All The Best, Jess

My dad and I, over the last several months, have been collecting quotes and moments of quiet heroism. These aren't the banner moments of a story. It isn't underscored by a symphony and highlighted by dramatic shifts in lighting. It's a moment where someone looks at the scenes around them, realizes that if anyone is going to do anything, it has to happen now, and makes a humble choice to be the difference. My dad described it as the moment where someone "decides to be more than what they are".  One of the quintessential moments that built the framework of this trope is Frodo's declaration that he will take the Ring to Mordor "though [he does] not know the way". I've started seeing similar moments everywhere, of course in the books I read and movies I watch, but more often in the people I see around me. I have no shortage of examples that surround me when I think of heroics. It's a castmate taking a moment of silence to bring up a concern she h

I have this knot in the center of my chest, where my ribs meet. I don't know if anyone else could feel it, but I can't help but notice it's presence. It's there, whenever I breathe in, and I push past it to breathe out. I can't escape the extra weight. It flares up whenever someone asks me how I am, whenever someone stops for a second and really looks at me. I choke. I would rather no one sees me, on days like this. Not in a big "I don't matter" kind of way, but more that I am so lost in my mind that it would be easier if I didn't matter, because I do not want to be a hurricane for anyone else. Here's what I do on days like today: 1. I keep breathing. I push past the weight and let air fill my lungs. I try to not hold on to it so tightly.  2. I listen to the music that I want to. This looks a little different day by day, week by week. Right now, some songs I have on repeat are "Surface Pressure" (Encanto), "Why" and "Co

I want to paint you a picture of a world.  It is not a perfect world. It never could be.  The lion is not yet laying with the lamb, nor is there perfect harmony. Discordant notes sound across the horizon; sometimes smoke blurs the sky. Sunflowers climb along side chain-link fences, skylines are peppered with scaffolding, and somewhere, someone looks out a train window with tears streaming down their face.  It is not a perfect world. It never could be. But in this world, a Latter-Day Saint finds herself inside a Catholic cathedral, in the Chapel of Our Lady of Zion. She is trying to come to terms with tragedy, and with all of the complexities that comes from living as a person striving for perfection in an imperfect world, with an imperfect body and mind. She isn't sure how to balance justice and mercy within herself. Grace has always been so easy to grant others, and so impossible to give herself. She is looking at the candles, all but one unlit, and thinking of her Italian ancesto

 In the musical adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame , the finale begins with the line "The world is cruel, the world is ugly, but there are times and there are people when the world is not" and it is this line that has been bouncing around my skull for the last several weeks as life has continued to barrel on relentlessly and often at an exhausting place. Due to some events in my life and in the world, the last year and a half it has been very easy to see the cruelty and ugliness of the world around me and the ways I feel I still fall short. However, over the last several weeks, this rather bleak outlook has begun to take an ever-crushing toll on myself, and I've found enough desperate strength to begin and see my way out of it. It isn't easy. But I am lucky enough to have friends that happen to be the best people I know, and throughout our constant navigation through relationships with each other, I have found so many times when the world is not everything I fe

Hello my dear friends. It's been a while. I never stopped writing, exactly, but I did need to take a break as the world inside of my head became very chaotic and convoluted. I feel a lot of regret at the things I wanted to write that I never did and have since forgotten, but I know that if I spend more time trying to recover all of that I will never write anything new. And I have a lot of new thoughts, a lot of things I feel the need to articulate at this point in time, where I am now. It is certainly a different place than I was a year ago; it's for the better that way. I think like most people, the last year has been incredibly frustrating, scary, and at times, infuriating. I think I've felt overcome by sorrow and anger more in the last several months than I have in my entire life, which, as someone with very big emotions, is certainly saying a lot. Beyond the obvious struggles that I know we can all relate to, my own personal life has been rather tumultuous, with various

Yesterday, I studied the scriptures with my pandemic bubble on the grass by the duck pond. The past few days it has finally started to settle into fall temperature wise, and it was one of the all-around prettiest days I'd seen in a while. While winters are hard to weather, being that I am still very unaccustomed to the cold, I have to agree that fall is absolutely stunning here. Sometimes it's still weird to me that I am so comfortable with these people that I have essentially tackled life with for the last seven months. There are more and more moments lately where I can speak my mind or be myself and I don't replay the conversations over and over and over again, berating myself for living and taking up space. Of course, I am nowhere near perfect, and still have many moments where I relive too much, but I've made a lot of progress and that's really important to me. Two of us are wearing yellow. I just recently decided that I really loved that color, and I still get