Hello and welcome back to Liveliness my amazing readers.
This post is about blogging. Fancy that. A blog post about blogging.
This post is for the three readers that will see this post. Hello, how are you? Go ahead and introduce yourself in the comments if you like.
Blogging is hard. Mostly because hardly anyone reads my blog. I don’t say that to guilt trip anyone, it’s just a fact. I thought that by now I would have at least a few subscribers, but I have one subscriber. And that one subscriber is me.
Sometimes I feel like I am speaking into the void, but I keep writing to have a creative outlet, for the off chance that I might connect with someone, and because it gives my days off of work some purpose. For example, writing this blog post will save me from at least twenty minutes of scrolling through YouTube shorts, although I do love them.
One of the best things about blogging though, is the free AI image generator built into the word press posting software. It has leveled up my game with post images. It summarizes what I have written in the post for me and creates a prompt to make an image that encapsulates what the blog post is about.
Anyways, if you want to help me on my blogging journey, let me know what I could do to improve my blog posts, I would appreciate the feedback. And let me know what kind of blog post you would like to read in the future.
What I’ve been loving
I have a new Beauty of Joseon Ginseng Cleansing Oilthat I have been liking. It has cleared my skin more than Cetaphil, Neutrogena, or CeraVe, so if those brands aren’t working for you I would suggest looking into Beauty of Joseon.
I also have this new gold twist ring that I have been loving. It is part of my everyday basic jewelry and goes with everything.
Weekly Inspiration
For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.
Moses 1:39
God’s goal is for us to become immortal and have eternal life. He is good at his job. A reason that you can choose joy in this life is because you are looking forward to what is to come.
Today I want to talk about finding balance in your life.
It’s hard to find balance.
In fact, I think that it takes a constant daily effort.
You can do pretty much anything too much or too little. And what is too much or too little looks different for everybody everyday.
But don’t worry, it’s definitely possible.
Take scripture study for example. I choose to read just a few verses a day and that suffices for me and my schedule. I used to make myself read a chapter but I felt like I would lose touch with the spirit and be focused instead on the length.
So for me I was reading too much and needed to tone it down to get the benefits I wanted from it.
But, most days, reading just one verse feels too short for me. So by reading a few to several verses I found that balance.
Another example of this is with food. I go through phases where I eat a little too much food and gain a little weight and where I eat a little too little food and lose a little weight. I think that this is a normal part of eating food, but it demonstrates the daily effort that it takes to maintain a balance. It’s a lot of little adjustments of a little more than before or a little less than before until you have inevitably slipped up and tipped the scales and have to restart.
Another way to describe balance I think is a daily changing to be a little bit better than you were before, or a correcting of mistakes. In the LDS religion we also call this repentance.
I think finding balance is a beautiful daily struggle that is part of the purpose of life.
I wish you all luck in finding balance in your daily lives and believe that you will find joy through it.
Feel free to share any struggles that you’ve had finding balance in your own life and what you have learned.
If you like what you have read feel free to subscribe to follow along with my blogging journey! ❤
“Try measure loss, measure the silence of a house The unheard footsteps at the doorway, the unemployment of the mouth The waking up, having forgotten and remembering again The full extent of what forever is”
By far, my favorite part of the song Through Me (The Flood) by Hozier is the lyrics, “The waking up, having forgotten and remembering again/ The full extent of what forever is.”
It’s so beautiful to me. It’s a perfect reminder that life extends even when it seems like it’s done. That death is not the end and we will all live on.
Sometimes I listen to this song in the mornings on my drive to work and I fully relate to “waking up, having forgotten… what forever is.” And this song is the reason that I remember it again. What a way that is to start the day, remembering that you will never run out of chances to be who you want to be.
For those of you who don’t know, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And we believe that we will all live on after death. Forever. We are all immortal beings and are simply on earth to learn and to grow. Death is just how we move on to the next stage of life.
One of my favorite sayings is ‘you live and you learn’ because it is so true. There is nothing we can do except for living and learning. I especially like this quote when it is applied to making a mistake. It says to not worry. That life will keep going when you make a mistake. And you will learn from it. You will get better. It is like when you fell and scraped your knee as a kid. You live on, and have learned one way that things can end up in you scraping your knee so you can be more likely to avoid it in the future.
That aside, I also like how the song points out trying to comprehend the extent of what forever is. Forever is a LONG time. It’s literally forever. It never ends. It’s like a circle with no beginning or end. Or two mirrors facing each other which reflect each other forever.
I feel blessed and privileged to be a being that will never end, and am glad to share the world with similar beings!
I hope this post gave you a little reminder of what forever is! ❤
Strobing red and blue lights flash all around me. Loud dancing music echoes off the brick walls. Exhausted from the night of dancing, I stop and rest for a moment in the middle of a crowd of sweaty teenagers. Everything seems normal. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see a girl who’s head is speeding towards me at an unusually fast pace. She’s not in line to hit me, I thought. I don’t need to move. Boy, was I wrong.
