Who Am I?

I often ask myself the question "What do I want to be when I grow up?" I am 31 and I still don't know the answer to what I want to BE. I am up. I still need to grow a lot, no doubt about it, but what am I growing toward?

I was journaling by hand recently and wondering what I should focus on, even just for now. What am I gonna be when I grow up and what am I gonna do while I'm waiting?

And that's just it, I have this feeling that I'm waiting, rather than doing the things now. "When will my life begin?" floats through my brain.

Well, my life began 31 years ago. I can't be waiting for something. So then there's now to look at. So what AM I doing? and who am I anyway? 

I am always having a battle with my thoughts and emotions, and I recently have been trying to notice them and not own them. The thoughts don't have to be invited in for tea. I get to decide which ones stay and which ones go. I am not my thoughts.

My emotions often get the better of me. I don't think of myself as ruled by my emotions, which has gotten the better of me, because I didn't see it coming. I think of myself as WAY intellectual. Not smart, just very intellect driven. But it turns out I have emotions too and they call a lot of the shots and that's not a good thing. I have been trying to keep them in check. But it turns out they can't be kept it check, only observed and noticed. I can't turn them off and I certainly mustn't let them control me so much. I am not my emotions.

So as I come to that realization I feel empty. If I am not my thoughts and my feelings then what am I? A hollow shell is how it feels. Haha, who cares how it feels?

I know, I am not my thoughts and I am not my feelings. I am my actions. But how do I decide what actions are worth taking?

Of course, of course, it all comes back to the Lord. His Word tells me what actions are worth taking. But I am no puppet. The Lord cannot work through me without my help.

It feels right that there should be this emptying out of self. I currently feel devoid of self and of life. I am not my anything. I am not. As much as this feeling really sucks, I know that it's necessary.

I am sure there are passages in the Heavenly Doctrine that speak about how we cringe at the idea of the Lord coming closer because we feel the loss of self, and yet the highest angels feel life as their own more than anyone else. I wish I could find the passage(s) I'm thinking about but this is another one of a slightly different ilk:

Who has any other feeling or perception than that when he thinks he thinks from himself, that when he wills he wills from himself, and that when he speaks and acts he speaks and acts from himself? But it is from a law of Divine Providence that man should not know otherwise, since without such feeling and perception, he could not receive, or appropriate any thing to himself, or produce any thing from himself, thus he would not be a recipient of life and an agent of life from the Lord. He would be like an automaton, or an image without understanding and will, standing with hands hanging down, in expectation of influx, which would not be imparted; for life, in consequence of non-reception and non-appropriation on man's part, would not be retained, but would pass through, whence man, from being alive, would become as it were dead, and from being a rational soul would become irrational, thus either a brute or a stock. For he would be without the delight of life, the delight which every one has from receiving, appropriating, and producing as if from himself; and yet delight and life act in unity, for take away all the delight of life, and you will become cold and die. (Apocalypse Explained 1138:4)

One Peanut

Have you ever noticed that one bad thing sticks out much more than one good thing?

One bad thing can ruin a whole lot of good things. It doesn't seem equal.

My wise man once described it to be thus: Imagine that you're eating a handful of peanuts. In that handful of delightful peanuts there is one rancid nut. When you pop the whole handful into your mouth, that one nut will spoil the whole lot.

Conversely if you have a handful of rancid nuts and there is one solitary good one (or even 5!) you won't notice it at all. You will notice the nasty taste and nothing more.

Why is that the case? It carries through life as well. Even if you're trying to look for the good and focus on the positive, one bad peanut can spoil your day!

In an ideal day of friendship, walks and board games, one wrong comment can make me feel like the day was a bummer.

Why are we so prone to noticing the hardships and trials and things that go wrong in life?

One bad peanut can spoil the lot of good.

How To Deal With A Difficult Nalison: a useless instruction manual.

Sometimes I'm afraid of admitting a solution to something for fear that someone will throw it in my face when all I want to do is complain.

I probably complain too much, but sometimes you gotta vent. And I when I want to vent I'm not looking for solutions. I'm not looking for advice, I just want to be acknowledged. I want someone to realize that I'm having a tough time.

I have a lot of nieces, so you won't know who I'm talking about. But recently one of my nieces was worrying about her alarm not going off, not waking up in time, not being ready and she was concerned.

It was obvious to any adult that these were not as life threatening as she thought them. An adult can recognize that she was tired and just needed to go to sleep and everything would be better. Said child was reassured that it was going to be okay. They would wake her up. She wouldn't miss anything. Nothing that awful was going to happen. But she was sure the world was ending.

