What Stops Us From Progressing?

Hello everyone!
As for what I've been up to, I've mainly been attending my brother's various concerts and performances that he's been doing for the Christmas season. I was lucky enough to have my sister and niece with me for a few days, and I've finally started really going out to view the films I want to see before I serve a mission. (Bohemian Rhapsody and Mary Poppins Returns were great, by the way.) I'm doing well and I hope you all are too.
Today I'm writing about something I have given a lotttttt of thought. I think we would all be agreed that a major purpose in life is to progress, to get better every day and learn. The reason this has been on my mind for the past year or two or three is because it's something I've had to realize so that I would be able to get better. There is something that paralyzes many of us and stops us from progressing entirely. I know it's been a roadblock for me during many times of my life and on occasion still can be. There are surely multiple answers to this question, but I honestly notice this frequently among a lot of people. What stops us from progressing?
A lot of the time, the answer is perfectionism.
Which to get more specific also means immediate perfection. We have an expectation in our minds of how we're supposed to do something, something that we are undoubtedly falling short at. So we say, "Okay, I'm going to do this. This is exactly what I'm going to do." And that's a great thing! It's good to have an end goal. The problem is, I so often see people expect immediate results. They get up the next day, try to accomplish this goal immediately, and when they aren't perfect at something that they haven't been doing for quite awhile, when they can't be perfect that very second, they hate themselves. They consider themselves a failure. And they give up. They decide there is no longer any hope for them. They're never going to get better.
Guys, it's not going to work that way. That's never going to happen. Being perfect in a day isn't going to happen. Being perfect isn't going to happen. But improvement is going to happen, and getting good and great and wonderful is going to happen. But it's not going to happen in a day, more than likely. It's surely going to take a lot of time. Progression takes time. Days, weeks, months, years. Forever. And that is not a bad thing. Constantly trying to be better gives our lives purpose.
As should be done with just about every big "project" of sorts, outlining the steps is important. I've found when I want to get better at something, I have to think about what I'm going to do every day. And at the end of the day, I evaluate myself. Did I improve from where I was yesterday? Where did I fall short? What can I do tomorrow to make sure I do better at the things I did poorly today? And I do them. And little by little, I start to get better at the things I want to be better at. By not being hard on myself, by showing myself love and kindness and patience, I actually get better. Back when I used to expect perfection right away, my life was at way more of a standstill. I genuinely improve myself this way.
For example, in 2016, as many of the people that know me very well and personally are aware, I had an identity crisis. And I mean a major one. It was pretty messy. It got to the point where within that year I asked myself what I wanted, yes me, a person who's always been wildly ambitious, and I had absolutely no idea. I was surviving day by day and it was the worst year of my life. That's not to say absolutely nothing good happened that year because that's not true, and it's not to say that that year was not at all constructive because that is in no way true as well. But it was a really devastating time of life and a lot of things contributed to that. One of the things was my absolute self-loathing in the beginning of the year. I realized how bad that was, and I knew I should not hate myself, and so I decided not to. I thought about how many times a day I said "I hate myself" every day. It was an overwhelming amount. So one day I was like, "Okay, I'm going to stop."
Breaking bad habits is not easy. That day, I had only been awake for about two hours and I had already said I hated myself around six times. I realized I failed. I didn't do what I wanted to do.
My heart broke. I cried pretty much that entire day.
When my mom got me from school and something was quite obviously wrong, I told her what my goal was and how I hadn't been able to do it. I was so sad. And that's when she told me that yes, I shouldn't be saying that to myself. But it's hard to get to the point where you are able to love and be kind to yourself. So I shouldn't have expected myself to be perfectly kind to myself after just one day. I just needed to keep working on it. Eventually it would get better.
And it was true. Whenever I was unkind to myself, I would just be like, "Hey, stop that." I started writing a list of things I liked about myself, just one thing every day. And over time I got a lot kinder to myself. I started showing myself a lot of love and respect, or at least as much as I was capable of. When I started showing myself patience, I started actually getting better.
