One More Semester.

This is almost it.

We're in class for one of the last times - finishing up fall semester, the last fall semester of school that I'll ever have. About to present our case reports on Friday. Applying for graduation. Applying to take the boards. Taking pictures tomorrow.
I'm surrounded by my fellow classmates, and it's weird. We've all come so far. 3 years ago, I was freaking out about whether I'd be accepted for an interview. Now, we're all preparing to go to our last clinics in January and exchanging stories about treatment and clinic sites and life in between. The 1st year physical therapy students buzz around us, the second years are practicing for their big musculoskeletal competency, and we are practicing skills that a year ago may have made me scratch my head. Talking updated CPT codes, funny ICD-10 codes, how annoying (or helpful) FOTO can be, and gait training with crutches versus gait training amputees. "Have you learned A-P mobs yet? What about strain counter strain?"
It's all delightfully familiar, and fun, and relaxed. My days have some classes and paperwork to do, but for the most part, the stress of exams, of competencies - is over. We have a clinic full of high expectations ahead of us, but we are ready for the challenge. We are making that transition from student to clinician and preparing ourselves to go out in the real world and be independent, practicing doctors of physical therapy. Next semester we will hear our names called at graduation and then we will go out into the world and live our separate lives as professionals.
My life is so much different now than it has been in the past years. I find I have more time for life skills - for every day things, such as going to see movies or play trivia in the evenings. I can paint during semesters, instead of leaving my canvas untouched for the months of classwork. All of those scary classes and long lists of requirements that I used to stare at, wondering how in the hell they were ever going to get done - they are done. I've finished them. I've run the race. I've jumped over the hurdles. PT school has sucked, it's been hard, but it's changed me. It's made me a professional. It's taken my quiet self and, yes, I'm still quiet, but it's taught me how to talk to patients and act confident and teach and to heal. Soon, I'll have a real paycheck. Soon, I'll have decent health insurance. Soon, I'll have student loan payments. Soon, I'll be managing my own caseload of patients.
It's not "eventually" anymore, or years from now. The future I've been building for years now is soon.
And it's been a long wait. It couldn't come soon enough.

Marriage Can Bring Out the Worst in You.

Marriage can bring out the worst in you.

6 months in, I think that can sound like a horrible thing to say.
"You're supposed to be in the honeymoon phase!" "Just wait until you have REAL problems!"

Well, to that I say - people like that don't know how life works.
Life doesn't care about what phase your life is supposed to be in. It doesn't care if the problems of today are easier or harder than tomorrrows - frankly, they all seem hard in the moment.
And that is where I really started to notice that marriage could bring out the worst in me.

I spend all day trying to help people not be in pain at work, it's hard to find 5 minutes to rub my husband's calves/back/shoulders.
I have time for other people but my most inpatient, worst self can be present when it comes to hanging out around my husband.
Passive aggressively folding laundry not bothering to ask him for help because, you know, I want him to want to help, not feel like he has to help.
Sometimes he tells me the same stories and I grumble about how "I know" and skip to the ending.
I'm sometimes short with him when I shouldn't be.
When a job doesn't work out, and you sit on the couch wondering how you two are going to grapple paying bills with half as much income, and you're fighting to figure out if it's human error or if it's God's will somehow trying to teach you a lesson.
When you're trying to plan your life together, and you realize the sheer depth of what it means to have your failures and shortcomings be the others' shortcomings, and how deeply yours and your spouses choices impact each other - that's humbling. That's hard.

Yes, folks, marriage brings out the worst in you. My worst behaviour is around my husband, and I'm ashamed to say it. There have been times when I am more polite to complete strangers than I am to him.

So, this brings me on to my next caveat before you go thinking "Wow Lacy, you're a horrible person."
Yes, marriage can bring out the worst in you. It's totally true: Every little flaw you found in your friend/boyfriend/fiance before: They're going to be there and if they drove you crazy then, you can bet they'll drive you batshit crazy once you're married. My point though:
I can be a nice, polite, charming person. I can also be a positively selfish, horrid person. My husband literally loves me nonetheless. He loves me the same whether I'm that nice person he met at swing dancing, or if I'm the person bickering at him over some silly, stupid thing that only married people would find it worth their time to bicker about. I literally got in a fight with my husband because he accidentally put my princess dress in the dryer. What's amazing is: it doesn't matter. He shows me Christianly, Godly love daily through his love of me, through good times and bad, and for that, he's a wonderful leader for our tiny family of 2 people (and 5 pets.)

