All The Best, Jess

"Are you sure this looks good?" My friend asked one night in mid-2020, as we had a bit of a fashion makeover going on. "Come on, which one of us is attracted to men?" I joke, throwing another shirt at him.  Twenty minutes later, we're talking about women's fashion. I don't remember what in particular, just that I had remarked about some trend or style looking good. "Well how would you know?" My friend quipped, "You're not attracted to women." I'm not sure what anyone else experienced, but I could have sworn the entire room pulsed with energy. It wasn't tension, I wasn't scared my friend hurt me in anyway. But for a second, the room was utterly airless. "Uh. Well," I stutter. "That's a story for another time." I wasn't sure anyone in the room caught my comment, until our other friend looked up from the dishes he was doing and stared at me for a couple seconds. A minute later, my phone lit up ...

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 Itali...

 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 ...

As people, we have this inherent inclination to make everything beautiful. It's one of my favorite things about us: despite the odds and circumstances, we can find something interesting in whatever we are faced with. As much as I love it, I also know how dangerous and ignorant the need to romanticize everything can be. We create tropes out of trauma and pedestal people who never asked to be.  One of my biggest pet peeves is the question  But doesn't it help you be so creative? that often follows any comment about struggling to live with mental illnesses. I hate the way people talk about Van Gogh, that he ate yellow paint to be happy, I hate the idea that an artist must be tortured. When people bring up Robin Williams, it is always to talk about how the saddest people work the hardest to make others happy, when I talk about my own trauma people feel the need to commend my kindness, and I hate that tragedy and beauty are so closely tied to each other that you cannot speak of one...

It's been a while. I guess, with the pandemic and near daily apocalyptic happenings, I didn't know how to adequately write about anything. Between people not taking the pandemic seriously, renewed conversations about systemic racism and human trafficking, the tragedy that is the election this year, and a million other tiny fires along the way, I didn't know what the right thing to say was. Because I come from a relatively privileged situation, I often wonder if it even is my place to say anything--shouldn't I be using the position I am to amplify the voices of the people who are actively hurting?  However, I've gotten well and tired of sitting and watching and worrying that my contribution in this apparently penultimate era of the world will be sitting and watching and worrying and sharing a few posts by people I feel are more eloquent than I. So, I make an attempt at putting my two cents into this global conversation. Over the past few months, I have seen countless...

Hi, I'm Jess. Or Jessie, or really anything that isn't Jessica. I've been writing on this blog for roughly a year and a half--although the location changed about a year ago. Since everyone who I show this blog to knows me already, at least for the most part, I never really introduced myself on here because I figured it was redundant. However, over the last year and a half, a lot of things have changed. Like. A LOT. That's to be expected, I guess. As a person in their 20s, I think it's normal to feel like "self" is ill-defined and ever-changing. That being said, I do want to give something like an introduction, if only so I have a more overt record of who I am right now. So, this is me. When I was little, I believed deeply in magic. I was pen pals with the toothfairy, I wished on stars and dandelions and eyelashes, and I often looked out my window hoping to catch a glimpse of Peter Pan. I jumped off chairs, trying to fly, and I thought if I tried har...

You know, my last blog post started with a commentary on everything happening at once. I am a firm believer that God has a well-developed sense of humor that is heavily based on dramatic irony, because if I thought a lot was going on a couple of weeks ago, I really had no idea what was happening next. Just the other day, I was having a really hard time and crying to a friend, and I said "I wish I could have a break." It seems I needed to be clearer--I wanted a break from the thoughts inside of my head, not everything that distracts me from them. My college, as many it seems, has decided to go online for the rest of the semester. I understand and agree with the precautions...but I am an arts major. Online classes are tricky in my field, and I am also losing a lot of what makes an arts major so rewarding: so many of my friends have had to stop working and have lost performances of shows they have spent months working on. There was no real closure to any of this--there are peo...

Life has a funny way of happening all at once. To me, at least, it has seemed like I've been hit by a train of responsibilities, or at least things that seem urgent to focus on. In trying to decide where I needed to turn for priorities, I have often turned to prayer. Being human, it's really hard to see the full picture of what is happening in life and where it could lead. I can't see the future, nor do I have a perfect knowledge of where different choices could potentially go.  In searching for guidance, I received clear answers that by focusing on my faith and relationship with my Savior and Heavenly Parents I would be able to see where I should go and what I should do. At times this has caused some stress: I am a full-time student, and sometimes choosing to focus on things that aren't just school-related all the time seems very dangerous. However, I don't take spiritual counsel lightly, so I have made efforts in the last couple of months to really focus on und...

I have always been a person who sought faith. I've been an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints since I was baptized when I was eight years old, and in many ways my faith has shaped who I am and is the reason I am who I am today. I cannot imagine where I would be without it, because I have never lived without it. However, faith, the actual principle in believing in something I cannot see, is not an easy concept to grasp or practice. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with me knows that I thrive off of connection. What brings me the most joy in life are the relationships I form with other people--I strive to make deep or at least personal connections with as many people as possible, because I truly believe that is something we are starved of in this day and age, especially in Western culture. Because of this, I have spent the last six months realizing and working on a personal and true connection with my Savior Jesus Christ and my Heavenly Parents...

Today I was scrolling through Pinterest, as one does when they are twenty and it's a Friday night and they have nowhere in particular to be yet still want to procrastinate starting homework and being responsible. I spend a lot of time reading poetry and other pretty words, so my feed is pretty full of those types of posts, which makes me very happy. Then I ran across this quote: "you thought that being young would be many things. skipping school and running through fields, sitting in the sun with friends. going to parties, coming home late and not remembering it the next day. taking buses and trains, not caring where they went so long as you were with those few people. kissing cute boys, an dressing up to go on first dates. sitting in coffee shops, talking about everything and nothing. you expected adventures, stories that you could tell your grandkids one day. "you didn't expect to be stuck in the same monotonous routine. going to school, having to face people yo...