But you know what? I so relate. I am a little older than my niece. While others might recognize sooner than I what my problem is, I often recognize it too. But I don't want to admit it.

I start feeling sullen and upset and I realize that I didn't eat breakfast, or lunch. I am hangry. Someone else might realize this, but a wise person would not suggest "Hey, Alison, when was the last time you ate something?" because they might get their fingers bitten off.

I was sick for the second half of December until nowish. Still recovering. Been so exhausted and had no energy to do anything. Not moving, not doing anything is a perfect recipe for feeling like utter crap. Physically and emotionally.

A smart person might realize that I need to get out on a walk, or listen to music, or any number of things. A wise person would not suggest this for fear of getting yelled at.

So, if a Nalison is being difficult, what IS the proper procedure?

Well, if I told you, you'd probably suggest it to me when I was upset and then I'd be furious at you and then I'd just feel worse for being mad and for snapping at you.

Sometimes I need food, sometimes I need music, sometimes I need walks and dancing, and I always need hugs. I want to feel heard. I want my feelings listened to, not dismissed.


This blog post has probably come across as a whiny self-serving post, and it probably isn't even serving me that well. Cause you know what? When you friend is being a jerk you DO just want to say "Shut up and get over yourself!" When your child is crying over spilled milk, or faulty alarm clocks, you are fairly justified in telling them that they don't get to whine about it. I'm not criticizing the parent who tells their kid to get over something trivial.

I think that my point is that even if you can see that something is trivial, it doesn't feel trivial in the moment, to the child or to the thirty year old woman.

Playing with paint

I'm not a painter. I love paint. I love squirting paint straight on to my canvas and running a paint brush through the creamy blob. Or taking my fingers and smudging the paint around.

It's so much fun to mix colors and make new colors. It's fun to just go with it and see what colors mix when you run a brush across different colors of paint.

I messed around with oils once or twice maybe a year ago? But not really. This September I have launched into oil painting. Painting every day! It's scary, but oils are surprisingly forgiving. I'm not sure why I have always been intimidated by oils, because they are so much fun to play with.

My problem with painting is that I like control. I like crisp defined lines and a plan. That's probably a good thing... to start out with. But I need to be able to let go.

I started a painting of a hand. It turned out so much better than I thought it would. But it was only the beginning. I knew it needed more work, but I didn't know how to fix it or make it better. Therefore I was worried that if I changed it or did anything too it that it could end up worse rather than better.

But advice from a friend let me move forward. She said that there's no virtue in finishing a painting if it means turning it into something you like less just so that it's finished. I had recently painted a bunch of color and movement on a small canvas just to use of some leftover paint. I had no agenda, just throwing paint all over and seeing how it turned out. My friend pointed out that that painting had so much life and moment.

She suggested, and I agreed, that I should just go at it. So I squeezed paint right onto the canvas and used my fingers to mix colors and make patterns. And I had lots of fun just making bright and bold colors on my canvas.

But now the hand I had painted on one side was washed out and gray. But I hadn't known what to do with the hand anyway. The brightness of the new background allowed me to add some red highlights to the skin, and it warmed up the hand and allowed me to fix some of the shapes and lines on the hand.

It's still not perfect, but I am pleased with the outcome because I just played with the paint and let it do its thing.

I like painting because it lets me create and engage, and because it is a metaphor for life.

I need a plan, and maybe even crisp defined lines, and then I need to let go and just see where life takes me. I posted my painting to Facebook and this conversation ensued:

Friend (who had given me the initial encouragement to just go at it): I always paint best when I'm willing to let go and play. Let myself be a vessel for creating rather than the CREATOR. How surprising that it works

Me: Haha. So true. But letting go of the outcome hurts!

Yes, life, letting go of the outcome hurts. But it usually works out for the best!

Why me?

Sometimes in a pickle we find ourselves asking "Why me?"

Why did this have to happen to me?

Do you ever ask yourself, "Why not me?" It's kinda the same question. But I mean it flipped.

We do often look at misfortune befalling another and one of two things could happen. You could say "Why did that have to happen to such a wonderful person?!"  but you could also say, "Glad it wasn't me!"

I don't think of myself as a masochist or wanting anything bad to befall me, but sometimes I look at a friend and genuinely wish that the bad thing had happened to me instead.

Example: My friend got cancer. She's married with two small kids. I genuinely wish that I had gotten cancer instead of her. Maybe it's weird, but she has a beautiful life, and while I do love my life, I don't have two small kids who I now cannot even pick up and hold.