As even more of you know, I saw a therapist this summer as a step in submitting my mission papers. That included doing a few tasks that would change and better my way of living, to not go into too many details just yet. A lot of the time it was really hard. And a lot of the time I didn't do as well as I hoped I would. I had progressed to the point in my life where I was no longer paralyzed and devastated by not being perfect, but still a little disappointed, and scared to how my therapist would react when she heard what I hadn't been able to accomplish. But when I went back for another counseling session and reported on what I had done, she was happy with my work. Because I hadn't been perfect, but she also told me that I never would be because being perfect can't happen. But she could tell that I had gotten better at what I was trying to improve on. I had completed the objective without even realizing it. The point wasn't to be perfect, it was to be aware of myself, which I had done.
Accepting that not everything you do is going to be perfect is essential to doing better. Things don't grow without patience and love.
Something else that I've noticed that has to do with perfection and happiness. This will really make you significantly happier, seriously. Not only are you not going to be perfect, but your life isn't going to be perfect. Bad things are going to happen to you, and you're going to feel negative emotions such as sadness, anger, and fear. All of this is fine, and let me tell you why. I'll start with why it's okay to feel negative emotions.
A lot of people think they can control their feelings. And by that I mean that they can control what they feel. They can't. Sometimes you are just going to be sad. (That's okay, but I'll get to that in a bit.) Because of that, they're afraid of feeling, because they think that means the feeling owns them, and that they have to react to a negative feeling in a negative way. That is in no way true! Who is possessing who? You own the feeling, not the other way around. It can't do anything on its own. So if you feel a negative emotion, that's fine! You don't control what you feel, but that doesn't mean you have to let it control you. If you're feeling sad, get some work done and do something special that makes you happy. If you're angry, take a walk and do some journaling exercises. If you're scared, pray and read a book. If you still feel negative, it's okay! It's just a feeling! It doesn't define you! You don't need to be devastated because you're not perfectly happy all the time. When I have a bad day but want to have a positive attitude, I don't pretend everything is fine. I say, "Yeah, I'm having a really bad day, but I'm not dead, so that's a good sign." Because the feeling isn't controlled but the attitude is. Attitude is just how you react to feeling. So you can be sad and still have a positive outlook! They are allowed to coexist! In fact, I've found that in the long run people that never admit they feel sadness or any negativity usually end up sadder in the long run. Tell the truth. Say, "Yes, I do not feel well today, but that is not going to kill me and I'm still going to do my best today."
I was out with my dear friend James last night and we were talking about this concept. I told him that I often use negative emotions to do positive things. How I've been feeling a lot of fear this year. But I'm not going to be able to control the fear. So instead I choose how I react to the fear. I use fear as an opportunity to have faith. I pray. And when I pray to God I say, hey, I'm really freaking out right now, but I know that You are in charge of what's happening to me so I'm going to just let You have control right now, even though I am very scared. I use the negative emotion to do something positive.
Now I'll tell you why it's okay to have negative things happen to you. It's kind of the same thing. Negative things are not going to stop happening to you. We are mortals living in a crazy world. I'm not here to discredit your pain by saying this either. I know a lot of hardships have come to you all. I just have noticed that I have felt a lot happier when facing my problems with this concept.
A lot of the time bad things happen to us that are not in our control. And while that can be devastating, we can't be owned by the bad things that happen to us. Because bad things are never going to stop happening. We deserve happiness in spite of this. I'm not even saying to say that everything's fine. Again, telling the truth is okay! Saying that things are hard is okay! As long as we keep trying. Progression and happiness happen when we are patient and keep trying. When we accept that negative things are going to happen to us. When we say, "Okay, this is not good, but I am still good, and my life is still good and can be good, I just need to keep doing my best."
To better explain, I'll give you an example. This is something I admittedly really hate that a lot of my friends do. Most of my friends don't participate in this in the way that I hate. But this evil thing that I so despise is the concept of Finstas.