What she was doing to achieve this kind of velocity I’ll never be completely sure of, but as far as my understanding goes she was either doing a back handspring, or threw her head back super hard while dancing or laughing.
Either way, amidst all the chaos and my exhaustion, she managed to hit my left eye with the back of her head. Stumbling back in the crowd, I couldn’t see anything for several seconds, I don’t know if that’s because my eyes were closed, or because my vision blacked out. When I recovered I had the sense that something had been hurt, and I suspected immediately that I might have a concussion, but I brushed the suspicion off at first, not wanting to face the implications of having a concussion.
I immediately went back to dancing, hoping that no one had seen me get hurt. Then I stopped, because I was worried that jumping itself might aggravate a possible concussion.
I first noticed evidence of something being wrong when I tried to walk and my body didn’t respond for a couple of seconds. Then, after trying harder, I got my body to initiate walking. It was a confusing couple of seconds. I was doing everything I normally did to start walking, but nothing in my body moved. Luckily, this phenomenon didn’t occur again.
After thinking for a while and stalling for time by lightly dancing (no jumping) I came to the decision of going to the bathroom to see what my face looked like in the mirror. As I reached the bathroom mirror and inspected my left eye I saw some minor redness above and below it, but nothing serious. I then got some ice from a kind Teacher’s Assistant and sat out the rest of the dance.
My mind was reeling while waiting for the dance to end. I had taken an emergency medical responder class, I should know the symptoms of a concussion, but the only things that came to mind were nausea and tinnitus, neither of which I had. In addition to that, I couldn’t stop overthinking whether you are supposed to put ice on your eye.
As the night wore on we transitioned to the after party of games and a movie where I noticed some confusion, brain fog, and had the overarching sense of everything being harder. I didn’t want to accept these symptoms though, because I liked to consider myself invincible. It took several hours of constant symptoms for me to accept that I probably had a concussion.
When I got home late that night I tentatively told my mom that I thought I had a concussion. I asked her if I should go to the doctor and she said no because she didn’t think it was that severe. That was a Saturday night. The next week happened to be the last week of school filled with all the senior activities that I longed to go to. The pro that I saw of not going to the doctor was that he couldn’t tell me that I couldn’t attend any of my senior activities. Similarly, the con of not going to the doctor was that he couldn’t tell me that I couldn’t attend any of my senior activities, which in hindsight, should have been abstained from.
The biggest set back was going to a rollercoaster park. Riding rollercoasters + a concussion = an unhealthy time. I’m pretty sure I got at least one more concussion on those rollercoasters since it’s easier to get another concussion when you already have one. I was also risking a lot by going on those rollercoasters because there is something called second-impact syndrome where you get a hit-even a soft one-after your concussion and it can cause your brain to rapidly swell and your breathing to stop, and it puts you in the emergency room if you even get that far before you pass away.
Doctors don’t know why some people get second-impact syndrome and some people don’t, but I was in the lucky category of not getting it.
The loud noises, jarring rollercoasters, and long, crowded walks left me dreadfully overstimulated and fearing for my life. This experience is why I will never ride a rollercoaster again. That being said, I did survive the day, but met my ride home being so exhausted that I was unable to speak even if I wanted to. Unfortunately, not speaking is a typical state for me so my ride (my dad) didn’t think anything of it. I wanted to scream that something was wrong in my head, but I couldn’t get any words out. I felt trapped.
The next few days were exhausting, but not rollercoaster riding, fearing for your life exhausting. Soon, came my high school graduation. To be short, it felt like a fever dream. I was out of it, had difficulty comprehending conversations, and was worried I was exacerbating my symptoms the entire time. Looking back on those pictures I look slightly pained and have a small red bruise just below my left eyebrow.
In general, what was worse, I felt like with every previously normal thing I tried to do after getting a concussion, I discovered a new deficit in my functioning. I felt like I was exploring my brain in a way I never had before, and not in a comfortable way. More like in a depressing and excruciating way. Try reading? My eyes couldn’t follow the words and frequently skipped. What about watching a movie? I was exhausted and got pressure in my head and brain fog. There was a similar story with every activity I did. I also had a strange sense of physical areas in my brain being activated differently and it was a constant reminder of my brain not working properly. I couldn’t even get my mind off the symptoms long enough to fully comprehend how bad they were.
I will leave this entry here since I don’t want it to be too long. In part 2 I will talk more in depth about my symptoms and what life was like with them. I hope this helps some people in putting words to what they may be experiencing, because I know I felt like I couldn’t put the proper words to it when I was experiencing it.
Thank you for reading this far. This has been a very cathartic experience for me and I feel more whole after writing this. I guess a part of me was still emotionally broken from this experience even after 3 years and writing it has helped me work through some of it.
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