In less than twenty-four hours I will be flying over the Atlantic Ocean, off to start a Master Programme at Oxford University.
I'm excited, nervous, unsure, confident . . . everything you'd expect from a young, twenty-something woman about to take on the world with a notebook, a good pair of heels, a head full of brains, and a heart full of dreams.
I've been thinking a lot about how I want to portray this adventure on social media. Because I know that all of my adoring fans (or frenemies . . . I don't exactly know who actually reads this blog) will be interested to know what I am doing . . . but I don't want to be overbearing/annoying as I post things on Facebook, Instagram, etc. Like, I don't want to overwhelm everyone's Facebook pages with what I had for breakfast every morning. But I do want to put some pictures/thoughts/experiences I'm having whilst abroad. Because--personally--I like reading about people's adventures, especially when I care about those people.
Will I post frequently? No idea. I hope to write blog posts a couple times a week, but there are no promises. I'm going to be doing most of my musings via this blog. But don't expect me to link my blog to Facebook every time I write a blog post. If you do want to follow my adventures more regularly, feel free to subscribe to this blog (via email, Google plus, or via the subscribe button below), or follow me on Instagram @megochka7. I'll be using the hashtag #MegGoesToOxford to link my Oxford posts together.
Also, here are some things you should/should not expect to see on my blog and social media accounts.
Do Not Expect my Instagram account to be like Caroline Calloway's. Have you heard about her? She's studying Art History at Cambridge and basically posts about her life abroad on Instagram . . . but it's a year after the fact, so she can make it into a story. Which is cool and all that, but there are a few reasons why this will not be me:
1. I want to "gram" about my life in real time.
2. I am not as extroverted as she is.
3. I am not going to meet a hot Swedish boy who will fall in love with me while I'm at Oxford. Like, okay, fine. It could happen. But I'm not going to let the world know about it. I mean, it works for her and that's great, and they're dating and obviously mfeo (made for each other, if your Sleepless in Seattle references are rusty). But I don't feel comfortable broadcasting my dating life to the world. Like, that's just me. So . . . sorry. No hot Swedish boys will make their debut on my blog. Anyway. Moving on.
Do Not Expect me to apologize for an overabundance of Harry Potter/Hogwarts references. I will try to rein it in. But there are no promises.
Do Expect my contributions on social media to be relatively similar to what they are now--thoughts about life, God, and the universe. Only this time I'll be writing from my flat in Oxford.
Do Expect pretty pictures from England.
Do Expect awkward moments, epiphanies, deep thoughts, and preachy soapbox moments. Expect wonder, faith, doubt, friends (new and old), musings, optimism, hope, and belief.
In short, expect a girl trying to use and develop her gifts as she stumbles, falls, skips, laughs, learns, and writes her narrative.
A dear friend sent this quote to me. I want to keep it somewhere I can refind and refer to it often:
"God expects you to have enough faith and determination and enough trust in Him to keep moving, keep living, keep rejoicing. In fact, He expects you not simply to face the future (that sounds pretty grim and stoic); He expects you to embrace and shape the future--to love it and rejoice in it and delight in your opportunities.
"God is anxiously waiting for the chance to answer your prayers and fulfill your dreams, just as He always has. But He can't if you don't pray, and He can't if you don't dream. In short, He can't if you don't believe." --Jeffrey R. Holland "Terror, Triumph, and a Wedding Feast.
-It's raining right now. So it's a perfect day for hot borscht and warm herbal tea.
-They say that Ukrainians say goodbye and then never leave and that Americans leave without saying goodbye. I have kind of felt Ukrainian lately--I think that since I've stayed in Utah for so long without leaving for grad school that people think that Oxford is some kind of ruse and that I'm not really leaving. I promise I am leaving for England in less than a week. The two suitcases haphazardly filled with clothes and books are a testament of that.
-Also, goodbye parties and last-minute hikes with friends are always in order.
[Sorry if you hate this picture, Hannah. I can delete it if you'd like. I just thought it captured the whimsical, adventuresome, backwoods nature of our hike.]
-I forgot how good fresh fruit and vegetables from the garden are. Fresh peaches, fresh tomatoes, fresh squash . . . a garden is heaven.
-I'm watching The Devil Wears Prada right now. And I'm pretty sure Anne Hathaway would play me in a movie about my life.
-Also, this movie reminds me of how much I would just not fit into that world of high society. "Don't be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us." Well, not me, thank you very much.
