If anyone knows anything about me, it's that I love movies. So, of course, the title of this entry comes from a movie. It's a quote that I think a lot about when things get rough and I feel like how can I push forward? Here's the clip:
This semester has been insane. I'm working for the school paper (required for a class), where we need to turn in two articles a week along with the class assignments and I'm working a million jobs and trying to keep up in all my communications classes and sometimes I really feel like someone has just asked me to jump into an oven and some magnetic suit is supposed to be the thing that saves me.
It's not a secret that Provo isn't my favorite place in the world and it probably doesn't even rank in my top five. I'm an east coast girl and you can take the girl out of the east, but you can't take the east out of the girl, am I right?
On Tuesday I'll be turning 25 and in Provo, as a single woman, I might as well be filing for social security instead of gaining the ability to rent a car. Mormons, especially in Utah, culturally believe in getting married young and having a family young. I am no where near either of those things and if you get to my age without those things happening, there's a stigma attached that something MUST be wrong with you, I mean how could NO ONE want you yet, it's just crazy to imagine that I haven't been "chosen" yet, like one of those little aliens in the Toy Story vending machine.
Most of the time, I feel fine about where I am in my life. This is MY journey and yes, it may be different from everyone else's, but it's MINE and everything I've been through has made me the person that I am and continues to do so. But, sometimes, there are days when those negative thoughts about my age, body, situation in life, abilities and self-doubt regarding everything and anything start to slip through the cracks in my poorly insulated bedroom windows (that reminds me, I need to buy curtains with winter coming...). As Julia Roberts says in Pretty Woman, "The bad stuff is easier to believe." Some days it IS easier to just believe the bad things people say and the negative stigmas and connotations that go along with my journey and my story of a 25 year old still in college, single in Provo. In one of those days where my senior citizen status in Provo felt particularly potent, I signed up for the LDSsingles dating site. AH! I just told you all (the two of you) my secret! Let the judging commence! Yep, online dating. That site can be an entire blog post by itself, so I'll hold off on saying anything more about that.
Back to the Jeremy Renner clip... Simon Pegg has to reassure Renner over and over that he.will.catch.him. Not to go into the spiritual (which I actually quoted this clip in a testimony meeting a couple months ago and related it to my relationship with God), but he isn't the only person who has caught me. There are the friends who make Starbucks runs with me, who invite me to spend Thanksgiving with them, who go running in the freezing cold with me because I need to talk or let out frustration or just CONNECT to someone who isn't a robot and has their own opinions, like me. There are the people who send me little reminders that they love me and that I'm special to them, all the way from New York, Boston and Florida.
My life right now is me jumping into a giant oven. But, it feels really great having people around to catch me.
