What Do You Have that Another Version of You Always Wished For?
Enjoy 25% off your copy of our “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journal for Black Friday. Our 25% off sale is storewide and also includes our Book of Mormon Come, Follow Me Calendar, Beloved Daughter of Heavenly Parents necklaces, and our Treasure map puzzles.
One of the interesting parts of designing the “It is Well with My Soul” Gratitude Journal that we recently released in the Meridian Shop was figuring out what the role of prompts would be. As a writer, I love being given a prompt. I love the opportunity to be guided in a direction I might not have come up with on my own. But the problem with a journal that’s punctuated with prompts throughout is that, if there are some that don’t particularly inspire you, you have to leave a big, blank gap. On the other hand, some might inspire you so much that the two or three lines that were left to you to respond on feel woefully inefficient.
So, I made the decision to include prompts, 100 of them in fact, but include them all at the beginning so that people could choose when and if to use them and how much space to take with each one.
As a Thanksgiving meditation, I’ve chosen one of the prompts to answer here.
The prompt?
What do you have now that another version of you always wished for?
We are immortal beings having a mortal experience, we can’t help the yearning that is inherent in that condition. We wish for things, it’s inevitable. But how quickly we forget how much we wanted it once we get it. So, it’s healthy to stop now and then and look back at the yearning of another you and realize what you have now that she always wanted.
One of those for me is a journey that Meridian readers have observed in the 14 or so years that I’ve been writing for the magazine. I was a romantic from the beginning (and also, perhaps, a chronic oversharer) and so it doesn’t take a detective to find the evidence in my early columns that I wanted a great forever love, and I wanted it badly.
In 2009, I wrote a column about Valentine’s Day called “36 Million Heart-Shaped Boxes of Candy”. In it, I wrote this now-embarrassing, but ultimately sincere sentiment:
Some of you may actually laugh out loud at me when I say this, but V-day is an annual reminder that I’m getting closer and closer to being too old for young love. Ok, that’s total silliness, I’m only 19, I know. But I can already feel my old soul being too sensible for that ridiculous, blind, nothing-else-matters kind of love that teenagers find in their high school sweethearts. FYI, I won’t even be a teenager a month from now.
…
This Valentine’s Day, 180 million roses were received in America and not one of them received by me. I smile, though, when I remember that my Mom was the Homecoming Queen at the university, but didn’t have a date to the dance that night until the last minute. I look at her now, and look at my Dad’s calendar, and how each day’s task list includes “Have you made her happy today?” and know that someday, I too will be adored.
That optimistic conclusion that I knew someday I would be adored represented the triumph of hope over experience. And was probably written more for the benefit of the readers, than as a true representation of how I felt most of the time. My young dating life mostly consisted of always being secretly in love with a best friend only to find out a year (or four) in, that he had never thought of me that way.
And a year or two after that column was written, I moved into a house with five roommates, who all got engaged while we lived there. One of my very next Valentine’s Days was spent sitting around a giant table with all of the couples and me. I did receive a few of the 180 million roses given out that year, a dozen of them…from my roommates’ thoughtful and unavailable fiancés.
It wasn’t a painful situation. I didn’t go to my room and cry about it nightly or anything. But it left me often wondering who could be out there for me. And why so many boys said I was such an amazing person and just the kind of girl they would want, but so few ever acted on it.
I remember after one pretty stinging rejection, thinking, what would it feel like to just be loved, and love someone back? What would it feel like not to have to be afraid of saying the wrong thing or wearing the wrong thing; to be so secure in someone’s affection that I could just be fully me and know that that’s exactly what they were here for? What would it feel like for someone to finally like me as much as I like them? Or to like someone just as much as they like me? I’d had several people that I wasn’t interested in, pursue me very aggressively and navigating that seemed just as stressful.
I wished all the time to find the person who was meant for me, someone who could see what made me lovable without needing convincing. But I couldn’t imagine what he could possibly be like. When I graduated from BYU, still single, I applied for a job to be an animal caretaker on kangaroo island, a tiny remote place off the southern coast of Australia. 250,000 people applied for that job, and I didn’t get it. But that represented how ready I was to take off far and wide into the world and be free of the tethers that had kept me in Provo for so long.
But I remember standing in the arts building for one of the last times as a student and thinking, “I am planning to just take off and keep going now, if I couldn’t find someone while I was proximate and available and easy to track down, how in the world and where in the world will I find someone that will pursue me across the earth?
I found him in a hotel lobby in Kathmandu, Nepal. A place all of my wildest brainstorming could never have come up with. He liked me so much so fast that he followed me to Zanzibar, New York City, Israel, Jordan, Scotland, and England (and that’s just before we got married).
This coming July will be ten years that we’ve been together. Now we have new challenges and I have new longings and other aching wishes. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, when I’m lying in bed in pajamas with my hair in some wild bedheaded topknot, and he brings me my favorite snack and tells me how proud he is of the work I’m getting done, or pulls me close as we’re drifting off to sleep and tells me he loves me, that, though this is my normal life now, it is also the future for which I spent so many years desperately longing.
It’s an affirming exercise to sit back and think about what you have that you used to only wish for. I remember I saw a flyer at BYU about a scholarship to Oxford and I wrote in my journal “2:11pm I’ve decided I want to be Rhodes Scholar and go to Oxford.” The next entry said, “3:07pm Nevermind.” It was a wish that felt so far out of the realm of possibility, that I didn’t even entertain it for a full hour. But though it wasn’t on scholarship, I did get to do my graduate work at Oxford.
When I had a newborn, I just wished to have a night where I got more than four hours of sleep in a row. Now, I regularly get six or seven and take it for granted. I used to feel like I didn’t have a single babysitter I could comfortably call on. I wished I could just go somewhere now and then. Now I have four or five babysitters, ready and willing and I don’t even think about it. I used to bemoan how little time I get to write since I became a mother. I cried about it often. Now, I get two four-hour blocks a week to do just that and nothing else.
So, this Thanksgiving, take the opportunity to look at your life and think about the things—big or small—that you have now, that you used to long so much for and weren’t sure if you’d ever get. It might even be worth taking the time to write them down. After all, we created the “It Is Well with my Soul” Gratitude Journal not only to encourage your most thankful and affirming meditations, but to have a place that your posterity could read what mattered to you and the blessings in your life that you had the eye to recognize. Writing it all down is key.
This is just one of the 100 prompts in the journal. I’ll write about a few others in the coming weeks, or you can take advantage of 25% off for Black Friday and order a journal of your very own—and read all the prompts for yourself.