-This time next week I'll be in London. If that's not exciting I don't know what is.
-But for right now, in the midst of packing and organizing and making sure everything is in its place, at least I have a pot full of homemade borscht. Made from fresh beets from the garden.
I don't really like meeting for church at 1 pm. It's soooo late (especially on Fast Sundays. Ah.).
But one of the perks of meeting late (and of living in Utah) is that you can go to things like "Music and the Spoken Word" in the Tabernacle on Temple Square.
So that's what I did with some friends today.
[Look at that sky. A perfectly blue September sky.]
I hadn't listened to "Music and the Spoken Word" for awhile (and it had been ages since I had gone up to a broadcast), and it was a beautiful, refreshing experience.
They sang "My Song in the Night," and I was just enraptured with its beauty. It just was--it was just perfect.
So yes. There can be some good things about meeting for church at 1 pm.
(I mean, I still stand by my argument that 9 am is better than 1 pm. But whatever.)
Part of packing up my life/organizing my room as I get ready for Oxford means that I find a lot of old notebooks and journals. I have too many of them. But the thing is, I'm not one a person who just collects pretty notebooks. I use them. All of them. Every single page.
I'm a writer. It's what I do.
My journals are . . . how do I describe them? They are similar to my blog posts, but they are more personal. I know that the more skeptical among you are saying, "Really, Meg? Because this blog can get pretty darn up-close and personal sometimes." I know that it can. Frankly, that's how I prefer it. I like to be as genuine as I can be without being overbearing. I have a way that I portray myself online, and for right now, I'm good with that--even if it does mean that I am more personal than some people would be comfortable with.
But, even though my blog posts can verge on the diary-esque at times, I hope that my thoughts and experiences are useful to people. I write with an audience in mind--and that audience includes both friends and family members who tell me that they enjoy reading my blog and myself, honestly. I try to write things that I would enjoy reading if they were on someone else's blog.
Anyway. My journals are much more personal than these blog posts. They include many more names, feelings, angst, dreams, hopes, etc. than I would ever feel comfortable sending into the vast universe of the Internet.
My journals are also full of more self-reflection than these blog posts.
Last night, I finished up a journal that I started about nine months ago. I always have this sense of melancholy accomplishment when I finish a journal. I also have this ritual I do--I like to look back and see how I have changed, what I have learned, and what I hope to improve about myself. It's part of the narrative I write about myself, I suppose. I want my narrative to be one full of growth and change, hope and redemption. (See this article in The Atlantic for a more-detailed analysis of this idea of how we shape our narratives--I think it's fascinating.)
When I write my journal posts, I am limited--I only have the understanding of what I experienced that day or that week . . . I can't see what the future holds. But when I look back on my old journal posts, I am an omniscient reader.
I know exactly what grade I will get on that essay, how that first date will go, or what graduate school program I will choose.
And I know how I have changed--for better or for worse--from those days before.
Often I laugh out loud when reading past journal entries. I laugh at how silly I am or how melodramatic. Sometimes I cry. I cry for the pain that my previous self experienced or inflicted on others. Sometimes I am impressed by the wisdom of a February 7th or April 16th Megan. Yet reading the entries from February 9th or April 28th help me realize how easily I forget. It's a cycle of epiphanies and amnesia, bitterness and healing, pride and humility, hard hearts and soft souls.
That's part of the story of the last nine months. That cycle. The give-and-take. Hope, despair, grief, healing, pain, joy, expectations, cynicism, anger, love . . . they are all a part of me. We can't choose what life or others throw at us. But we can choose what to do with our circumstances. Hard hearts can soften. Moments of struggle bring the greatest growth. And I can choose to be an agent and claim a space of choice.
Perhaps one of the biggest lessons I've learned this summer is that the cure to our maladies (particularly grief and heartbreak) rarely--if ever--come in some dramatic package. Rather, it is by doing the little things step-by-step and choosing to keep moving forward that we make it. Peace and healing take time. But they come. If we are searching, moving forward, and trying to reach out to others, healing comes. That I believe.
It is also impossible (and unhealthy) to try to make things the way they were before. We learn from the past, but we don't live there. As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland says, "We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced, then we look ahead, we remember that faith is always pointed toward the future."
