Not Everyone Likes Me, and Apparently That's OK

If you’ve never been to IFS therapy (interfamily systems), then a session sounds nuts. It sounded crazy the first time I went. “I feel like I’m making it up,” I told my therapist.

“So?” she said.

In IFS, we try to identify feelings or urges as “parts” (or “peeps,” as my mom says) with names, personalities, ages, purposes, and desires that may conflict with each other. (Think Inside Out.) As a rule, no matter what a part’s job is or how destructive their work is becoming, they’re there to help. My anger is there to protect me. My sadness lets me know what I value. My tired tells me to rest. But they’re all a part, and it’s my job as the Self to be the whole. I’m the grownup, and I have to help them realize when their job is done or redirect their energy when they’re being hurtful.

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Here am I

When I was twenty-two, I ran into a professor in the elevator who said, “Hey, I need someone to do research for me in London. Want to go?”

Going to London is one of those turning points in my life. I spent six weeks there, and it had undue effect on the person I became. Like, I’d always ascribed to second wave feminism enough that I’d refused to care about clothes or makeup or anything appearance related, and then I went and was like, “There are exactly zero guys here I’m trying to impress, and I still want to know what I look like with eyeliner, so I’m gonna do it.” I’d always thought I didn’t like being outside, and one day, on the top of White Horse hill with the wind whipping around me, I found out that I loved being outside. Not being around people I knew meant that I could become who I wanted without fighting their expectations.

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On Hobbits and Happiness

Often, when one of my friends is off to do something exciting or unknown, I’ll ask them, “On a scale from Bilbo to Gandalf, how do you feel?

Bilbo, of course, is the main hobbit in The Hobbit. He likes the comfortable life—good food served promptly at meal times in warm, dry, comfortable spaces, preferably home. Gandalf, of course, is the wizard who tramps around inciting adventure and danger and general excitement everywhere he goes, convincing others to tramp along with him. This, of course, is how Bilbo ends up hungry on the other side of the world, in lots of cold, wet, uncomfortable spaces and has a lovely adventure.

Sometimes I am the wizard, sometimes I am the hobbit. Sometimes I spend days on AirBnB or hop last on a last minute flight, go on sporadic six hour hikes or wander around unknown cities looking for speakeasies. Other times, like a few weeks ago when I was on a plane to Aruba, my inner hobbit kicks in.

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It's Not a Trick Question

In one of the shortest books of the Book of Mormon, Enos is out hunting when he develops a sudden need to speak to God. He kneels down and pleads for forgiveness of his sins.

We don’t know very much about Enos other than he is the son of Jacob, son of Lehi, and that he was raised in the faith, so it’s unclear what kind of life he’s led up to this point. Did he sow wild oats, like Alma the Younger, or was he more of a Joseph Smith type, not guilty of anything grate, but nonetheless committing “many foolish errors, and display[ing] the weakness of youth”? Either way, Enos characterizes his conversation as a “wrestle” before the Lord. He pleads for himself, then for his people, and then for the enemies of his people.

There’s a lot of things that we could say about Enos. In the Maxwell Institute’s new series, Enos, Jarom, Omni: A Brief Theological Introduction focuses on how the book explores themes of covenants and inheritance. In my scripture study group last year, we spent some time discussing Enos’s characterization of the Lamanites as "a “wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people,” a generalization that we were uncomfortable with (and really differed from Jacob’s account of the Lamanites only a generation before), especially given the racial overtones of the passage.

This week, though, I’ve been thinking about t the bit early on in the chapter when Enos repented of his rebellions and hears a voice saying, “Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee, and I shalt be blessed,” and Enos’s immediate reaction is, “I . . . knew that God could not lie; wherefore my guilt was swept away” (Enos 1:4-5).

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Theological French and Metaphorical Wildernesses

A few summers ago I studied French. I did not want to study French. It was not on the top of my Languages to Learn list. But my program required French or German, so French it was.

There were a few things that were very unfortunate about this class, besides, of course, the fact that I did not want to be in it at all. The first was that we were not learning how to speak French. Written French, as you probably know, bares little to no resemblance to spoken French, and my professors were not at all interested in my ability to order a croissant in a little bakery in Marseille and much more interested in me being able to power through Foucault, a writer that I find deeply confusing even in English. After eight weeks, thousands of flashcards, and a lot of crying, I was no closer to being able to ask for a bathroom in French but could make my way through complicated philosophical texts.

The worst part of the class though, for sure, was that I was really bad at it. Everyone else in the class had some background in French, even if that background was just “I took Latin for four years in high school.” Those people at least knew what conjugation was. I studied Mandarin in high school. Mandarin doesn’t do conjugation. Mandarin is about as related to French as lobsters are to seagulls.

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I Am Bad at Museums and Depression

A few weeks ago I went with my in-laws to the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit. We sat in a room as 600,000 cubic feet of projections and Van Gogh’s artwork flooded around us. “There’s two ways to watch this,” the ticket handler at the door told us, “You can watch it like a movie or you can experience it.”

