extract of happiness

happiness is amazing. it's beautiful. wonderful. and it's not elusive!

everyone can be happy...i truly believe that. i have had many dark days and lived on rock bottom for awhile. i've worked very hard to achieve the happiness i now have. i've spent a lot of time pondering, praying and reflecting. i've taken a magnifying glass to my soul and found scrapes, bruises and imperfections. i have a long way to go, but i have come a LONG way.

i have learned to trust the Lord. i know now who i am and what i want to be. i'm not looking forward to my surgery on tuesday necessarily, but in a way i am. i can't wait to have it and get past it so that i can have the next one and then be DONE! but at the same time, i'm so grateful everything has played out the way that it has. i've had the chance to become someone that i'm proud to be at a young age- what could be better? i know now that i will excel at anything and everything i choose to do. i'm not afraid to work hard to get what i want. i'm happy and i want others to be happy!

 i'm so excited for what the future holds- to become a registered nurse! i feel 100% that this is my calling and what i'm meant to be. i love working with kids so much and will always have that be a part of my life, but i think i truly will have a talent in medicine and that my experiences have built me into the perfect candidate to be a nurse. i know how important it is to have the right people around you when you're sick, having surgery, recovering, whatever! the people who cared for me after my first surgery had a HUGE impact on my accepting the situation and in my personal growth. EVERYONE deserves to have people caring for them who really do CARE for them, who are passionate about what they do, and understand what it's like to be sick and suffering. i know that i can be that for people, and that's so exciting to me!

my niece and nephew are here right now. they are rays of sunshine in my world, i can't believe how much i love them and enjoy them. i used to REALLY not like kids hahaha. working with children has really changed my perspective, and my niece and nephew have as well. here i will admit that i have realized that i am going to be a really great mom! haha. i never thought i would say that, or that i'd even want to.

i've reached a point where i can let go of my vanity, which has been a struggle of mine for years. feeling beautiful is fun but it's not everything. it meant way more to me than it should have for years. having this bag and taking a medication that affected my very face was one of the hardest things that i've ever gone through. it's forced me to look beyond physical beauty. i appreciate myself for so much more than that. i enjoy feeling attractive and taking care of myself but i also know now that it's not the most important thing in the world. it's moved down several rungs and settled in the correct place on the ladder of my priorities. by the same token, where i used to take beauty for granted, i don't anymore. i am grateful to have what i do and will always make the most of it! but there is just so much more to life. yeah it's nice to feel beautiful. but for a long time i let my happiness depend WAY too much on physical beauty, if i felt "ugly" or not. and the truth is, it's not just a trite or cheesy thing that being happy makes you beautiful. i can SEE my insecurity and misery in old pictures- i wore it as obviously as the nose on my face. true happiness really does change your countenance.

life is a crazy thing. i think back to just a few years ago and i don't recognize myself. it's like i'm a completely different person. i think about people i worked for in those rough years (one place that i just walked out of one day, leaving them high and dry. one of my low points) and i think about my ex and his family. it's hard to think that there are people who know me as THAT rachel- a person who doesn't even exist anymore. a person who is so different from what i am now that it feels like she's a stranger. i wish sometimes that all of those people could know ME, that they won't remember me the way that i was. the only way i can make up for that is to make sure that everyone i know from here on out will always know ME 100%, and that their lives will be better for it.

i stand on the threshold, ready for this upcoming surgery. ready to recover and have the next one, and then move on with my life. i am determined to make something of myself, to be the best at what i do. to be independent from everyone and everything except the Lord. i'm not going to be the girl that waits around for the right guy who will then "take care" of me. i'm going to ALWAYS be my own person, and when the time comes for me to marry and have a family, i will bring 100% of that person and those talents to the table. and i will always do so for the people i love.

this is pure joy, plain and simple. worth the hard work, the pain and the tears. and i owe it all to the Lord. making changes isn't easy. it's painful a lot of the time. but sometimes there are people or things in our lives that are detrimental to our growth and we need to learn how to identify what/who they are and take the necessary action to be happy. in the end, it's worth it.

the beginning of 2010, a whole other person :)

yayyyy! now :)

i'm okay....really

i've been thinking a lot lately.

(i know, big surprise)

my upcoming surgery is The Big One ala toy story. it's like that rocket, srsly. a big deal.

it's the one that is really important and matters. the last one is the the biggest change but the "easiest" or whatever...if any part of getting gutted and using your small intestine as a colon is "easy"...

anyway....i'm ready to give 100% to some things that i haven't given 100% to yet. i'm also okay with whatever outcome there is. i trust the Lord, i can truly say that. everything that has happened that i am happy with, has been the Lord's doing...hard to go through or not. so i choose to trust Him.


i will be okay.

how's that working out for you?

for a long time i felt like i was being rocked by life.

 now, it's the other way around :) no matter what your circumstances YOU are the one who gets to decide how you react...and that is the most important thing in the world. 


