Tag: purpose

What makes you feel alive?

lys hLeave a comment

What makes me feel alive:

I asked for a guitar last Christmas so I could learn and I try to practice at least 3 times a week.

I started reading books last year and I’ve clocked over 100 hours on my (ahem…Jared’s) Kobo. I thought I hated reading.

I love to take pictures with feeling.

I love to create art that moves me.

I learned how to snowboard when I was 18 and it helps me not hate winter.

I learned to longboard when Jared and I got married. It scares me a bit but I love it all the same.

I love to find new music and make the perfect playlists in Spotify.

I write music and although I don’t even know if I would go to my own concert (unless it was free maybe?), it makes me feel badass and happy.

I play video games because they are the quintessential combination of art, music, and experience.

If my daughter asks me to jump in the lake for a swim, my unwritten rule is that I will because I don’t want to be the boring parent and let Jared be the only fun parent. I’m going to be fun, dammit.

I turn on music almost every day and dance like a freak with my babies. I hope when they grow up they know that they can be weird and fun around me, they don’t have to wait until I leave the room.

I get travel anxiety pretty bad, but I try to travel.

I guess this blog kind of means that I like to write.

I want to live, experience, and be.

.

.

.

What makes you feel alive?

I was taught not to be

lys hLeave a comment

When I was small I was told that my shoulders were to be covered .

Modesty meant that we should never expose our small, 6 year old tummies. Cover them up.

When I learned about becoming a woman, I felt sentenced to an eternity of imprisonments. Existing forever as a second-class citizen and that my body, my mind, my soul, was only meant for one thing:

birthing children.

Giving birth was my inconsolable fear from the small age of 5,

Until I was 27 and had borne my second baby.

By the time I was 7, I absorbed the culture around me and believed I was lesser than every male man and child that existed and would ever exist.

When I was a teenager the boys explicitly told me that I was less than them in God’s eyes.

They told me that women don’t need to be educated and do not deserve equal access to education.

My school career counsellor told me to be a teacher because it’s a good career for a mother.

My religious instructor taught me that staring in the mirror at myself was vain. And that masturbating was bad; I didn’t know what masturbating was though.

I was so afraid of my own body that when I might have caught a glimpse in the mirror, I dared not to look.

My own skin terrified me.

I was so afraid of breaking rules that I didn’t know I could free bleed in the shower. I thought my blood was dirty.

I was always supposed to be the image of a good woman. Even when I was still a girl.

I existed, embarrassed to exist.

I bled, embarrassed to bleed.

I suffered, embarrassed to suffer.

I felt guilty for feeling angry.

I

felt

guilty.

And I’m still angry.