Two quick announcemnets
this summer we are participating in the CF climb challenge, if you will be in Colorado June 25th please consider
joining our team
Also we are selling
lemon shirts again as a fundraiser for our climb team, so if you missed it last time here is your chance to get one, or if you grew out of the last one! :P
As I write this I am sitting in the practice rooms at GCU spending my last hours of the semester hanging with friends listening to music. WOW! I can't believe this year is almost over. Between me and summer are a few hours of sleep, several sweaty trips to the storage unit and a 14 hour car ride home. A year ago I would never have imagined my year would turn out like this. It is amazing how different college was for me this time around, from being able to walk quickly to class, to actually talking to people and gaining the freshmen (can I still call it that?) 15....well....20. If this is the only good year I get with these lungs, it was worth it. I did so many awesome things and met a ton of really cool people.
Well as usual life got in the way of writing. I am now home. There were indeed many sweaty trips to the storage unit but the sleep thing was more of an ideal than a reality.
This year was, dare I say it, the best year of my life so far. It also was the hardest goodbye I have had yet. I know I will see all these awesome people again soon but for now we have 115 days to get through.
Although the goodbye was hard, I am glad for it because a gloomy goodbye means we had an amazingly awesome time together. Feeling blah about going home for the summer, means I have built roots and found a new home. It means I have made the friends and connections I have always wanted. It means I finally got the college experience I dreamed of and for that I am extremely thankful. I dreamed days like these would be possible but was never completely certain they would be in the cards for me, yet here I am.
This reminds me of a saying one of my transplant friends doctors told her "transplant is a bridge, some people get right across, some get stuck in traffic but at the end of the day, we all eventually make it across." Well I think it is safe to say I have made it across the bridge. Not just the bridge of transplant either but the bridge of anxiety as well.
I don't think I have talked about it much here but I have struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my life since high school. My biggest issue was social anxiety disorder, which is, simply put, an extreme fear of other people. At my worst I refused to leave my dorm room to hang out with people and even mostly stopped eating because it was just too much to drag myself to the cafeteria to eat around, or possibly with other people. I have gone through years of medication and many many hours of counseling to get me to the point I am at. That was another bridge I didn't think could be crossed. From my beginning perspective it looked like the bridge had fallen into the water. However, it turned out the bridge took a few steps down but continued on and did indeed cross the river. I know the bridge of anxiety is not over, I am nearing the end, I hope, but there are still situations that I feel the nerves well up inside and I being to shut down, but the fact that I have so many good friends that I feel mostly comfortable around shows the immense progress I have made. Oh and did I mention I did all that without medication!
I think that all of life is a bridge really. You never are completely over any one bridge. The terrain may change, going form a sketchy, narrow hanging wooden bridge swinging in the wind above a 5000 foot drop, to a wide paved multi lane concrete bridge 20 feet above a slow moving river, but ultimately there will always be challenges to get across in life. The good news is that we have people around us to travel with, and an awesome God leading the way. That is a fact I can fix my eyes on as I go through the bridge of summer, and if this smooth bridge turns rocky again, which is inevitable, I have people and a God I can cling to!
Here is a quick summery of my year
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| 2 year lungaversary dinner |
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| Hiking with the roomie |
Sebastian came to visit!
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| Volunteered with Jenna at our church's Halloween event |
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| Yes I sometimes did homework! |
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| Dorm event with most of my roommates |
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| Wandering in the wilderness! (we meant to go hiking but never found the trail) |
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| Sunrise at the Grand Canyon!!! |
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| Horseshoe bend |
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| It wouldn't be college without late night food runs! |
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| The guys photobombed this (does it count if we knew?) |
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| College Group Selfie! |
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| Watched The Common Thread perform at the fair! check them out at here |
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| Copycat pic shenanigans! |