It is so easy to fall in love, but marriage makes you work to understand what the true meaning of love means. It means that, even when you're tired, inpatient, pissed off, short fused: you choose to love instead of knocking the other person down, even if it may be easier to do that. When you are angrier than you have ever been (and trust me, that time will come), you have to literally will yourself to forgive, even though it may seem like that person is the least deserving person in the world at that moment (trust me, they aren't). Sometimes your spouse isn't going to act like a good person. Your job is to still see the good in them. Sometimes it's easy to want to blame the person you're with for absurd things simply because it's the easy thing to do! Don't do that, either. It's not your job to knock them down. The world will knock them down. It's your job to bring them back up. Uplift them.

Marriage can bring out the worst in you. But marriage makes you work hard to be a better person so that you become a better version of yourself than you ever could be alone.
Cast aside the selfishness, the thoughts of "me". Marriage isn't the place for that. This has been hard for me. I'm such a prideful, independent person. I pride myself in having it all handled and doing things just particularly my way. (Maybe it's not perfect, but it's perfect because it's my way). Independent work - independent savings - independent drive - independent, self-made life plan - independent free will. My belongings. My stuff. My choices.
It's easy to be those things or proclaim possession of your things. What's not easy is surrendering your independence in some ways. No, ladies, this doesn't mean you have to become a subservient housewife. It means that you let someone into your life to share those things with you. Our way. Our savings. Our belongings. Our life plan. Our decisions.
It's not easy to swallow your pride and say that marriage is not an always perfect, beautiful fairytale of people who build lives together and go on fun adventures and always agree on what to watch on Netflix and always offer to rub the others' feet and do each other's laundry (lol). But you have to swallow your pride. Because that's how you become better: you set your pride aside, accept that you don't know everything, and you accept the lessons that life gives you. Let life sift you and see if you are more wheat or chaff.

Marriage isn't for you. It isn't about you. And it's easy to spout those things when you're not going through hard times and when you feel blissful and happy. But when life pounds down on you hard, and makes you make hard decisions that impact both of your lives very early on, that is when you fully come to terms with this statement. Hard times will come, early on or in between or later. They will come. They test you and show you your weak points. If you get through them, you learn together. We are married for God's glory here: our marriage is to display that glory. To mirror marriages after Christ's relationship to his bride: the church. This requires harder things of us than we ever imagined, because contrary to what society might tell you, we don't get married solely to make ourselves happy. That is not the point at all. It's to show you a great, powerful, incredible love, full of ups and downs and the decision to weather the storms come what may. That it is so difficult, humbles you to think of how much love God and Jesus have, to so freely give love despite their bride's constant shortcomings.

It's through working to build our marriage in a manner that reflects this kind of love that makes us better people. That teaches us to set our selfishness, our pride, our blame, our pettiness aside, and open our minds to something greater than we ourselves alone could ever have thought of. We do it for God - and we do it because we so greatly love the person we vowed to love forever, our best friend, our closest companion, the one person that will love you despite the good and bad, that will work with you tirelessly and help you become better. You do it because although there are hard times, there are infinitely more beautiful ones. Waking up to your loved one's smile every morning. Sharing in their victories. Driving through the mountains singing songs from the early 2000's together. Being on the same side in an argument with someone else. A dancing buddy. Your Netflix and chill partner. Laughing til you cry together. The inside jokes. Sharing one life together: a life so full of meaning you can't imagine it without the other person.

It is humbling. It is hard. It is backbreaking work, but it can also be the lightest weight to carry when you do it with your best friend. It is fun. It is beautiful.

It's the greatest journey I (we) have ever been on. And I know that despite its hard times, despite my own shortcomings and the bad sides of me: it's making me, us, better than ever before.

Can't Be Perfect.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s life, but regarding myself, I feel as though I may spend entirely too much energy convincing myself that I lead this “perfect” life, when in all reality, there are a lot of aspects about my life I don’t love. Now, there’s a fine line between what I would call this pursuit of convincing myself of perfection – and choosing to be optimistic and happy about my life. I’m a become proponent of leading an optimistic life. I have been through the whole depressed (teenager) phase, and it’s not an alleyway of life that I’d like to find myself going down again. What’s more, I find that it’s simply a better use of my time to focus on the good, the happy, the positive – and to set myself up to operate under a mindset of what I can change in order to make life better, versus moping about what I do not like. I value action so much. When I am distressed, I find myself loathing talks sometimes… they seem so useless. Like, I could be spending this time doing instead of speculating. Talk is nice, but what can we do to fix this now? Activity and action are such a comfort to me. That makes me a bad, inpatient conversationalist sometimes. That makes me harsh sometimes, because I demand action from those I love to ease my own distress. Just ask my husband – it’s not always easy to be around me. And I feel bad about that sometimes, but just find myself thinking that it’s so easy to get caught up and feel helpless in this world where so much is out of your control. That sometimes – it’s simply soothing to focus on what I’m not helpless to change.