Last September, I fell in love with a song from the musical Ragtime. It's called "Back to Before," and it is sung at a critical junction in a character's development. It is a moment of self-realization . . . and disillusionment. Listen to it--it will be worth your time, I promise.
[I'm also including a link here, just in case the video is taken away.]
Since I know that you most likely did not listen to it (although if you did, kudos to you--it's beautiful, isn't it?), here are the lyrics:
"There was a time our happiness seemed never-ending I was so sure that where we were heading was right. Life was a road, so certain and straight and unbending Our little road with never a crossroad in sight. Back in the days when we spoke in civilized voices Women in white and sturdy young men at the oar. Back in the days when I let you make all my choices . . . We can never go back to before. There was a time my feet were so solidly planted You'd sail away while I turned my back to the sea. I was content, a princess asleep and enchanted If I had dreams then I let you dream them for me. Back in the days when everything seemed so much clearer Women in white who knew what their lives held in store Where are they now, those women who stared from the mirror? We can never go back to before. There are people out there unafraid of revealing That they might have a feeling or they might have been wrong. There are people out there unafraid to feel sorrow, unafraid of tomorrow, unafraid to be weak . . . unafraid to be strong! There was a time when you were the person in motion I was your wife, it never occurred to want more. You were my sky, my moon, and my stars and my ocean . . . We can never go back to before. We can never go back to before!
I think that we all have multiple times in our lives when we have those startling paradigm shifts: we realize that life can never go back to the way it was before. Our "little roads with never a crossroad in sight" suddenly become tortuous. We realize that there are many winding roads with multiple crossroads . . . and we are forced to make difficult decisions. Decisions where we both lose and gain.
We wake up from our enchanted sleep and find that we have been been living someone else's dreams instead of living our own lives with purpose and fulfillment. Those "women in white who knew what their lives had in store" and who seemed to have all the answers fade from the foreground; their images become blurry and clouded from doubt and disillusionment. Life as before can never be the same.
But in those moments, instead of wallowing in self-pity--or even allowing ourselves to be paralyzed by shock--we need to choose action over cynicism or fear. We choose to move forward in faith, even while we grieve (or rejoice, depending on the context) for what was lost. We can choose to be "unafraid to be weak, unafraid to be strong." To live deliberately. To realize that doubt and disillusionment are parts of life--of growing up--but that doesn't mean we have to stay in those valleys.
We can claim our agency. And re-claim it time and again when life tries to swallow us whole.
Fight for our happiness.
As I was re-reading a few of my past journal entries, I came across one that I had written after a "we can never go back to before" moment. A paradigm shift, so to speak. And a deeper understanding as I wrestled through questions and struggles of my own. I hope you will indulge me as I share it hoping that these thoughts will be helpful for someone, somewhere:
"Where is the mercy? I think we all ask that--or we all will ask that--either cynically or out of despair at some point in our lives. Where is the mercy? Where is the mercy in the history of a world that is full of plague, war, rape, slavery, and oppression? Where is the mercy in our own lives? Our own lives which are also full of sorrow, disappointment, despair, and loss? Where is the justice? Where is the compassion? And where is the mercy? [. . .]
"Sometimes we wonder where God is, or why God "did" or "didn't" do something. But often, God doesn't do anything. Not in the sense that He's not there or that He doesn't care. But in the sense that He doesn't take away our agency. He allows us to make stupid decisions. So that we can learn. So that His justice can come to pass.
"I mean, God could send an angel with a flaming sword to stop every bad thing from happening--every genocide, every stock market crash, every war. He doesn't stop every break-up, every broken arm, every sickness.
"He could. And don't get me wrong--sometimes He does. Sometimes He does. But most of the time, He lets us choose. And our mistakes hurt others. And others' choices hurt us. He is the God who weeps. Who weeps because we hurt each other. Who weeps because we choose ourselves over Him. Who weeps because He loves us. But who loves us enough that He doesn't and will not take our agency away.
"So there has to be something powerful about agency--so powerful--that God will not take it away from us . . . that He will not force us. But that He will guide, direct, persuade, and ultimately weep--mindful of us and mindful that this use of our agency is the only way we can learn. It is the only way we can progress. Desiring and choosing the Lord's way helps us become like Him. But we have to really want it. He wants to know if we really want it. What are the desires of our hearts? Shto ty hochesh? What do you want?"
We can never go back to before. But we can move forward. We can choose to claim our agency and be the leading ladies and heroes of our own stories.
