The moment I wake up, before I put on my make-up...

I've been reading about Alma the younger in the scriptures lately and I feel a really strong connection with his story. I feel like I can relate to him, and understand what his regrets and his desires may have been as well… and I think he is an inspiration to all those who have known the truth and have chosen to fall away. I’m not gonna lie, to marry a man like Alma the younger… that would be awesome!

I love the idea of becoming the type of woman that can possibly one day achieve that. If I stick to what I'm doing right now, and do a lot more improving as well, I may just be able to find a man that is truly a man of god, and that will be able to take me on a righteous path to the places where we should go. :) A man that I can not only grow old with, but a man that I can look forward to an eternity of happiness with.

I want to do as much good as I can in this world before I go... I know I've done a fair amount of bad for those around me, but I want to make up for that and then some. I want to know that I've saved lives, and assisted people in finding who they are, assisted them in aligning themselves with the path that leads to who they want to be. I believe now that I'm on my way to becoming that very woman. :) Thank goodness for that! haha

One Day at a time, and I Say, We'll be just fine.

Today is my five monthiversary J as my awesome friend so lovingly named it… I’m really excited to be this far into my recovery!

I’m nervous as well… and a little lonely. Luckily though the further I get from where I was the more I remember the pain rather than the pleasure… and of that pain I remember enough about the friendships I had to know that I am currently in far less pain than I would be in if I was still out there. I’m blessed every day to be this far away from it, and getting further every second I choose to stay. I’m clean J and not just sober… I’m really, really clean. I feel clean on the inside. I feel like my soul took a bubble bath and the tar just washed away. Obviously it didn’t happen like that, it was much harder and took much more work… but I never thought I would be where I am now. I never thought I could feel the way I feel about myself right now… ever. I am just so… thankful.

There is a lot of pain associated with this side as well. I mentioned feeling lonely… and it’s definitely not because I’m alone or because of the type of people I’m surrounded by, because they are definitely of a different caliber. But I think it has more to do with the fact that I am used to being filled with a different light. This light that I have now, though twenty times brighter and more filling, is not filling the places of myself that I’m used to having filled… and so they still feel empty. Though a somber note, I know that this feeling will pass with time as I let go of what I believe that I need and hold more strongly to what I know I want. I want purity J I love purity and the wonderful feeling it leaves me with at the end of the day, when I know that I’ve done what I truly needed to and did not falter from it.
But that’s not necessarily the only pain… I feel pain every day for the people I remember loving from that world… The people I still think of daily and want nothing more than to go back and find. I still love them… I still miss them. I still know every day that what I felt in my heart for them was true and pure… and though the person that I was didn’t show it so clearly, my heart wants nothing more than to know that they are safe. It pains me every day that I have no idea.

525 Thousand, 600 Minutes.... How do you measure?

I love my savior, and I love my Heavenly Father. I love them for the family that they are to me. I love them for what they have given me every day of my life, and that every day I wake up and though things may feel or seem bleak, they continue to give me strength and they continue to bless my life with beauty. I have cared so much about what other people have thought. The more I do the right things the more I fear the consequences of my actions. If my life is going nowhere at all, what is the fear in what there is to lose, or the hope of the promise of what might be gained? There is none. I have no fear of the consequences for I care not of what the outcomes will be. But when I put more effort into my life, when I strive for more... it means more. It holds more sentiment within it, and it is followed by so much more brilliance or defeat that it cannot under any circumstances be viewed as meaningless.

I want stability. My desires for myself are simply to be able to be, and be successfully. To live free, free of my fear of what lay ahead of me. free of the constraints of failure, and able to enjoy the delicacy of a properly constructed life. In the moment when my life reaches that point, it will be visible, it will be a change that others can see... for I will live delicately. :)

....But then, is a delicate life what fits me? Is it just that I have never lived delicately, is that why I feel it may not work? How can I know until I try?

Even if it is not exactly what matches what I want to become... what better place to start from than 90% of the way there? :)

I don't know what I want because I don't know what the "personal best" I'm searching for feels like, and moreover I don't necessarily know what it feels like to continue past it... to achieve more. I wonder if I would become stagnant... complacent... I know I have in the past. And by far the hardest fall, a shock wave that reinvented my Richter scale, came immediately after I had achieved a personal best and capped myself off at it. As if the rest of my life was going to be spent simply maintaining the 100% best I had just discovered. That did not sit well in my life. Especially when I started to fall... because it happened fast, and quietly. I almost didn't even recognize what was happening until I was almost pinned to the ground under the weight of a thousand pounds of pressure. I had completely forgotten that there was more to be had... and that I had only achieved success in one area of my life, while utterly neglecting every other facet of myself.

more on this later... It had just been far too long so I thought I would post a release :)

It's a new year with a new life, and creating a new story with a new-found understanding of grace, the atonement, and simply... who I am. :)