In short, I'm expendable and she's not. That might seem harsh and like a terrible thing to say about myself, and I don't mean it quite as badly as all that. Maybe the truth is that I should not view myself as expendable. I should realize my value to this world, and I do, at times.

But this isn't meant to be a depressing post. I just wish that sometimes I could take the fatigue or sickness from a friend so that they could go on and power through the hardships of their life! How do I take some of the burden from my friends so that they can go forward in strength?

Movement and starting small

I have discovered that most of my rambling little bits of story that I just dump into the middle of are so often about people moving from one place to another. It almost always involves a few people walking and talking.

Starting here, ending here. And always in the middle of a conversation too. I just drop the reader into a scenario and into a conversation. No context given.

I don't know when I started doing this or why, but it's pretty consistent. I've only just noticed this recently. I wonder if it started in an effort to kickstart a story. Starting with a "Once upon a time" or a description of people, events, or a setting would get me hung up. So I would start in the middle. Maybe originally with a goal to go back and write the beginning, maybe not.

But now it's a pattern. I like to just jump in at the deep end. When I'm writing snippets as exercises I think it's probably fine. Maybe it's fine anyway, but it's funny to notice this pattern.

Sometimes it's hard to write anything at all. Right now that is my life. I didn't want to write the above. It didn't flow. Maybe if I had written it in story form it would have flowed better. 

"Why do you always start stories in the middle?" Hydrangea asked as we walked from point A to point B.

"Good question. I guess I haven't thought about it much," I responded, thinking back over the things I had written.

We walked on.

"Maybe it was an effort to kickstart my silly brain," I laughed. "I just enjoy jumping in, throwing the reader into a setting instead of gently guiding them to it." I thought for a moment. "It's like zooming out instead of in. I start close up, right on the characters and what they're saying, pan out to what they're doing, and then paint with bigger and bigger strokes until I have showed you my world. Some authors start with the broader strokes, creating a world and a setting and then introduce you to the characters and their motivations."

I looked up at Hydrangea to see if she had followed my train of thought.

She was thinking about it. "I think that's accurate," she responded. "I haven't read all of your work, but I can see how that's a theme in your writing.  Do you know why you always start close in and then slowly pan out? Do you think one style is better than the other?"

I thought about it as we walked under the something sky in some kind of weather.

"I think it is because whatever story I'm telling, it's for the characters. Everything is character driven. Not so much plot driven. I know where the characters end up, their friendships.... I mostly know their goals and motivations. But the world they're in matters less to me. I just want to know how and why they care about each other. What they're doing to make each others lives better. I don't care where they are. I just want them to be happy. Sometimes I let them be unhappy for a bit. Sometimes things don't work out amazingly, but I'm afraid that what I care about most is weaving friendships. Saving the world is secondary. My characters care about saving the world... because they care about each other."

Hydrangea smiled at me. "I think that makes sense. And it makes sense that you would begin by having two characters talking. Or a handful of characters. Why do you think that they are traveling? So often your characters are going from one place to another. Have you ever thought about that one?"

I had. But I thought again.

"I don't rightly know," I admitted. "But maybe two people sitting in a living room feels too empty. Maybe it's because I know that for myself I talk best when I am in action myself. Words fall more easily from my mind to my tongue when I am walking. It's all well and good to sit across the table from someone or on a couch, but when I need to process my thoughts it's useful to be walking or driving somewhere. It frees my tongue. And in my writing, I guess it's the same way. Something about the momentum of moving forward makes it feel like the story is going somewhere."

Hydrangea nodded. "Are you happy with that?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, if you start in the middle, if your characters are in motion... does that bother you? Or are you fine with beginning your stories like that? I guess what I'm getting at is do you think there's something wrong with this habit you have formed? Or are you fine with it?"

I thought about what she was saying. Was there something wrong with this form I had chosen?

"What do you think, Hydrangea?" I asked.

"Do I get a say?"

"Yes, I need to know if someone else is okay with it. I know what I think, but what I think isn't enough. I want to know what others think. It has to be okay with someone else. Someone outside my mind!"

Hydrangea just looked at me, a smile creeping over her face. "Silly," she said. "I'm not outside of your mind."

I raised an eyebrow. We had arrived where we were headed. This journey was complete. Another journey would start again. Another pathway in my mind would need to be explored. But this pathway was tread. I had arrived at the stopping point.

Approval outside my mind was waiting on the other side of another journey. But for now, I had walked this pathway with myself. Unwinding an idea in my mind that needed to be talked through.

And that is why I write. To talk things through. To figure out what is in my mind. To get it out on to paper... or a screen. So that I can see it out there. Outside of myself and evaluate it for what it is.