Living the Half Full Life

Friends, family, we are on the final stretch of the year 2020. We have just finished up Halloween and are now getting into Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years (secretly hoping 2021 will magically erase all of the problems 2020 has brought). 

While I must say that October-December is definitely my favorite time of the year, it is also a bit hard to deal with mentally for a lot of people (myself included). Daylight savings time is over, the sun sets earlier, the weather is dropping, and we should all probably be popping those vitamin D pills (unless you live somewhere warm and sunny #jealous). I know my depression is definitely stronger in the winter. As sad as it is, we have also entered the beginning of many people’s seasonal depression.

I have talked about my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints before. It took this little Arizona girl, who is not used to things like daylight savings time, and moved her to Utah and then Denmark.

I was in Utah to be trained at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo. I was in a group of three other girls going to Denmark—we roomed together, ate together, and learned Danish together. We learned how to adjust to be missionaries together. And it was a hard time. All of us 19 years old, leaving home for the first time, needing to learn a new language, and adapting to a new lifestyle. Not to mention when we began our training it was November. We were missing out on the holidays with our family.

Luckily I have an angel mother who helped make our time a little more bearable. She sent me a Thanksgiving/Christmas care package to help lift our spirits. One of my favorite memories of that time was our gratitude wall. My mom cut out letters to say “Giving Thanks” and a bunch of yellow, orange, and red paper leaves to write what we are grateful for. 

We went to town on those leaves. We would of course write things such as our families, Jesus, scriptures, each other. I am pretty sure we had a leaf with every one of our names on it. But we also had little things that just made us happy. There was things like Dr. Pepper, inside jokes we had, or even just the ability to laugh. While we were going through a hard time, it helped so much to recognize what we were grateful for. 

No, our grateful wall did not make the hard go away. We still struggled a lot. But it helped us realize how good life is despite the hard. 

I want to reiterate this because I feel it is important: gratitude and false optimism does not make mental illness go away. It makes life with mental illness more bearable. It makes life in general more bearable. Because life is just hard. This last year has shown us that life can throw curveballs that are stressful enough to make us want to curl up in bed all day and forget life’s problems. 

But what would happen if we did that? We wouldn’t see the little miracles that life has to offer. We would miss out on seeing the beautiful world we live in. We would miss the people that could change our lives. We would miss seeing adorable baby animals at the zoo, hip new restaurants that you just vibe with, the smell of fresh rain, the almost spiritual experiences you get at a concert when an artist is bearing their soul to you in music. 

Life is worth living. Let’s remember why.