Wake up Call

*Disclaimer*** I am about to reveal some very troubling tales of woes on to your delightful soul, if you feel the need to reprimand me than please do so in private. I do not wish for my page to be filled with negativity, I think I have enough of that to bring forward so please don’t add any of yours. If you are easily offended, you might just want to go gander at someone else’s blog of ignorant bliss, this is not a light read. Lastly, if you could just put your judgmental and narrow minded thoughts to the side until the entire piece has been scanned by your innocent eyes than that would probably serve you better.****

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

Society as well as our friends and family tend to put a lot of pressure on us when we are growing up, telling us who we should be, how we should act, what we should do, what we shouldn’t do…etc. I have always and will always be a very headstrong and opinionated person. I don’t like to be told how or what I should be, I want to figure it out all on my own. Unfortunately as you have read in my past posts, some of the roads I took would have definitely been better if they had been less traveled so to speak. I made a lot of mistakes, shit I still have errors throughout a lot of aspects of my life all of the time. Guess what though? I love it. I love having slip-ups, I like to mess up it makes me feel human and it makes me feel alive. I hate having this sensation that I am a robot just put in place in civilization and doing my part to make it to the finish line. That makes me feel like I am a piece of furniture, and it doesn’t make me have any pleasure inside. I am a firm believer that you need to have those ‘screw up’ moments; otherwise you are nothing but a soulless coward who is being used as a puppet to fill a number on this earth. It’s harsh, but honestly you can’t argue that it’s not the truth.

The world tells us who we should be, how we should act, yes. Eventually I got tired of the games I was playing and I ended up conforming in one way or another. Where I come from, it is very common that when you graduate high school you immediately get married, I am not exaggerating on that either. Seriously, so many of my classmates are hitched and pooping out little versions of themselves.  There is definitely a few of them who really need to quit it otherwise they are going to end up with their own reality show….real talk… and for the record dude…genetics were not on your spawns side. Anyways, this is what is considered normal for us back home anyways.

For me? Absolutely not.

 I had no desire whatsoever to get married and have little kids crawling all over my house.  But….once again, guess what…. I became that girl. I got sucked into a relationship where I believed everything was made of candy and rainbows and nothing in this god forsaken world could ever bring our sweet love down. Did you just throw up? Yeah, me too.

Gaaaaggghhh.

So there I was, just being in love and all that garbage at age 19 and here it comes my big and revealing secret that I have told but maybe five people in my entire life. I got pregnant! Wahooo, Mormon girl living in a Mormon society with a man out of wedlock having premarital sex and getting knocked up. The cherry on top of the shit cake I have been baking up for years. I wonder what they would say in church if they knew. I wonder what my mother would think. Well, rest assured none of that matters because nobody found out. It stayed between us, and the clinic I had to be drug to in order to ‘take care’ of it. God I hate that phrase. Now, before you pull out your judgmental words and try and throw them back in my face please take the time to shove all of them up your ass. Anything you could possibly have to say to that has been spoken by my own mouth into a mirror for years. I degraded and put myself down over the whole situation for a long time. In fact, I still struggle with it. I am still playing in my mind that rotten day, and all of the feelings that I felt for the weeks following. And when I was sitting in my apartment alone that night bleeding out the life that I had created and doubled over in pain, it finally hit me how alone and scared I was on this planet. Our reaction to a situation literally has the power to change the situation itself. It took me years to get over this tragedy; however I can finally be at peace with the whole thing now that I have changed who I was. I rebuilt myself from the hideous person that I was trying to be. You can’t change what’s going on around you until you change what is going on within you. How different I had planned my life out to be originally. This was not me, and this was not how things were supposed to go for me.

I woke up one day to find that my life had not gone as planned, I wasn’t accomplishing the goals that I originally had set out to, and most of all I wasn’t happy with the direction that I was headed towards. How did I get here?  When did I stray from the path and end up dodging towards a dead ended cliff? I am teetering on the edge; with one small shove I could be gone forever.  What do you do when you don’t know what to do anymore? I was finally given a wakeup call with this quote that I read while skimming articles in the doctor’s office one day, “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging”. It was certainly time for me to stop digging, and it was time to find someone who wouldn’t keep digging with me but would lift me up when I was slipping. The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too. I got lost when I started to adapt to what everyone thought I should be.

Leah, you can’t have a baby if you’re not married.

 Leah, you need to find someone who loves you for all of your problems.

 Leah, this is the best you can do so you better settle for it. 

Leah, you need to settle down and stop being so crazy.

How could I ever let them get to me? All of these phrases, these words, everyone was constantly telling me who or what I should be. I can’t believe that I ever listened to them in the first place.  I used to be better than that, I used to be someone who lived above the guidelines and never kowtowed to their “rules”. I was going to get back to who I once was and show them. Because waking up every day hating yourself, wanting to be out of the bubble of unhappiness you feel trapped in, is no way to exist. The greatest challenge in life is discovering who you are, the second greatest is being happy with what you find. I think that the second challenge is more important than the first. You don’t need to know who you are, you can spend a lifetime trying to figure it out, you just need to be happy with whatever journey you find yourself embarking on.

Whenever I find myself doubting how far I can go, I just remember how far I have come. I remember everything I have faced, all the battles I have won, and all the fears I have overcome. Though many people put me down for the choices I made after all of that fiasco, leaving my boyfriend, leaving my job, leaving my home, joining the military, finding a different path for myself….. I couldn’t hate myself for what I wasn’t; I had to start loving myself for what I was. I am not the perfect girl that you see strolling the streets downtown back home; I am not the flawless photogenic beaut that you see on social media updating her selfie photos from her latest cruise that her parents bought her. I’m striving for progress not perfection. I am not that girl, I have dirt under my nails from a day’s hard work, I have a heavy heart in my chest from combat and the things that I endured, I have scars from actual wounds sustained during the brutal reality of life that has variously knocked me down, and I have worry lines from fighting to keep my head above water. Everything that I am has been because I accomplished it on my own through my own hard work and effort. I stopped caring what others thought about me, I stopped letting people’s snide comments and rude comebacks get to me. I built myself from the ground up, and I did it all without the helping hand of another person or any person for that matter. Because in reality, you have nobody to count on but yourself. Sometimes you have to go through the worst to get to the best… I realized that through a lot of pain and suffering, it’s just you that’s it. So don’t ever turn your back on the person you’re meant to be, because that’s the only one who truly has your back in the first place. I love the person that I have become because I fought to become her. The strongest actions for a person is to love themselves, be themselves and shine amongst those who never believed you could. I now realize that I am stronger because of my hard times, wiser because of my mistakes, and happier because of my sad experiences. I know now, I will never sacrifice who I am for someone else or whatever the world thinks that I need to be. 

I think I like who I am becoming now, I think I like myself a whole lot more.