A Little Bit Brave

We've all heard it said that "home is where the heart is." In my loneliest moments, crying on my bathroom floor, the cry of my heart has been I want to go home.  It didn't matter where I was. It didn't have much to do with who was with me. I wanted to feel home. There's more to home than where our heart is. Our heart can be anywhere. I know my heart has been with the wrong people before. It's been focused on the wrong things before. My heart has been wrong before. My heart is wrong a lot. Our hearts are fickle. They change so often, especially as teenagers. We think we know what we're doing, we think we know what we want. But things change and suddenly what we thought we knew is gone; what we wanted is broken. In the last year I feel like I've watched person after person get exactly what I wanted. It's broken my heart again and again. If our home is where our heart is, our home is on fragile ground. When I started writing this, I wa...

I want to make Youtube videos. Technically, all I need to do that is a webcam and any account connected to Google. However I want a little more quality than that. I got a wonderful camera for Christmas (I mean it's not a Canon 70D but 1.2k isn't chump change). It's really cute and I love it. But it didn't exactly come with editing software. Or a new laptop. Or magic that makes my laptop even slightly more competent. You see, my laptop is a potato (aka it's a hand-me-down from my sister and let's just say there's a good reason she got a new laptop). I filmed and edited a video that I am very proud of but MY LAPTOP WON'T SAVE IT PROPERLY. And I am outraged. Backstory time: When I was just a lil 16-year-old, I started watching Youtube videos that weren't just Blimey Cow  (still love me some BC tho). Katie Gregoire and Chris Howard and Kirby Minnick  had channels I loved and I was like "yo I can do that." The first time I though...

|| "Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1 || Nothing this year went how I expected it to. For instance, I did not expect "man buns" to become a big thing (unfortunately they did). Or for people to demand that I watch them do a stupid dance move (I'm proud to say that I have never whipped or "nae naed"). Or for people to demand to know what my shoes are (that was probably the most annoying thing). Or any of the other weird things that have happened this year. But more seriously, there was a lot of disappointment. In different ways, with different things. That's not to say there weren't great things that happened, because great things did happen. Like, I got a cat and went to NITOC. But not so great things happened too. Maybe it's just me, but I always have these unspoken expectations at the beginning of each year. At New Years, at my birthday, at the beginning of the school year. I exp...

"Psh, that's ridiculous." I thought while watching Pocahontas for the millionth time. The whole spinning compass and magic flower wind was a little out there for my fourteen-year-old sensibilities. "You're not supposed to follow your heart. Haven't you ever heard Jeremiah 17:9?" ||" The heart   is deceitful above all things   and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?" -Jeremiah 17:9|| Clearly, you should not follow your heart. It is deceitful (above all things!!!) and super wicked (like, even more than the musical), and incurable and just generally horrid. If you do follow your heart, you'll end up miserable and cold and alone. No one can ever conquer the heart, so you should probably just ignore it when it tells you about that thing you're passionate about, or that crazy idea you've had for years. So you take this seemingly sound advice, and you leave behind those crazy things your heart keeps telling you to do. After all...

When I was thinking about what I learned this month, I realized just how many things have happened to me in the last four or so weeks. I've grown a lot, and been in situations I've never experienced before. Here's what I learned in one of longest months I've been through. 1. Swing dancing is seriously amazing My friend had her 16th birthday party at a dance hall in a sketchy part of Fort Worth, and when I saw the place for the first time I was like "what the heck did Kat get me into?" But once I got inside and started learning how to actually swing dance, I learned I'd been missing out on something amazing for years. If you get the chance, you should grab a few friends and go out dancing! 2. I am ridiculously sentimental I cleaned out from under my bed this month, and I realized that I keep way too many things. I honestly don't care about the crafts I made in VBS when I was ten, but I still had all the little cardboard baskets and pi...

I didn't expect to feel different the morning of my 16th birthday. I figured it'd be like every birthday ever. People would wish me happy birthday on Facebook, I would eat cheese cake with my family, maybe watch a movie. The thing is, I did  feel different. *Gasp!* I know, I know. I wasn't really that much older than I had been last night. Nothing had physically changed. I didn't magically have a drivers license. I certainly didn't grow (haven't grown since I was thirteen). I didn't wake up to balloons and confetti and people screaming "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!" at me. That would've been terrifying. I probably would've cried. Instead of waking up feeling the same way I did the night before, I came to a realization: I have a life. Like, I'm a person. Who is alive. And breathing. And I can use words. As I reflected stereotypically over the last year of my life, I realized I was tired of waiting for my life to begin. I'm not ...