All The Best, Jess

 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...