare

Samson loved Delilah, and let her crush him.
I feel so much stronger than him today.

Thankful for days where the mountains are crystal clear. Thankful for the smell of Lush body wash and early gym workouts. Thankful, so thankful for coffee. Thankful for a couple weeks of sleeping in my own bed. Grateful to watch Ray Donovan, sober. Thankful for my job and rare days with no headaches.

Sometimes I feel like my sobriety is viewed like a cancer by my friends who are normal, and can drink normally. Like they don't know how to act around me, and that I'm more serious than I used to be. 

What I want in this next year of my life is to be as fun, or more fun, than I was when I had alcohol to help my personality. It's more work now, but I feel like I can little-by-little get excited to be alive.

The dreams are scary enough, and my new life is happy enough to keep me whole. 

  

Today's silver lining:

The Dog Didn't Die at the End.

give me my ordinary name

I try to write when I feel sunny.

Some one called me sunny the other day, and I wanted to take that back to the one who called me a dark and stormy person and say--but sometimes I think she was right. I am sunny and I am stormy and I am gonna keep getting through that.

Hiked 10 miles in Big Cottonwood this weekend over Saturday and Sunday and I wanted to bottle up the clean air and take it back to Salt Lake and use it as a balloon to pull me up and over my troubles on Monday morning, but it can't do that. But I do keep fighting. Fighting the unrequited love, fighting the wage gap, fighting the stupid decision to end our daylight at 5 PM. Wrestling with God and for God.

Dog Lake via Butler Fork this weekend with Kenz, and we met up with God at the water.

We also did Bonneville Shoreline for a few miles on the Mt. Olympus leg the next day.
I can't believe the female support system that God has given me.

in my sophomore year at the U, I took this film class about cinema in the developing world. Almost none of the films we watched were in English. I was so tired back then. I worked 40 hours a week, played regularly in a band with Billy and Dan, and took 15 credit hours. I would fall asleep on the train even when I felt unsafe. I kept cans of Slimfast and Clam Chowder in my backpack like a hobo.

Sometimes the films come back to me like a dream, or a memory that belongs to someone else, that I've absorbed. A Mexican child drinking warm Coca Cola. An Iranian man crying about his cow. A Vietnamese guy in an abandoned house in the jungle, with a Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway. 

I can't believe how many lives I've lived since then.  The mountains make me feel new. Sobriety makes me feel new. Speckled green eggs and homemade espresso make me feel like a rich lady, and I'm lucky. I'm grateful for all of it.

Everything feels new and more beautiful, and more manageable than a year ago.

where but for the grace of God go I

I'm one week away from 5 months sober.

Everything about my life feels more peaceful than it did. I was able to quit my anxiety medication, and I've gotten my finances on track.

Mostly these days are about working 45 hours a week, doing a bunch of Micro Economics homework, and taking care of people's pets. Drinking lots of sparkling water. Trying to fall out of love. Singing and laughing.

Lots of hope for the future. For a new and important relationship with God. For loving more and more people. For big tent revivals or for the small amounts of blood my heart pumps continually to keep me alive. I see tiny miracles that I didn't see before. I see entanglement; sometimes exhausting and frustrating, but so mysterious and delightful too. What am I that You are mindful of me?

Purity

"Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet."

Purity, Jonathan Franzen

absolute beginners

When I was a teenager, I always wanted to get amnesia somehow.
I thought it would be great to wipe the slate clean and start over. A good way to escape.

Now I'm getting closer to 30, and I feel like I have amnesia all the time. I realized, hanging out with Kelsea the other night, that I've lost most of the memories of high school. This morning I had a brief flashback to one of my classes at the U that was in a building where I never had any other classes, and the teacher was this tiny woman with a child's haircut and a doctorate, who taught me about Frankenstein and I wrote her a ten page paper on Silence of the Lambs.  And then I was sad to learn that I've also lost a lot of the memories of college.

I wonder how much of this was alcohol's gift to me, and how much is just getting older. Dear teenage me; is this what you wanted? It has taken away the sting of old lovers, but also the warmth of time with friends.