I’m not very good at experiencing art. I feel bad about this, but so it is. Usually I walk around a museum for about twenty minutes, and then I think, That was cool. Is there a cafe or a gift shop? I don’t really know enough about art for it to touch me most of the time—but every once in a while, every once in a while it barrels past my ignorance and tags me anyway.

In the exhibit, they sometimes animated the paintings, and one in particular caught my eye. It was on every wall, this rocking man, gnarled and bent over, rocking back and forth and I thought, I recognize that. I know that feeling.

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Sparrow Prayers and Thunderstorms

Chieko Okazaki was in Church leadership when I was born and will be a patron saint in my family forever. In her 2002 book Being Enough, she preached about sparrow prayers. Sparrow prayers are one of Okazaki’s answer to the same question I pondered a few months ago: why does the same Lord who promises that if we ask He will give us not always give us what we ask for, even when we’re asking for good things?

Sparrow prayers are smaller prayers that God can answer when He and She can’t answer the big asks at that moment. Because our Heavenly Parents delight in blessing us, when they can’t do the big stuff (for a variety of reasons that Okazki explores here), They shower us with the small. Rain is one of my sparrow prayers.

Growing up in Hawaii, rain was the rhythm I fell asleep to most nights. Hawaii rain is dense. It falls thickly and steadily and warmly, and after I moved to the desert for school, I missed its consistency. When it did rain, especially as I was falling asleep, especially when I was having a hard time, it always felt like love. Every time it rained it felt like God had seen me and said, “Time to send Marissa a little love. Let’s get a rain storm in there.” God may not have been in Elijah’s wind or earthquakes of fire (1 Kings 19), but He was in my rain. So whenever things got really bad, whenever I really needed to know that God was there and had my back, I prayed for rain.

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Last Week in Div School: I Believe in Providence

I was having a hard time holding it together the first few weeks of divinity school. I was overwhelmed by the lack of familiar, by the new city, new school, new apartment, new people. I left everywhere an hour early, scheduling getting-lost-time that I often needed. I had not yet learned that I had finally reached the point of my education in which it was physically impossible for me to read everything I was assigned—so I was reading everything that was assigned, which meant I wasn’t doing anything else.

I also didn’t know how to live my religion at divinity school. It wasn’t hard in the ways Sunday School prepared me for—saying no to friends offering me drinks was fine, and no one was derogatory towards my beliefs or the the Church. I walked out of zero movie nights and a grand total of no one offered me illegal stimulants. It was hard because I didn’t know how to simultaneously represent the complexity and the strength of my faith, I didn’t feel that I was showing how important it was to me, didn’t feel like I was framing it in ways that made sense to the people around me. And because my faith is such a strong part of who I am, I didn’t feel like I knew how to be me in this new space.

None of this is surprising, since I grew up in the Utah part of Hawaii and then moved to Utah. I’d never had to represent my faith to people who didn’t already know what it was. So it wasn’t surprising, but it was a little crushing. I’d always felt good about talking about God, but as soon as I got to divinity school, poof! Away that ability went.

Fortunately, I was taking a class with the only LDS Christian member of the faculty, and I had an appointment with him to discuss the presentation I was giving in his class. After we’d gone over my handout and general plan, I said, “Professor, can you give me some pointers on how to be LDS here? I don’t feel like I’m doing it very well.”

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Easter: Presence and Absence

There is scriptural precedent for people feeling left behind by God. Job is, I think, the most famous, but Martha felt abandoned when Jesus did not come in time to save her brother. She went out to meet Him when he finally came, three days late, and said, “Lord, had you been here my brother would not have died.” In jail, Joseph Smith wrote, “How long shall thy hand be stayed?” On the cross, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

What I think is interesting about all of these moments of rebuke by the servant to the master is that, while they are cried out in agony of soul, in hurt and anger, perhaps in feelings of betrayal, they are also always expressions of faith. Martha is hurt that Jesus did not come to rescue her brother—because she knows that if he had, he could have stopped death. This was Martha’s faith, that the Lord she worshipped had power over death. Joseph Smith wrote in the pain of his own suffering and the suffering of those who followed him. He had witnessed death and illness and imprisonment and rape, and he knew that His God had power over all of those things and all who perpetuated them. And, on the cross, Jesus knew that His Father could save Him, could be with Him, could preserve Him. All of these people would have done anything to feel God with them, and what God seemed to require that they do was, for a time, feel alone.

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Marissa: A Recap

Things that might have happened since the last time I talked to you, depending on when the last time I talked to you was:

  1. I went to graduate school at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) to study stories of holy women. Consequentially, I moved to Boston, cried a lot, wrote and read more than I thought humanly possible, and started learning how to combine my spiritual-speak with my school-speak.

  2. I started dating Austin, got engaged to Austin, and married Austin.

This takes us to the present day, in which I am sitting in a tiny little apartment on Commonwealth Avenue where the tub is blue and you cannot open the fridge while standing in the kitchen. (I love this little apartment. It seeps sunshine.) I just sent my husband off to class and just paid for this blog, because I’m graduating again, and I want to keep writing.

I think I’ve forgotten how to write when it’s not for a professor, and I want to remember.