My Final Post

Unfortunately, my blogging days are nearing an end. I may continue to post later on but not as much as I have been. So before I leave you until… well the next time I post (probably a while from now) I’m going to tell you how blogging has changed me. At the beginning of the year I had big hopes for my blog, such as posting every day. Later I found that it was better to post when I had something to rant about than to try to 2-3 times a week. Quality over quantity I suppose.

Being able to write out my problems has changed me in many ways, and I thank you all for reading and actively commenting on my posts. It truly has helped me know that I am not alone in this. One of the biggest things this blog has done for me is helped me realize what I want and what I need. I am making a big change in my life and moving to Salt Lake where my dad lives and my horse is boarded. My mom will be renting a house down there and I feel that it is going to relieve so much stress that the stretch of Parley’s canyon causes me. Lately I’ve been feeling like my life is so spread apart, things that I enjoy are mainly in my hometown, Salt Lake. It’s not that I don’t absolutely love and adore all of my friends in Park City, and it will be very hard to not see their faces every day. But I had to realize that this is a change I need to make for me.

So this is how I got to where I am right now. I have learned to share my problems with those I trust, and take action in trying to make myself happier and taking opportunities that I have and letting them prosper.

I hope that you have learned something from my blog too. Or at least been inspired in some sort of way. I do not just write for me, I write for the unwanted, unappreciated, unknown teenagers alike. But remember, someone in the world you might not even know yet needs you. You may feel unwanted, unappreciated, and unknown but your life has purpose. Maybe you will never find out what your purpose is but if you take nothing else away from my blog, at least take away the fact that you are important.

So thank you to all of my readers, you have helped me in ways you may never understand and I thank you for that.

Photo Courtesy: Word Press

My Life is Anything But Perfect

For some reason I am unable to fathom how some people seem to think that I live a perfect life that has nothing to complain about. Now I will admit that I complain more than I should, and I’m working on it, and I’m not advocating for you to think life is terrible, but I’m also asking you to not think anybody’s life is perfect. The truth is, everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. So be kind, always. So I am going to talk about a few, not all, of my battles.

The first thing I’m going to talk about is depression. The fact that I struggle daily with depression is inevitable. I can hide it from people’s eyes but I can not evade the fact that it's true. There are many different events going on that factor into this so I’ll talk about a few key ones. A large contributing factor is that I lost a lot of key people in my life all at once. It was unbearably hard on me and I wanted the pain to end. Sometimes I felt I would have done anything to make it end. I wrote in my journal once “I’m so fucking tired. So fucking tired of this. I want it to end.” I have decided to not go too far into the next reason but I will mention it, because it was significant. I don’t have a stellar relationship with my mother. We do not always get along, and it is tiring to live with someone you are always fighting with. But even more so, it’s tiring to have such a strong love for a person you are constantly fighting with. In another journal entry I wrote “She is never happy with me, at least not for long. I am so tired. I want to stop being tired. I want to stop pretending I’m happy. I want to stop trying. I want to it to stop. I want it to stop. I want it to end.” I want you to know that I have thought of self inflicted harm but I have never come close to attempting.

Secondly, stress has driven me to insanity and keeps on adding the miles on. Mainly stress causes me migraines. Migraines have taken over my life. The best way to explain what they've done to my memory is making an analogy. Let’s say my life is a glass window in the back seat of a family car right beside the car seat of the youngest child. As children I’m sure you remember swiping your sweaty little fingers tips and palms all over that back window. Your parents would always scold you, for now they need to clean the window from the greasy streaks. But in my case, no one is there to clean the smudges. Sometimes I have flashbacks, usually of insignificant events, but other than that migraines have made grades six through nine a complete fog. Migraines have pulled me up by my roots. Some people say I’m one of the most down-to-earth people they’ve ever met. I find this quite ironic because I have such a down-to-earth disposition, but truly it’s so hard for me to stay grounded. I am in wonderland half the time, just sitting in the back of my head. I have an extremely small attention span now, I have loads of nervous energy and anxiety, and truth be heard, I wouldn’t be surprised if my pediatrician diagnoses me with ADHD. The stress amounts I undergo are to the point that at any given moment you asked me to cry, it would take me anywhere from a minute to a few seconds to burst into tears. I am on the verge of tears perpetually.

