Room for growth: Some mistakes I’ve made lately.

March 21, 2019Leave a comment

I was thinking about accountability. I was also thinking about growth and how the internet is a highlight reel. I was thinking about how all these things mix together. For younger people it’s harder to process the fact that you’re not seeing everyone life as it actual is by following them online. Adults know that, and we know that well, but we have no drive to make dents in our online perception because we all like looking better than we actually are. We like to display ourselves as if we have no room for growth, because we are, for lack of better terms, fully grown.

I don’t want the internet to know all my darkest secrets. I’m really careful about not posting anything that will come back and bite me later on. I worry about what I like and how it would effect me if someone I knew scrolled through every single Favorited tweet of mine. It’s something to be careful about- after all employers, colleges, and people in powerful positions are known to do that.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be held accountable for my failures, because being accountable for them helps you grow, and no matter what social media portrays we all have a lot of room to grow. So how do we frame our online landscape to push us towards growth and help us become more?

Part of that is following people who inspire us, who teach us things, who motivate us, and who do so with honesty not envy. We need to follow people who are accountable and who are open. That doesn’t mean that they blast their mistakes with reckless abandonment, but it does mean they share their growth that came from past mistakes. It’s a easy way to say “yes I mess up” but also “I’m better off now because I corrected it”.

I don’t really find myself inspiring or motivating, but I thought I’d share some of my recent mistakes with you and what I learned from them. Then at least I can try to take steps toward inspiring and motivating myself.

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Lessons learned with the help of horses:

January 30, 2019Leave a comment

Maybe every young girl doesn’t need a pony for Christmas. There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t have a horse, money and time being two of the biggest, but I want to talk about some amazing things that my favorite hobby has gifted me, and why I’m kind of glad I got a horse for Christmas all those years ago:

How to manage money: The old joke is that you should buy your children horses because they’ll never have money for drugs, it’s true, but all jokes aside the horse taught me financial literacy and responsibility from a young age. They’re expensive pets, especially if something goes wrong or if you’re showing them. I’ve always been a bigger money saver than a lot of my friends, and that really started when I was 15. My parents told me that I was responsible for D’Artagnan’s vet bills. Which would have been fine if he didn’t get seriously hurt, but of course he did, and I emptied my savings account. My parents stepped in then, but it taught me that that savings account needed more in it in case of emergencies, and not just the equine kind.
How to be patient: Bad habits take a long time to work out, riding ones are no different. Learning to deconstruct your riding, find the bad part, then put everything back together again without it is no easy task. It takes a long time and a lot of work. It gives you patience. So does dealing with an animal that is just as stubborn as you are. Horses get set in their ways too, and getting their bad habits fixed takes time and energy as well. There is a lot of slow work that needs to get done before you can move on to the exciting parts. Any trainer will tell you just how important slow work is.
How to handle competition: It’s funny, but I became less competitive when I was racing as a child. It became more about competing with myself, my past times, my past rankings, and less about competing with my peers. This might not be true for everyone, some people are just competitive to their core, but what is true is that horseback is a game of give and take. If you want to place better, you have to give a lot of time and energy, and you know that all the other rides are giving it too. It gives you perspective on how to gauge your success and what to keep in mind when you’re going for the gold.

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Things 2018 taught me:

December 31, 2018Leave a comment

A lot can happen in a year, everyone knows that, or at least everyone has heard it. I was starting to doubt it when I was sick. Nothing can happen if you’re sitting on a couch… at least, not anything exciting.

But flash forward to 2018. I’m still having treatment, but my entire world has shifted. I’m off the couch. I’m about to marry the man I love. I have been working a year and a half at a wonderful job I love. My world is coming into focus. I’m starting to get a clear picture of what the future is going to look like. And I’ve learned a whole lot in this busy year, so I thought I’d share a few of those lessons with you:

Things really do happen when you least expect them too. It makes life feel like a series of surprises you just stumbled into, but that’s part of the magic. It’s easy to feel like everything is out of your control when it comes to the next step, but our main job is to keep moving forward. Get farther down the trail, there is a lot of beauty ahead.

Kindness doesn’t just happen on its own. Maybe civility happens without much effort, but true kindness, the kind that shifts days and changes lives, that comes from a lot of effort and a series of repeated actions. You have to choose to be kind, and work at it. It’s always worth it.

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Five real life truths I’ve learned from writing fiction:

July 30, 2017Leave a comment

The characters are more important than the plot. This one someone might debate with me, but I stand firm on it. If you have a good plot with really terrible characters you have a bad book. You need characters you can relate too or at least somewhat understand. If you have amazing characters with good character development and the stories plot line isn’t that great, you’re book is at least somewhat decent.

Life is a lot like this. Our life stories might not be the most interesting. We can’t all have the one in a million success stories that we hear about on TV. We all have interesting points in our lives, we all do amazing things, but our whole lives aren’t going to be filled with that kind of excitement, and that’s okay, our stories are still great, because we’re the lead characters and who we are is enough. We’re all interesting, we’re all unique, we all have amazing character development. Our lives are all worth reading.