For those of you not in the loop, a Finsta is an Instagram account that is typically much more private than your main account. The average Finsta that I've seen has less than fifty followers and posts about every day, while their main account, primarily used for photos of themselves and other aesthetically pleasing things, is open to the general public and posts at the most once a week.
A lot of people I know use their Finstas as a way of documenting their life, and I get that. Not everyone wants to be obnoxious (@ you, Lizzo) and have their life as an open book for the world to see. Some people really like photography so they want to have an account dedicated just to that. I get it. The problem with Finstas, however, is that a lot of the time they are used to separate a person's life into good and bad. Their pretty life from their real life. Their perfect life from their messy life. And these people frequently end up very sad because they are not able to live up to the expectations they made for themselves. Life is very messy, but their Instagram self demands that everything be perfect and beautiful.
If you follow me on the blog's various social media accounts (I'll post references to my social media at the bottom of this post for those of you that want them), you already know that my posts are pretty messy. I do what a lot of people don't do. I talk about the good and the bad. The very beautiful and the very ugly. I don't see why I shouldn't tell the truth. When I say that something bad happened to me, I'm not saying my life is over and that I'll never be happy again. I'm just saying that something bad happened to me. But it's fine, because that's not going to kill me. I'm okay with the fact that good things and bad things are going to happen to me in my life. I know that life is never all good and all bad. The lows and the highs balance each other out. I am always going to have a mix of positive and negative experiences in my life. And that's awesome. I possess the capability of being okay no matter what.
I wasn't always like that. In previous years of my life, when I was like fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I would worry so much over so many things. And I don't mean so many things at once. I just mean when something would resolve itself it always seemed like something new would come up that had me stressed again. I would so frequently say to myself, "If this one thing would just resolve itself, then everything would be great. My life would be perfect."
I can't believe I ever thought not only that my life would ever be perfect, but also that I could only be entirely happy if my life was perfect.
I thought that way until right before my senior year of high school when I received a priesthood blessing. I was told that just because not everything was right didn't mean that everything was wrong. That phrase has stuck with me ever since, and the past three years of my life have undoubtedly been the happiest because of that. I realized that having problems didn't need to devastate me. I would just continue to work through them when they needed work and ignore them when they could be ignored, and continue to love the good things in my life, and continue to know that I am wonderful and I am okay. I have tried to live my life by that phrase ever since.
I so frequently see people say that whenever something good happens to them they don't let themselves feel happy because they know something bad will happen that will ruin it for them. This thinking assumes that anything will ever be perfect, and it won't. It also assumes that negative occurrences and feelings have to dictate how we live our lives. Bad things happening to you doesn't mean you can never be happy, just like good things happening to you doesn't mean you can never be sad. Negativity isn't going to kill us. We just need to be patient.
To conclude, you're all really loving people. You show a lot of care to others; I know this about you. Start doing the same for yourself. Why should you expect perfection out of yourself and no one else? We are all just trying our best, and if we keep doing that we're going to get better. That's the good news. If we just keep trying things are going to get better.
Perfection isn't a possibility. We see our friends without makeup on and tell them they're beautiful but when it's us we swear we're hideous and no one could ever like us this way. We put a filter over our photos because there's no way we look good enough without one. We all see the fake aesthetic homes on Instagram, we all go to each other's houses, we all apologize for our home being a mess, we all say it's okay but don't believe it's okay when it's us. I'm so tired. I'm so tired of all the wonderful people around me being so mean to themselves because they are not instantly what they think they should be. In the words of Thomas Sanders, "Even a little progress is progress."
Thank you so much for reading. Keep this all in mind. You're doing you're best, you're getting better, and that's awesome.
I love you endlessly.
--Lizzo