When you add these two things together, they make for quite the ordeal to be dealt with for one small fifteen year old girl that already has to think about getting decent grades in school if she wants to have a nice future ahead of her. The coalition of these two tribulations has caused me a variety of other issues such as malnutrition (not due to or related to any eating disorder), depreciation in grades and school work, issues with close friends, and loss of temperament control.

I want to acknowledge the fact that there are people out there with much worse problems than mine but I also believe that you should never degrade your emotions just because someone else out there is dealing with something worse. Point is, don’t assume someone’s life is flawless and remember, everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind, always.

Photo courtesy: Electric Sekki

Who Revolves Around Who?

The Sun, something so vital to our existence, to the way we live out our life. We have been taught about it ever since we were young, the blindingly bright sphere of fire that floated above us in the sky. The main source of energy on this Earth, the reason we are alive. Yet it isn’t grammatically correct to capitalize it. It is said to be spelled “the sun” but I am here to tell you differently.

We are to capitalize the first letter of our names because we are proper nouns. But in reality our significance is incomparable to the Sun’s. We are small individuals thriving off of the Sun and the Earth. We did not work for these things, they are our guardians, our care takers, what we actually need for survival. Yet us insignificant little destroyers of nature can’t even let the fucking Sun have a capital letter? We are so selfish, ignorant, self indulgent to the point we give our underserving selves capitalization yet the Sun and the Moon are to be uncapitalized.

Let’s play a little trivia: what would happen to the world if we suddenly disappeared? Whether you like it or not, this wouldn’t be a tragedy but rather a regular loss, in the Earth’s point of view anyways. Elimination of a species from Earth, it’s got it’s own word, extinction. That’s all it would be, another case of mass extinction. Next question: what would happen to the world if the Sun lost flame and flickered it’s last beam of light? This would change everything. Not only would we die, but the Earth would be on its way to losing every last species that inhabits it. Earth would be just another empty, cold, planet. So may I ask you now, which of us is more important? The Sun, or us as individuals?

Businesses, cars, magazines, books, countries, people, clothes lines, street signs, the list goes on and on. We throw capitalization at just about everything and anything in this world, significant or not. Except for the Sun. The one thing that deserves to be spelled as if it were the king of the world, because it was, because it is, because it always will be. Is it so hard for us humans to give the damn thing that keeps us alive a capital letter? So I realize my one blog post most likely won’t change the rule but if you read this all I’m asking you to do it take just a moment longer to when writing “the sun” and make it “the Sun.” And remember, the Sun doesn't revolve around us, we revolve around it. Therefore, do it for the thing that our life literally revolves around (Sun puns ?)

Photo courtesy: Houghton

Drawing the Line Between Childhood and Adulthood

If you are a teenager I’m sure you’ve heard an adult telling you that you need to handle things like an adult would or assuring you that you are an adult now and you need to act like it. It’s irritating to hear this. I’m not an adult, I’m already mature beyond my age, and now you’re asking me to be an adult.

No.

I am not an adult, I am not even close, I have so much more to learn and to experience in life before I even want to think about classifying myself as an adult. And in the meantime I’m going to live out this limited time I have to be a child. To make dumb decisions and be recklessly stupid. These are my trial years to life and I’m going to take them to the limit.

Technically, by doing so I am preparing my self for adulthood. If I only experience being a good kid all throughout childhood then there’s a higher probability that it will be during adulthood that I begin to make illogical decisions. The problem is that my life won’t be as forgiving when I don’t have parents paying for my care. If I make a shitload of shit decisions when I’m an adult and having to handle my own well being, it’s not going to end well.

Now I’m not encouraging for you to go out and do things that will most likely impact your future life badly. Don’t go get addicted to drugs and literally make every bad decision possible, but don’t feel too guilty over every single bad one you make.You need these less than great choices to learn what it feels like to mess up. No one can expect you to make all good choices. No one can expect you to be an adult at fifteen. Even so, adults don’t make all good decision either. So really, adults aren’t much to strive towards being. No offense.

So the next time an adult tell you to be more adult like in your decisions, the way you act, or anything similar to so, please remind them you are not an adult. Look them in their eyes and say “I am not an adult, you can not expect me to be one.” It’s time to draw the line between childhood and adulthood. Who really wants to be an adult anyways?

Stay young my friends, stay young.