Everything has a lesson. What’s the moral of the story? It’s a question you should have an answer to at the end of every book, if you don’t have one then I don’t know what kind of book you just wrote, but it’s probably not the most valuable piece of literature. Everything that happens in a story should lead to something else, every event should have lessons that we bring to the next plot point, just like everything that happens in our life should be learned from. The world is full of knowledge. Every mistake and every success promises more and more of it, if we ignore the lessons we aren’t ever going to develop our own stories.

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It’s June and I’m 23. Here’s to bad years closing and lessons learned.

June 8, 2017Leave a comment

Happy June! My birthday was yesterday, and I am now officially twenty-three. Let’s just say that twenty-two just wasn’t what Taylor Swift made it out to be. I made a post about my year lost to lyme and mono and I meant it in the most literal way possible. I don’t feel like I was ever really twenty-two. The entire year was lost to pain and I didn’t really move from the couch. I feel like I’m behind now, because I know that if I hadn’t of gotten sick I would be so much farther ahead. I know that I’m not, there are a lot of twenty-three year old’s still trying to figure it out, I just thought by now I’d be farther along.

So when I say I want twenty-three to be a better year for me I’m not setting the bar crazy high, in fact the bar is rather low. I know life moves in phases and no matter what we think those phases aren’t marked in years or semesters. They’re random. God and the forces on this earth aren’t really working with our calendar. So, I don’t expect it to get better right away, but I hope that this age is more giving. I hope that it has a little more mercy.

That’s not to say that twenty-two didn’t come with some valuable lessons. Here is what I learned while I was too sick to get off the couch. Continue reading →

7 Things I Learned in my 21st Year:

June 8, 2016June 8, 2016Leave a comment

I don’t know about you- but as of yesterday I’m feeling twenty-two. In some ways it feels like this birthday is a year late. I’ve felt this age for a while, or at least the last semester. Still, looking at the number is pretty amazing. I’m now really into my twenties.

Have a learned anything? Surely. This past year has been so busy it would have been impossible not to gain something.

Here is what I learned:

College really isn’t the best years of your life. Adults say this all the time, in fact, I had a few tell me high school was going to be the best part of my life. It’s just not true. There is so much life ahead of you. It’s getting better.
Waking up earlier is actually really great. Take it from your local night owl, I started getting up just an hour or two earlier and my day feels a million times longer. It’s simply not the same as adding that hour or two after the sun has gone down.
That feeling in my gut sometimes lies. I’ve always been big on going with what feels right- and I still am. The problem I’ve come across this year is making up my own gut feelings. When I want something bad enough I can convince myself it’s going to happen, and when it doesn’t it’s pretty soul crushing.

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15 Lessons from Year 20

June 2, 2015June 20, 2015Leave a comment

It’s amazing how one facebook message can launch you into a friendship that’s been dormant for seven years. We play the “I’m just going to stop texting people and see who reaches out to me” and pretend like it tells us who is really in our lives for good. It doesn’t. It tells you who’s busy, or it tells you who is waiting on you to text first to see if you care. Stop being a child. Reach out.
If you aren’t educated in a topic it’s okay to say that. Don’t try to keep up the fight just because you have an opinion.
My body shape doesn’t actually matter that much- how far I can run when the dog takes off and how I sleep at night do. Health and image aren’t the same.
We’re young, things don’t work out. That doesn’t mean that we’re doing anything wrong. Sometimes you have to go on a few dates before you realize what you’re looking for. Sometimes you can just go out to dinner with a guy just to see. It’s okay, the next boy you date doesn’t have to be your future husband.
Taking much needed down time and being lazy are two very different things. When you get older you start to realize you’ve been lying about your days “off”. Don’t you have something you’ve wanted to do but “hadn’t have the time to do”?
Dream big, reach for the stars, but keep in mind that you should also have plans for the time in between dreams, the steps to get there. Transitions should be enjoyed also. A lot of life is spent in transition anyways.
I look fine when I smile with my teeth, no matter what I’ve spent my life telling myself. And if someone gets a bad picture of me smiling with my teeth? That’s okay too, people on facebook have seen me in person, the people on here and tumblr who haven’t? They don’t actually care if I put out one bad picture for every 20 glossy ones. It’s how I look. Not flawless like Beyonce but damn good looking anyways.
Study the masters. Of anything that you want. Learn everything you can from everything. You never should aim to “finish” your studies.
Buy it in Print. Cook books, magazines, novels. Drip on the cookbook pages, rip out magazine articles, write in margins of novels. You’ll retain more. You’ll love it and won’t “click away”.
Indulge. They’re only guilty pleasures if you feel bad about them- which you shouldn’t.
I spent years not speaking of my accomplishments because I didn’t want to brag. I thought the line was too thin to walk, but it isn’t. Show your skills or knowledge when on the correct topic for it and only mention it a few times through out the year. People can know you’re great at something without you being annoying about it.
Don’t wait- Don’t put your life on hold. Things can be moved to the back burner, but you should never just be sitting around waiting for a call from him or that call from that dream job you applied to two months ago and never heard from.
Dance alone, in public. Embarrass yourself every now and then. It’s how you have fun and learn that you shouldn’t be embarrassed by that anyways.
Spend time with toddlers and puppies, you’ll understand why when you want to rip you hair out, then again when you see the beauty in it all. It’s something everyone should learn.
Thank them. Do it again. And again. Never forget to say I love you. Never let someone think they aren’t important to you.