Facebook Note: Days Like These

Written and published to Facebook on September 4th, 2012

Author's Note: I was heavily considering not copying this over to my blog. As I said before I started doing this, I don't really want to make this particular blog be about me as a person; whatever story I want to tell through this ongoing amalgamation of words isn't the story of my life. I want to tell a story more of what I learn, and while I do include some personal experience, that's not the focus here. Unlike my fictional stories that I like to make focus on the characters themselves (sometimes even more than the plot), this is a story where I want you to concentrate on the themes and truths that you glean from the words.

This Note tells of a personal story. I wasn't sure about bringing this into my blog. But after thinking about it, I see that I was in the process of learning some things, and those things are worth sharing. Two of them that I will give away to you right now: It's not enough to live your dream, because you might find out that the dream isn't what you intended it to be (I came up with that idea before I ever watched the movie Tangled); and that pity is not the best technique for helping someone to heal emotionally.

Anything more than that is what you will see for yourself.

Sometimes, I have to write a Note like this one. I don't know whether I'll keep it, but I have to say it right now.

You see, sometimes you have to dispense with the word games, with the elaborate magniloquence, and the poetic structure that you try to create when you write. Sometimes you need to stop worrying about cadence and grammatical perfection and malapropisms. Sometimes you need to stop hiding behind poems or "fictional narratives," which means anything from a fable with a moral in it to a story that has a theme or metaphor to a possible story about the real future.

On days like these, sometimes you just have to open up and be honest.

I think that I'm talking to all of you on Facebook in general because at this moment, I have no other people to turn to, with the exception of praying to God. Believe me, I will be doing that later on, but for now I thought I would say hi to you all. How are things?

Well, on my side of things, things aren't going all that badly; I could list off the number of hurdles that I've leapt and the hoops that I've... sorry, I said I was going to just be honest instead of hiding behind the word games. Things are going rather well. I have had a lot of obstacles in the past 14 months in getting to where I am right now - a student at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. To tell you how difficult it is I would have to tell you the whole story, but I'm not doing that right now. Just know that I've overcome almost all of the obstacles of getting here, so far. In the most recent triumphs, I was able to get some of my money and thus be able to buy most of my textbooks, and I just signed on to have a place to live while I'm here - so I'm not going to get deported from the USA for being homeless! That's a relief!

Yet I have to say this if I'm committing to being honest and not hiding behind any of the shrouds that writers use. So, here it is: for some reason that I don't really understand, I hurt right now. A lot. I feel like there is a huge weight dragging me downwards and backwards. I feel the threat of despair seeping into my mind, and I'm trying to keep it out, but this is like trying to hold back a flood with a sponge.

To be honest, for the past few days of being here, I have started to wonder what it is that made me strive so hard to get to where I am right now. When I first thought that I wanted to set a goal of getting into BYU, I remember what the reasons were. I had recently come home from my full-time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I missed it so much that I cried at least five times as much as I did when I started it; when I left home in 2008, I knew I would be coming back. When I left my mission in 2010, I knew that it was gone. That stung for a long time; it was through all of the trials and blessings of being a missionary that I really learned for the first time who I was.

I've said that my first year in the United States taught me who I was on my own.

My second year taught me who I was with help from above.

Now, my third year is teaching me something different.

Before I get to that, though, I need to explain: in this third year I wanted to somehow duplicate the experience of those previous two years; I learned to be comfortable with myself as a person and as someone with the potential to become so much more while I was engaged in a certain kind of lifestyle and a very particular kind of work. Missionaries are unique in many ways, not the least of them being the number of things they sacrifice - everything from the freedom to grow longer hair, to the freedom to have romantic relationships, to their own first names. Yet every sacrifice yielded a blessing of something else. As I have known the principle of sacrifice, it isn't giving something up as much as it is an exercise of faith, making an investment before you have evidence that you will be recompensed.

So, I initially wanted to put myself back into that lifestyle where I would be called upon to act in the most exact obedience I could, to exert myself mentally and emotionally in ways that I didn't think I could do unless I was doing something much like being a missionary. And then there was the final thought that came with me as I returned home as a missionary: I had nothing to lose and a lot to gain. After all, what had become of my old friends? What had become of the land whose face had now changed? What was there that was worth experiencing here, in my own country, in the place where it's been said "a prophet is without honour?"

At the time, I rashly thought that by leaving my homeland and sojourning at BYU I would be gaining everything and not losing much of anything. Now I can see differently. Where the first year in this nation just south of Canada taught me who I am on my own, and the second taught me who I am when I let my Lord make me more, this third year has thus far been teaching me who I am when I do as Link the Hero of Time once did: "left the land... [and] was separated from the elements that made him a hero." When I toss aside all that I was connected to at home, my opportunities and obligations to serve, the natural world that I love, the connection to most of the memories I have, I feel like I've cut myself off from a piece of me.

I think I've finally figured out why it is that every time I move out of a place where I have been living, no matter how short a time, I look behind me and scan for the thing I've left behind. Sometimes I feel that I've left behind a physical object, and I am right. But even more often than that, I don't find anything physical that I have forgotten, and I am left to wonder why I feel like I'm forgetting something, like I'm leaving something behind that I ought to take with me. I think, having looked at this most recent move, that it's because I've left behind a tiny sliver of my identity. Something in me stays attached to the place that I leave behind. Some part of me chips off and binds to the lands that were so good to me and to the people that were even more so. No matter how thoroughly I search, I will never completely get rid of the feeling that I'm not taking everything with me, because quite simply, I'm not.

And thus is me. Right as I prepared to leave home and come here, I started to seriously consider what I was about to leave behind, and wonder why I had been so anxious to leave it all. What was I hoping to gain in a foreign land with a people that are even now a little bit foreign to me, that I assumed I couldn't receive at home? Respect? Friends? Self-acceptance? An adventure?

...Y, indeed?

...As Arnold of the Magic School Bus used to say, "Maybe we should have stayed home today."

So, Facebook and the people therein, this is what I want you to know. I wanted you to know that I'm grappling with the thought that maybe I regret what I have chosen. Maybe this doesn't make me as happy as I thought it would, now that I'm here. Maybe I should have looked for a chance to stretch myself in a different way, shown a little more patience, and been content with all that I had already been blessed with. I can't very easily back out right now - well, I could, but I don't think that would be in my best interests overall, when I consider how many hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that have had to go into this venture. Now I just have to live with this decision and keep working at finding the faith to think that all will work out for the best. In the meantime, it's probably going to keep hurting, and I'm probably going to feel those invisible nets from my old foes Despair and Pain.

Rather than post these depressing status updates that hint that something is wrong, rather than wait for you to talk to me and suddenly find that things are not going well on my end, rather than put symbolism into a poem that most of you would probably never read, much less interpret, I'm trying the route of honesty. I'm not really trying to get pity; pity helps in the same way that water helps you when you've eaten something spicy, or you use duct tape to repair a boat. That is, it's a temporary solution that doesn't help in the long run, and the second it's gone you find that the problem remains and is just as severe as ever. All I want to say is how things feel, and hope you understand. If you choose to do something as a result of that, thanks. Pity isn't what I want or need, though; whatever I need from you is sure to be more profound than an expression of remorse for what I'm going through. Anyways, if nothing else, you can see what resides at the core of some of the things that I write. This is how some inspiration looks when it's not cloaked. (Not very inspiring, is it?)

I hope that you're doing well out there, all of you. May the Lord watch over you, just as I hope He does for me. Let peace be unto your souls, and as always:

Love and courage to you,

[TAB III]