This last week or so has been a little hard. I'm not exactly sure why, except that Heavenly Father still has more to teach me before I move down to Provo.

First, the whole thing with the boy happened. That's still happening, I suppose. It's just every now and then I meet a person whose philosophies and ways of life are so different than mine I can't help but find them interesting and incredibly confusing at the same time. I'm like the stupid kid at the zoo who stands too close to the monkey cage. I learn a lot, but sometimes I get poo slung at me. Sometimes it misses and sometimes I get hit with it.

A lovely analogy, I know.

Also, I've just been having the hardest time motivating myself to work. Which is saying something, because this is one of jobs I've loved the most. And yet there are sometime when I show up and just think "I don't want to serve tables today. I don't want to interact with people, I don't want to balance a huge tray of water glasses, I don't want to put in special orders, I just don't want to." So I go through the motions and get cut as soon as I can.

Which makes me wonder: is it possible I'm just easily bored or do I just suck at sticking things out?

That question has bothered me for at least a year, but it hasn't been until the past few weeks that I've realized it affects me on different levels.

1) How often I've changed my major. Believe it or not, I do actually think things through before I change my major. I don't just pull the most recent major out of a hat and roll with it. And yet, the past few times I've changed my major, two months later I find myself bored and not feeling fulfilled by the major I've chosen.

This brings on the second problem 2) I don't have any goals in life. When I tell this to people they're like "well, get some goals." Not so simple. Again, I find these goals - to speak another language, to read a certain book, to travel and tour a certain part of the world, to achieve a certain degree, and again, in two months or so I don't want that goal anymore. I've moved onto something new and different, something new and shiny has distracted me from something I really wanted SO badly.

Part of it might be that in order to succeed in some of these goals it takes lots of time to figure out the fine details and to plan. But I usually can't focus and research enough to ever come up with a total plan, I get bored with research too easily.

It's so frustrating for me! I see so many people in their lives who are filled with passions and have accomplished things and know where they're going in life...and then there's me. And I know that if I could just stick with something for more than a few months I could accomplish it. It's just finding something and forcing myself to stick with it.

I can't help but wonder how much this actually has to do with me being ADHD or if I really just suck at life. It could be a little bit of both. Or, it could again be that Heavenly Father has a reason for me to be this sporadic.

The more I look at life and religion the more I see how important it is to have a one on one relationship with Heavenly Father. You can't rely on society or anyone else to blindly lead you into what you're purpose is in life. You have to take what you're told, what you're fed, what you're exposed to, and study and analyze it with the aid of Heavenly Father. Only then will you be able to truly do what you're supposed to, to live the principles that you need.

Most of the time this will probably clash with what society says for you to do - even a "good" Mormon society. Sometimes it's not right for you to have a child within the first few years of marriage. Sometimes it's not right for you to live the conventional "mormon" life, with a cute little family. This is right for some people, but I can guarantee that no family is the same. No family fits into the same perfect mold. Every family grows, stretches, has trials, learns, according to what Heavenly Father has planned for them. And that's what's important.

I'm an echo of the eternal cry: LET THERE BE!

Here I go, musing once more. I really feel this is for my own amusement and gain. So why am I posting this on the internet you may ask and not just writing it in a journal? Maybe because I secretly enjoy knowing someone might discover it and read the thoughts I'm wrestling with right now.

I realize I'm not the exception to the rules. Or at least, I feel like i should realize this. I realize that all the things the prophets have said and all the rules set forth by them are for me just as much as they are for the masses.

And yet...

And yet I keep finding myself doing stupid things that may or may not fall under the category of disobedience, all the while rationalizing that certain rules, while they apply to me, should be adapted to fit me personally, as I truly feel should be done with gospel principles. We're not all cookie cutters and therefore cookie-cutter principles need not apply.

However...

However, I think I'm taking this principle to an extreme, saying that obvious standards of the gospel don't apply to me whenever I choose for them not too. And because of this I feel like I'm mixing things that are good for me with things that are bad for me in the blurry middle ground.

Also, I'm finding I'm having a hard time differentiating my feelings. I can't tell whether feelings of guilt or excitement or happiness are coming from Heavenly Father guiding me or from social stigmas or from past experiences influencing my current feelings and perceptions.

Plus...

Plus I'm not feeling settled. I keep looking for some place where I'm comfortable, some middle ground where I don't feel pushed and pulled in one hundred different directions, a place I'm not looking forward to leaving. I love living in West Valley, but I'm excited to get back to school. Yet even then I can't help but think about how stifled I sometimes feel while I'm there and wondering if maybe, just maybe, I'm supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else. Or maybe this feeling is what I need to keep progressing in life.

To top it all off I feel myself becoming more and more dumb as time goes by. Seriously. It's like I can feel the knowledge from 14 years of schooling slowly seeping out of my ear. People I talk to seem so full of knowledge and facts about art and life and I'm like "well...I can tell you about the best wines to pair with the Chicken Speidini at Macaroni Grill!"

Yeah, not so impressive.

However, all things are going as planned. I will be back in Provo in 3 weeks, attending school full time. So who knows? Maybe this too shall pass.

Toodles!

-Jillian