Disney Princess Series: Merida

Hello all!

I am an aunt now! My beautiful niece Brook was born about a month ago and she is the love of my life. I was lucky to spend Thanksgiving with her, my parents, and all of my siblings.

I also got to help my high school choir program with this wonderful show they do called Cabaret Night. They have a dinner before the show and then the students put on a beautiful theatre revue show. I got to help with the choreography and blocking, and they all did a fantastic job.

In other news, I got to see Vocal Point live in concert which was super awesome (As well as Basic Academy's Take Note! Great job kids!) and I've even been on a couple dates, which probably wouldn't normally be a super huge deal but I hadn't been on a date in a year and a half HAHAHA so that was pretty exciting.

Today is a big day, being our final post in the Disney Princess Series! I don't have any spicy introductory facts for you this time. I'll just come out and say I'll be featuring Merida today.

Truth be told, it took me a long time to be a fan of Merida. I don't really like Brave. (I also don't really like Disney's gross one-word film titles that have nothing to do with the film--Brave? Tangled? Frozen? I mean, I'll give Frozen some credit because I guess it is about frozen hearts and frozen land and whatnot. But other than that, I'm literally disgusted. The titles are lame and irrelevant. That was a really dumb and borderline random side rant, but I feel pretty strongly about it.) I'm not sure I've seen the whole thing because I think there are a few scenes of the film that I know of but can't quite recall seeing, and have a little bit of a hard time remembering the details and chronology of the story. It does have a fun plot line, I'll give it that. But that's not just because the film is generally unavailable to me, but also because I don't like it enough to want to watch it whenever. The tone of the film just isn't my style. That's kind of the point of Merida, if you read up on the creative process behind her, that she doesn't have the same tone as the other Princesses, but I really enjoy the tone of the other Princess films, so I suppose that was kind of problematic for me. However, I was really determined to find something to like about this lady, not just because I want to have something I like about each of the Princesses, but also because I'm a women support women type of gal, and I think we gotta stick together no matter what, whether we vibe or not. So while I don't really have any super specific plot points that make me admire who Merida is, I do have some things about her character and personal development that I really love.

First of all, seeing people in their element and doing what they love is the most beautiful thing in the world, so when we get to see Merida out and about and climbing mountains and whatnot, and being so joyful, and seeing what a free spirit she is, that's just awesome to me.

Also how Merida takes control of her situation and fights for what she wants. Being the prize in a contest is definitely not ideal. Merida really wasn't really wanting to get married at all, much less like that. I think it's totally cool that she competes for herself, taking control of her situation in the best way she could, winning herself her freedom, which at the end of the day is all she really wants. Kind of similar to my own favorite Princess. Plus, she totally showed off her talents in the process, and that's awesome.

A really bothersome thing about the film for me was how when Merida's mother turned into a bear, because Merida gave her a spell, Merida kept saying over and over that it wasn't her fault. Like, girl! Stop trying to take the blame away from you! You literally did that to your mom! But that was really unfair of me. That's something very unfair that a lot of people do frequently. Expecting a character to have no flaws is pretty much the worst. Like, where's the human quality there? (Although, sometimes as people we don't even allow real humans to have flaws, so that's not good.) But in the reality of the thing, that attitude of Merida's was really good for the beginning of the film because it brought about a favorite plot point of mine. Pretty much all of the problems in the film come from Merida and her mother, Elinor, just not understanding each other. I love how Merida took the time to be with her mom, to let her mom take care of her and to take care of her mom in return, and how it allowed them to see a little more eye-to-eye, to do what's best for them both, to help their relationship grow and help them genuinely show love for each other, and be able to feel love from each other.

And can we talk about this woman going through everything she did to save her clan, and to fight Mor'du, it was so beautiful to me. Such determination. Absolute fearlessness. Wonderfully fierce. So beautifully brave.
I really have developed a love for Merida. She's wildly original, unashamed of who she is, a very bright and beautiful lady, very loving.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and I hope you enjoyed this series as much as I did! I'm a huge Disney fan (even after all this time of writing and posting about it all the time I'm still not sure whether or not that's closeted information), and the Princesses have always been a favorite of mine. The displays of grace, kindness, courage, joy, and fierceness are great examples to me and women everywhere. I simply love them.

And I simply love you.

For your reference, if you're interested in reading the rest of the series again or for the first time if you're new or if you missed it, here are the links to the posts introducing the series and featuring Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, and Rapunzel.

Thanks and much love!

--Lizzo