Photo courtesy: Children's Ministry

Being an Equestrian

Let’s talk about horse back riding. One of the most misunderstood sports on earth.
“It’s not a sport” they say.
“Does it even take muscle?” they ask.
“It takes skill but it doesn’t take strength” they assume.
If I could put every single human being that said one of these things on a well trained horse and ask them to be able to control it beautifully, elegantly, and still manage to take it over a 3 foot fence they’d be wishing they were dead.

“The horse does all the work” they state. No horse chooses to canter or gallop or even trot for heavens sake when there’s a human casually sitting on it’s back. If you let go of the reins you wanna’ know the first place my horse is going to go? The nearest food source. If food isn’t near by then she's going to paw the ground and slowly fall to the arena sand where she will take a nice roll. So that doesn’t make much sense does it… how do I control where she is going if it’s not with the reins? FREAKING GOD DAMN LEG MUSCLES HUN. That’s how. Legs. How do you slow down? That’s when abdominals and butt muscles come into play. Still don’t believe me? Then how can I ride my horse in a circle, cantering with no saddle, no bridle, and my hands in the air?

Video courtesy to Arielle Smith

I honestly have no idea how it came about that people think that controlling an animal that’s 10 times larger than you is easy. Since when has it been easy for some one to move something that weighs 1,000 plus pounds? That’s what I thought, never.

So everyone that still thinks that being an equestrian isn’t a sport, I have a question for you. Is soccer a sport?
Of course soccer is a sport! You run very fast and you have to have a lot of stamina and be a fast runner. But you also must have skill to get the soccer ball to go where you want it to go!
Okay, well take this from a girl that played soccer seriously and competitively for 8 years. I never once got as sore from playing soccer as I do riding. Soccer is in our comfort zone as human beings. When a mom puts her little kid on a soccer field they don’t know that they have it easy. Everyone gasps when the soccer ball hits a kid in the gut. But nobody ever died from a blow to the face from a ball. But when parents allow for their kids to sign up for riding lessons they sign a waver. The waver reads something along the lines of ‘you may not sue if your kid dies taking place in this activity.’ Then they watch as their kid gets on to an animal with a mind of its own. A beast.

Riding takes more energy, more muscle, more skill, than any other sport I have ever experienced, you just can’t even compare it to a sport as rigorous and riding.

The Golden Strands to my Not-so-Golden Past

I am cutting my hair today.
I am cutting away my past.
I am cutting it away.

I am cutting away the hair that the people that have left me touched. I am cutting away years and years of hair.
I am cutting it away.

I am cutting the ties that keep me together with my past.
I am cutting away my youth.
I am cutting it away.

I am cutting my hair today.
I am cutting away the hair that I love so much.
I am cutting it way.

I am cutting away something I am so emotionally attached to. I am cutting away 12 inches of hair. I am cutting away three people and three years. So don’t shame me for my choices. I am cutting my hair not for the look of it. I am cutting my hair to surrender in this fight to hold on to those who didn’t. These golden strands from my not so golden past. They will be someone else’s. Don’t shame me for how I’m going to look. You don’t understand what I’ve been through. I would scrape off my skin if I could. But not even my skin was there when the people I loved so much were. That skin has died and turned into the undesired dust on my little dark oak coffee table. It was swept away, but my hair, it is very much still here. The hair my papa used to stroke. The hair that my friend used to braid. It’s still here. And so am I. And here I plan to stay. No matter how much I hate it, no matter how much I want to leave, I will stay. But my hair will not. I want it to be given to someone who needs it. And I don’t need it. I want to need it.
I need it to be given away.
But I want it to stay.

I am giving away my hair today.
I am giving away my past.
I am giving it away.

No matter how much I want it to stay,
I am giving it away.

Please know that I love you with all of my heart,
but no matter how much I want to need you to stay,
I need you to go;
I need you to go with peace

I am giving away my hair today.
I am giving away my past.
I am giving it away.

168 Hours in a Week

“You’re lazy.”
“You don’t work hard.”
“You think the world revolves around you.”
“You get all of what you have handed to you.”
“You get good grades because of the school that you go to.”
“You ride horses? You must be rich.”
“You’re a selfish little bitch.”
This pretty much sums up what people think of me. This sums up what I hear every week, or even every day. It makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me cry. It makes me feel unappreciated. It has caused me to have depression, at the youngest of ages.