I do have so much hope for new memories. Driving to work today, I thought about what Spain or Ireland would be like for sober me. For the hope of new love and new friends and new memories with old friends.

My insomnia used to give me so much anxiety but now I try to look at it like God just wanted to give me more hours in my day than normal people get.

Noah-isms

Mom: Oh so Rachel's invited now?
Noah: Well, Rachel's not very annoying.

-------------------------------

"It's the only show that's made me emotionally smile."
-about 11.22.63

-------------------------------

"You can kill a man's soul but can't take his carbs away... even an atheist eats carbs."

I let myself feel things now because I don't have a choice.

I feel happy and recharged.
I feel sad, and I can't mask it with something. I let myself have a milkshake and I tell all my problems to the dog. The dog says, let's go for a walk.

I go for a walk. Feel angry that I feel love. I feel angry that I might be in love with a fool, and also feel angry that my sinuses hurt and my throat is swollen and I have to take care of myself.

And I'm grateful. For all the minutes of it. The minute I want to be with Jesus more than here. The minute the sun rises and the fields glow. The minute my coffee reaches drinking temperature.

I get tired of being the bad guy. When I get tired, I go to bed, and then tomorrow we lace up our boots.          

I told You I'd never be in Your army again, but the fight--and Your mercy--sucked me back in.

Parley's

The spiritually sick attract the spiritually sick, Mackenzie says. And while my soul knows parts of your soul, and my soul loves parts of your soul, my soul is suspicious of your soul. My soul wants to go in the washing machine. And then it wants to stand outside in the Pines and clean air.

"If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your résumé and claim them as achievements."

Mason Cooley

New life. New LIFE. Everyday new life in You, my hope and my savior.   The only thing important I did today was take my dogs on a walk, on my lunch break. But colors seem brighter, and friends lovelier, and the coffee smoother and my purpose stronger. 

Come Be My Light

"Do not think that my spiritual life is strewn with roses--that is the flower which I hardly ever find on my way... But I am happy--yes happier than ever. And I would not wish at any price to give up my sufferings. But do not, however, think that I am only suffering. Ah no--I am laughing more than I am suffering--so that some have concluded that I am Jesus' spoiled bride, who lives with Jesus in Nazareth--far away from Calvary. ...Pray, pray much for me--I really need His love."

Mother Teresa

Bergamot, Mediterranean Orange, Sangria Accord, Spanish Rose, Leather Accord, Vetiver, Turkish Rose Petals, Guiacwood, Amber

I put on the perfume that will remind him of something he used to love. So he can't get out of this. I feel exotic, I feel like if anything, I am a Spanish wine on a summery night on a back porch far away from cars, and I feel like if anything, I am the stars and the hot humid night.

When he is laying next to me, he is not thinking about that but the perfume has reminded him of when he was a little boy.  He isn't thinking about the streets in Oviedo after a warm summer rain. He's never been there. He's thinking about an aunt an uncle of his used to be married to. Maybe she smelled like me and that's what conjured her up. He was watching her cut carrots and red cabbage. She sliced the cabbage in half and showed the inside to him, as she was always marveling at the small things, the intricacies of cabbage or how tadpoles could into frogs and how she knew that the TV was floating in millions of particles over her head--which we have all learned from Willy Wonka--but she couldn't explain to him when he asked, how the rest of it worked. She had freckles. She couldn't explain to him why her skin had freckles and his didn't. But they weren't actually related by blood.

What he says out loud is something about Donald Trump.

I love to wake up before my alarm. 
Or with no alarm set at all. To see the spring sunlight coming through my window, and the fan making my cranes dance on the strings that suspend them from the ceiling in my room. I used to do this on the weekends (can't now because I live at the hotel, and have a different tradition there on Saturdays and Sundays) and it feels like a small happy moment that I can start to build a house on.