NO ONE can take that away from you.

fireproof.

i'm thinking about a lot tonight. stuff that's hard to adequately put into words. stuff that makes me feel like i might be the most frustrating human being in existence sometimes. stuff that i wish sometimes i was too dumb or too shallow to even have cross my mind in the first place (yes that sounds conceited, no i do not care).

the thing is...i'm one of those people who thinks about everything. i overthink things up and down and inside-out, and just when i think i'm done with them...i unearth them from their shallow graves and overthink them some more. i think a lot about why my life has turned out to be what it's been. i think about where it will go from here, when all of this is over and i'm left with what it's made of me.

the thing is, illness and recovery aren't as simple as just that. at least, they haven't been for me. my illness coincided with the end of my marriage. it was a slow death and by the time we knew it was "over" we'd gone through the tunnel of pain and sadness and come out the other end okay. but when your marriage ends it affects your identity. suddenly things that were part of that, aren't anymore. maybe they're things you've done away with for good and maybe they're things you put in a drawer for later, but the point is that it's a big change. i knew i'd need to adjust to being a twenty-something single mormon girl whose beliefs mattered a LOT more this time around than they ever had before.

but then sickness came, and it took over everything. thoughts of living as a single person again and building that identity back were pushed aside by the basic thoughts and needs of survival. that has been largely the story of my life the past couple of years now. survival. making it from one day to the next. weeks. months. being sick became part of me the way that being married had. when it seemed there would be no end to my being sick, i tried to build my identity around it.

that identity was temporary. i knew it would be, because i have known from the beginning that i will not spend my whole life sick. but as the end has approached it's opened up a new challenge for me: take away the sickness and the survival and everything, and WHO AM I? that's the million-dollar question. that's what i spend hours and days trying to figure out. there are things that have naturally been a part of my personality for as long as i can remember, and there are new things. there are things that are ugly and things that are wonderful.

i find myself testing and pushing limits with everything, trying to establish my own boundaries as a person. am i kind? am i patient? am i dishonest or sincere? are my intentions good? are they all centered completely on ME? how much do i love the people i love, and what does that mean to me? all of these things i think about, and much much more. when all of this is over and i'm "free"...what will rise from the ashes of it?

i made a promise to myself after a dear friend visited me last winter. we hadn't seen each other in years and had just gotten back in contact shortly before she came home for christmas. it was one of the hardest times of my life and i was in a bad place. it took me awhile to admit to myself that i didn't want to see her because i was ashamed of what i'd become and how i was handling my illness and everything else. when she left, i promised myself that the next time i saw her, i wouldn't be ashamed of myself. i'd be someone i was proud to be. she loved me and still does, and i knew she could see me better than i could. when she came to visit just recently i realized that no matter how much further i still may need to come...i was no longer ashamed of myself. i'm proud of who i am.

it reminded me that even though i still have a lot to figure out when all of this is over...that i'm on the right path and in a good place, and that i will be exactly who i want to be and exactly who the people who love me know i can become. for better or worse (and i'd say better) overthinking has actually been a great blessing to me. i've been spurred on to rebuild the house that burnt down with something a million times better.  and not only better, but something that will stand as long as i do. something fireproof.

strong souls don't burn.

hope like a joshua tree (flowers are pansies) (see what i did there)

once upon a time, i had these amazing dreams.

they were epic and seemed endless, and i didn't care about how possible they seemed or bother to make them seem "real". everything was real to me and possible was just a silly word. the world was a big open place for me to explore, the way i used to explore the mountains above my house like an "indian" when i was a kid.

i'd grow up to be an indian alright, and the world would be my wikiup.

but then something weird happened. i got married. i got fat. life fell into this awful and plain routine, and all of the hope i had withered out of existence like an old dead flower. the world became small and boring and scary all at once. my dreams went into a closet on wire hangers, covered in dust and smelling of mothballs.

life went on this way for awhile. things happened, they came and went. my marriage dried up and died like an old, dead flower. i decided i needed things to be more durable than flowers from now on...when my hope awakened again, it was something different this time. it was a joshua tree.

you know what i mean...movies get "re-imagined" right? so...my hope was re-imagined. this is what it came out as:

 much more durable. much more reliable. scorching heat...crazy winds...droughts of living MUERTE (see what i did there....is this becoming redundant?)

nothing could get my joshua tree of hopes and dreams down. nothing. suddenly my dreams were back, bigger and grander and more absurd than i ever hoped they could be. i'd be the first gutless person to climb mt. hanawazaloo (probably not) and i'd live in a trailer in the middle of the mojave desert for awhile, doing nothing but writing and probably becoming a whiz at several musical instruments at the same time.....yes....my hopes returned.

on this night of a full moon, my hopes returned as joshua trees, reaching toward the sky with spiky little "i shall have it" hands....

will i grab everything i wish to grab with those hands? why yes, i plan to. can i do so without sounding totally pervy in the process? i don't know...i think i might have already done that....however....


i have dreams and hopes and big full moons to lasso....and i'll be ready. ready in may.....the world is mine.


never forget that flowers are pansies.

the end.

so apparently, i invented "the creep" ;)

here's the video evidence ;) i remember this night PERFECTLY, and that our whole concept of the weirdo little move i'm doing was EXACTLY like "the creep". i almost died laughing upon rediscovering this.

that wonderful moment where you find a video from 2007

....randomly on some old memory card i didn't know i still had. this is totally classic...an ex-boyfriend and my best highschool friend. the three of us hung out all the time and apparently (according to the video) had a blast doing nothing. this was right around the time i first got scout. we three would sit in my basement playing guitar hero, taking turns babying scout and taking him outside for potty training. funny how one little video brings back SO many memories.

here's the video in er...question...