I first experienced depression in sixth grade when people told me “You’re so skinny, you’re going to die.” Or they would ask me “Are you anorexic?” or “Do your parents feed you?” Nearly every day I would go home crying my eyes out because people would bully me about how much I weighed. I began to develop clinical migraines from the amount of stress that I was experiencing.

In seventh grade it only went downhill. First my grandpa died, he was the closest family member I had after my parents and his death rattled me. I never let myself grieve his death. I forced myself to forget that he even ever existed. This wasn’t by choice, it was because at the time I was already emotionally unstable, and I wasn’t about to let myself fall into the deep pit of grief that I knew was awaiting me. But this did not fix my depression, and next my very best friend left me the summer after seventh grade. She went from FaceTiming me for hours at a time each day to not ever texting me back. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, all I knew was that another huge people figure in my life was gone.

In eighth grade I developed what I called separation anxiety. When I felt alone, too alone, I would have an anxiety attack that would begin with me feeling nauseous, then shaking, then full out balling, rocking back and forth on my tailbone as my whole body shook like an earth quake. I got migraines every one to two weeks, and school didn’t help.

I forced myself to forget about all of this, just like I forced myself to forget my papa (grandpa). But it all came back the other day when I was with my friend. We were talking about the sadder aspects in our lives when it all came rolling back into my brain. How hurt I really am, how messed up I really am, how bad my depression actually was and still may be. But I got so goddamned good at hiding it from others that I could hide it from myself too. I had ignored it, shoved it into the very back of my thoughts, but it was still there. School gives me no time to handle my own personal needs. I have no time to have a mental health day. I have no time to waste crying over what my life actually is because I spend approximately 40 hours at school, 21 hours on homework, 12 hours at the barn, 10 hours eating, 56 hours sleeping, 2 hours showering, 5 hours getting ready for school, and 4 hours on the bus every single week. Do you know how many hours are in a week? 168 hours. Do you know how many hours those numbers add up to? 168. This is how I spend my weeks. Do I have enough time to be stressed? To take a minute to just focus on breathing? No. So am I lazy? Is using every single hour of your week that you can for productive purposes what you call lazy?

My cat being adorably lazy, as always.

To the Unwanted, Unappreciated, Unknown Teenagers Alike

For this blog assignment, we were asked to write about our ideal reader, or who we are writing to when we write these posts. “It has to be a person that is famous in their field” reads the rubric. But I do not write for a person that is famous, and I do not write for a person that is professional in what they pursue. I write for teenagers alike to me. I write for the people that aren’t anything special to our society. I write to you because I’m one of you, and I understand what it feels like to be unwanted, to be unappreciated, to be unknown. So if I am given an F on this assignment, I will take full responsibility without regret, because I will not bullshit my way through this assignment, and write to you about someone I don't even care about, to get an A on my report card. So here it goes.

To the unwanted, unappreciated, unknown teenagers alike,
I admire you for putting up with the hell thrown on your shoulders. I admire you for having to listen instead of speak for the first decade or more of your life. But I admire you more if you have found your voice. And I admire you even more if you have found your place and stuck your feet in the ground. But I admire you if you are lost just as well. I admire you for always having to care more about your future than what is happening right now. And I admire you for being so strong when others think you are weak. I admire you for not letting yourself fall when people push you down. I admire you for showing up for school even when you are sad. I admire you for having to deal with adults and often times being expected to be one.

Don’t stop being a kid to be an adult. Please live out your childhood. And don’t let yourself think that you have to be famous or professional (basically and adult) to be appreciated. Because I appreciate you more than I do adults.

I feel that we shouldn't be expected to admire someone for their superiority. I don’t look up to famous people for being famous. I look up to people that really deserve it, I look up to people that matter because they work hard every single day to get to where they are. Teenagers don't stop working off their place in the world, famous people have their whole pretty lives in safe hands. And when us ordinary teenagers age, maybe we will be famous, and maybe we will professional, but we will be adults by then, therefore most of the blood, sweat, and tears will be left in our teenage years. I admire the teenagers that work their asses off even when no one believes in them. Even when no one appreciates it. Even when it goes unnoticed.

So let it be if I fail this assignment. Because it was worth it to tell you the truth.