I build this house of sweet moments with God, and one day I can live in that house and trust in His goodness fully again. We are rebuilding our relationship with love letters and phone calls, but I want to marry Him fully and spend my nights in that house of joy, sleeping with my hand holding His. 

at home with Judy

"You've had pomegranate seeds before? How come I'm the last to know?"
-Judy


"This is just the worst idea I ever had."
-frosting warmish cake

"Well, you just need to move to Texas and we'll tell ol' God that He needs to get on it."
-on dating

I'm just so happy. Fat, and I haven't seen a vegetable in three days, but really happy. Happy to sleep through texts from someone I need to get over. Happy to have pastries and coffee each day until two.  I'm even watching Hallmark movies, and acting like I can't figure out the ending. Happy to shovel the dusty snow off the longest driveways. To eat Long John Silvers and see my curves in the mirrors of a West Des Moines Super Target and just shrug. Happy to go through black and white pictures of my grandparents' wedding on a snowy Valentine's Day.

If you forgot what God's grace and love was like, you might need to spend some time in Iowa.

I live in a hotel by myself on the edge of a field and I spend my Saturdays drinking cinnamon coffee and watching the snow fall.

I think, how did I get so lucky to be here?

I breathed through a panic attack in a room full of Christian women on Wednesday night. I left that house sobbing so hard I couldn't see the road to drive. I cried to God.  And what I feel like he's been telling me since then is that my life doesn't have to look like the other women's lives at my church. That I have my own special relationship with him, and my own gifts from him, and if it looks different than theirs does, it's okay.

Being childless is a gift, just as children are a gift.
Being single is a gift, just as much as marriage.

This hotel is my gift. My family is such a gift. Stretching out and rolling over and not having to take care of children on Saturday is a good gift.

the end of January

It changes my whole attitude to have flowers on my desk.
To have my nails painted.
To have my own house each weekend.
Getting accounting problems correct.
Running miles.

God is so good and I've been reading little love notes He leaves around.

am i doing it right

I've been thinking of Custer, this week. George Armstrong Custer, and his luck. How he led and was lucky for how long he did not die.

I've been thinking about the extras, in the movie of his life. I've been thinking of those extras, those soldiers who die suddenly in the movie due to an arrow. Due to a gunshot. Due to falling from such great heights. We see stunt men, but in real life, they were real men that died suddenly. Who were one moment here, and one moment gone, though their carcass remained. I might be an extra in someone's movie. A soldier, certainly.

And how do we sleep, knowing this. That we will be here one moment, and another moment we will be meeting our Creator.

The mix of fear and love for my savior and my God is terrifying. But that's the way that I like to keep Love.

Underneath the morning sheets     My skin is tangled in between      Sun is peaking through the blanket holes      Don't you wish you were there?

patrick watson

Every one is posting those Instagram pictures of their year, but none of my Instagrams can say what actually happened in 2015.

Feb '15:
Started my new job at W--
Went to Vegas with Caitlan.
Broke up with N---.

Mar '15:
Cried and Drank.

April '15:
Cried and Drank.

May '15:
I wake up to a text from Celisse that one of our friends died. My first thought was, I wish I could take her place and go be with Jesus. I realize I need help and call the doctor.

After 26 years of fighting my anxiety and pessimism, I finally give in and the doctor prescribes something good.

I start hiking with Katie. I start having ideas again. I start to like God, again.
I get up in the morning, simply because it is a happy time, being alive. Where has this been all my life? Why did I wait? What would college have been like with such a sunny outlook? What would it have been like to not spend my bus rides crying?

June '15:
Seriously, where was this drug? I'm singing again. Laughing again. I have energy to go to parties and I LOVE EVERYONE.

July '15:
Just happy, all the time. Hiking. Running. Tubing down rivers.

August '15:
Lost 20lbs of break up weight. Started dating.

September '15:
Realized I'm in love with someone new that I am not dating.

October '15:
Trip with siblings to Portland and Seattle. Beautiful. Four days of laughing, and rain, and beaches, and trees and waterfalls, and a tiny house, and a strange hotel.

November '15:
Fall out of love with guy I'm not dating. Go on date with Christian dentist instead. Much safer.

December '15:
Look around at all the snow and wonder what's next.

Now: 
No more dates, no more dreams. Just plans and goals.