But still – it’s so easy to fall into that “wanting to be perfect” trap! It’s all too easy to screen your life through social media, taking photos of the good times, occasionally being “candid” about the things we don’t like as much, gleaming important lessons through these things for the sake of being open and real to an audience, but still reluctant to share the real things about us that make us feel insecure. Man, if I had a dollar for every one of those things, I’d never have to gripe about not having insulin again. This is something I’d like to improve about my own life, but again, I can’t speak for anyone else’s. I just think that we’d save a lot more energy if we were more honest and open with ourselves. Looking at my own life, I can find prime examples of this.

My life isn’t always glamorous. Newsflash – no one’s is. And we shouldn’t stress about it not being that way. And as a result, I get cranky, I snap at people, sometimes I get mean. I get human. I love visiting new places with my husband, going on adventures, but you don’t see the times I tiredly get home after working 10 hour shifts and then I get cranky with my husband and myself as I try and clean for the next two hours muttering about how I clean all the time.

I’m convinced every girl has these thoughts - yeah: Sometimes, I don’t like my weight. Or how I look. I'm constantly comparing myself to others and it makes me unhappy. I’m happier with where I am now – but I used to be a lot skinnier, and with being on insulin, sometimes it’s just really hard to lose weight. Or maybe it’s just me, and insulin doesn’t have as big of a role in it as I would like? Do I like to cast blame on that? That’s an ugly part of me I confront a lot. My husband brought me home a burrito once and I irritatedly asked him to make me a sandwich because I didn’t want to eat the burrito.

I’m 23 and I still spell sandwich wrong way more than I should. And restaurant.

I like to talk about my accomplishments because I’m proud of everything I’ve fought to do. But damn, if I don’t feel like it sometimes makes me a worse person. The kind that forgets to call people enough or reply to texts or have the energy to chat with them when we’re hanging out.  The kind that neglects personal growth or relationships with others in exchange for having a full schedule and trying to climb the success ladder. My ambition gets in the way a lot. The tired days when I feel stretched way too thin because I’ve worked 7 gigs but still have a 54-60 hour work week ahead of me interning. The times when I’m on my phone but shouldn’t be because Kris is trying to have a conversation with me. Sometimes, I need to learn to put the work away and just focus on the now and the people around me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful for the work, but a lot of me seems way too caught up on trying to accomplish things, to hang successes on my “mental” wall. It lets things slip through the cracks on accident sometimes. The other side of the coin I get lazy after working a lot and end up procrastinating on assignments, or not calling customers quite on time., or being late to things I said I’d be on time for.  Life is just hectic!

My walk with God – I forget to trust him all the time. I rely on myself too much. Don’t like to give up control of my life. I’m stubborn. Kris and I are now (thankfully) getting back in the habit of going to weekly church. Not just podcasts. It’s good for us.

My internship has got me down a lot this semester because I’ll be honest: A lot of the time I just don’t feel good enough, or smart enough, or charismatic enough to be a good PT. Sometimes I see patients and I’m trying to treat them and I have no idea what to do. The stakes are higher when you’re dealing with real people. Sometimes they tell you stories so sad you go home and sit in silence just thinking about the weight of those words. Sometimes you feel like you’re never going to get there, you’re never going to be that good. Sometimes I feel like I’m not making a big enough difference, especially with difficult chronic pain patients, and I feel as though all my schooling has gone to waste. Did I choose right? Am I in the right profession? Will I be satisfied with it? Is it truly my calling? Maybe it’s healthy to constantly question things. Maybe. I’ve questioned all of these things in my pursuit of finding career fulfillment.

And Diabetes… that’s the worst of all. I want to you to think that I’m in control. I want to be. But I’m so insecure and bad at the Diabetes thing somedays. Somedays, I let my blood sugar run high… sometimes I just don’t care enough. I let it run high for two weeks recently. I shouldn’t have, but I did. I’m too tired to deal with it somedays. Yes, I know the complications that can be a result. But burnout is a real and unfortunate thing that all of us diabetics succumb to sometimes. The insulin store in my fridge is getting lower than it’s ever been and I need to figure out how to get more soon. But part of me is afraid to go see someone for it because what if they yell at me? Tell me I’m irresponsible because I haven’t seen a doctor in over 2 years now? No insurance – no time. Fear and disappointment over knowing I likely can’t afford a visit and the monthly insulin anyways. Maybe I just didn’t order my priorities correctly these last few years, and I should have tried harder to get insulin.

Bottom line – none of us, least of all me, are the perfect person, the perfect wife, the perfect worker bee or student, the perfect Christian, or diabetic, or whatever you may be. We all have slip ups time to time, and they can be extremely irritating. I think it’s good to take step back and focus on the bad along with the good sometimes though. Healthy for us. Helpful to remind us how to become better people and prioritize what we want to change.