Photo Courtesy: Stability

Suicide is a Permanent Solution to Temporary Problem

Suicide. It’s a term that parents refrain their kids from knowing about. It is shamed upon. We run away from it; we don’t understand it. But it’s time to talk about it. I have a dear friend that has struggled with this. His brother attempted in sixth grade by overdosing on Ibuprofen, luckily he was found and saved. But, did he want to be saved? Was he okay with the thought of his slow and painful death when he was sitting on the cold bathroom floor, weak and unable to change his mind if he wanted to? Or had he accepted the fact that he was about to leave Earth, never to be seen alive again? My friend’s next two encounters were his own, he followed his little brother’s lead and swallowed a whole bottle of Advil. One-by-one they went down his throat.

Somewhere around this time, he ran away. I was worried sick, I didn’t know where he was, or if he was okay, or if I would ever see him again. First it was unreal to think that one of my very best friends had left me without saying goodbye. I was so stressed out that I failed a math quiz. That was my first reaction. Then a couple days later, I found myself teary-faced staring at my boat where most of our camping adventures took place, and then my jeep trailer where we would hide out from all of the Ashtyn-obsessed children that camped with us in Moab. He was a friend different from all others, he was the friend that I only ever saw in my happy places; Moab, Jordanelle Reservoir, and Flaming Gorge Reservoir. We were all happy there, no problems, only good times, boat rides, jeep trailing, and campfires. It was a surreal place with dreamy memories, no one was ever not happy there. And that’s how I remembered him, I never realized how serious his depression was until he was gone. But he wasn’t gone forever, he came back about 30 minutes after my breakdown.

A lot of people mistake my care for him as me “liking” him as more than a friend. But this isn’t the case. I care about him because he is my best camping buddy, he is my friend, he is my brother that I never had. And to hear that he hates life, that he doesn’t really want to be here, it kills me. But on January 1st, 2016 during our hour and a half long conversation at 6 in the morning he told me something about suicide that changed his mind. He said “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” That quote reversed his thinking. That quote save his life. And I will always respect those words for saving my camping buddy from choosing death over life.

"No Violence Statue"

Photo Courtesy: Prospect

The Fault in Your Birthday Cake Candles

When I was little my dad used to say “you’re growing like a weed, goose” and “maybe if I stop feeding you, you’ll stop growing.” I would always react by angrily telling him that he was dumb because I would die if he stopped feeding me and at the time I didn't think that weeds were pretty so I’d tell him that I grew like a flower. But standing here as a freshman who spends most of her time with a junior and some fellow freshman students, I regret how I treated my childhood. All kids want to do is get older and older, they count each and every candle on their cake just to make sure it is just as many as their new age. Those very candles burned out my creativity. Now you can picture yourself, all dressed up perched on your chair, eyes focused and reflecting the small buds of fire melting undesired wax onto your frosting, eagerly waiting for the untuned singing voices to stop. All for what? To blow out those damn candles. To be able to say “I’m six” instead of “I’m almost six.”

Truth is, I would do a lot of things to be almost six again. I would do a lot to go back to the time that I didn’t know what dirty jokes were so I could speak freely without the worry that people would laugh because what ever I said relates to sex some how. But no, I’m stuck here for a little while. I’m stuck seeing people that I love want, and try, to commit suicide. I’m stuck seeing the people that I love cut. I’m stuck here seeing the people that I love drown in their own goddamn tears. I’m stuck here seeing people I love burn in the extra fire those new candles provide because they just can’t blow them out anymore. I’m stuck here. And I’m sick of it.

The ironic thing is, no matter how much I hate those candles, I still look forward to them. I still have hope that they’ll bring me to a better place. That it’ll be better when I’m fifteen. They are a drug. The glory of age is a drug. It makes it hard to stay centered in your life. Its magnetic force pulls me so hard that I have to remind myself that the things I am touching and the objects surrounding me are real. My mind is so busy I forget to “stay real.” I’m so content thriving in my thoughts that I can’t focus at what I’m doing at that actual moment. I work in auto pilot most of the time, so used to my life, so bored, that I keep myself entertained in a separate dimension while I nearly unconsciously do what ever it is that I am supposed to be doing. This is why if you were to ask me to describe what I did yesterday I wouldn’t be able to tell you without struggling to remember what I actually physically did yesterday. I’m constantly trying to escape the now by time traveling into the future. So theoretically, I’m constantly trying to escape my current age, by day dreaming about the next cake full of candles I get to see.

Photo Courtesy: my mom, Kristin (yes, that is me)