I fell off the bandwagon as far as posting deployment updates, partially because I didn't want to violate OPSEC or PERSEC, partially because I was really busy and never made time for the blog, and partially because some things were just really private. But, now one of my classmates (or former classmates, I guess, which is really sad when I think about it) is about to experience deployment and I thought I would brush up on my experiences of the year. I jotted down some notes from time to time, so here are my (mostly) exact words. I also wrote about how I felt the night he told me that he would be deploying, and our thoughts later, and things becoming real (and you know it's really real if I'm at an FRG meeting--I haven't attended one in almost two years).

about 5 months before deployment
He snores a lot. It's annoying now, but it'll be too quiet in a few months.

about 4 months before deployment (Alan was in the field)
Day one of not seeing Alan for over 16 hours. Good deployment practice and I managed the dogs, house, and [foster] kids by myself.

about 1 month before deployment (1:29 a.m.)
I'm not at all tired ... and now, due to the extra time spent awake, I'm devastated about Alan leaving for a year. I'm so sad that we'll be apart. That's a huge portion of life that we'll miss together. I don't want him to go. I just want to hold on to him forever.

about 3 weeks before deployment
"That's what you need to show the cops when you get pulled over."
[Alan pulled out the insurance and registration in the Jeep.]

about 2 weeks before deployment
I was about to start creating a grocery list on an app so it would appear on both Alan's and my phones. Then I realized that the next time I go shopping, I'll do it alone.

do over

We've put another quarter in the slot – free play! Hit the reset button on a moment this year: what would you do over? Whether or not you analyze your actions – how would you act differently? Would the outcomes shift, or stay the same? From a single sentence to a whole day (and everything in-between), feel free to explain your choice, from how you felt immediately after the moment passed, to any thoughts that ran through your mind beforehand. Take a mulligan!

Graduate school has taught me so much about counseling, relationships, and myself. I would not trade the experiences that I have had over the past year, but something that I have shared with friends in other cohorts is that tending to your self-care and giving yourself permission to make mistakes is vital.

If I could do something over, it would be to learn that lesson faster and relax a bit more, especially during the spring semester. Burning myself out didn't help anyone (certainly not myself), and I hope other students realize this sooner rather than later. Society seems to expect us--or, perhaps more accurately: We seem to expect ourselves to keep full and active lives across a variety of areas, all while uploading filtered photos, tweets, and statuses that lead everyone else to think it's all effortless.

We take full course loads (and sometimes overloads), participate in our churches, volunteer in our communities, tell our supervisors that yes, we can take another client, make room for our families, keep up some semblance of having social lives, and feel our anxiety levels raising because there's another 14-page paper due and a presentation on theory on probably something else that we've forgotten. Not to mention the fact that we come last, because putting ourselves any higher on our list of priorities would seem selfish and wrong. (Or, maybe that was just me spring and part of summer semester. ...)

So, if I could do something over this year, it would be to take better care of myself from the beginning, instead of waiting for stress to build up to the point where I begrudgingly started putting myself first more often and realized that I wasn't going to be struck down by lightning for doing so.

goals with grace: december

I currently use a bullet journal to keep track of my daily goals and to-dos and finally-got-dones, but I like the idea of goals with grace, so I decided to link up!

My goals for December are:

+ practice self-care. The day before and the day of graduation are going to be extremely busy for almost the whole 48 hours, so if I don't take care of myself, I'm going to be very burned out and grumpy. And that's not how I want to remember earning my master's degree. Specifically, I plan to run a minimum of 35 miles this month (approximately 3.5 miles twice weekly). My bonus goal is to work back up to running at least 10k by the end of the month.

+ host a brunch. I really love the heart of the International Justice Mission and I'm currently reading The Locust Effect. I've been wanting to host a casual brunch for some ladies to talk about justice and raise money for IJM.

+ advent. Along with hosting a brunch, I want to introduce Advent Conspiracy to our home life group. Alan and I are talking about the sort of traditions we want to establish for ourselves and the sort of life we want to lead and I think the philosophy of Advent Conspiracy, which I discovered on another blog linked up with Goals with Grace, reflects that.

arbitrary 03.

So, my final semester of grad school happened and I forgot I had a blog. Fortunately, I'm graduating in less than two weeks (God willing)!

+ remember. Please consider supporting a friend's daughter on March of the Living--she is the granddaughter of a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau. March of the Living will enable her to travel to Poland and Israel.

+ nudity. Recently, nude photos of Kim Kardashian made their way around the internet. I found this article, 5 Things I Plan to Tell My Teenage Boys About Kim Kardashian, and bookmarked it because I think the points could be relevant for a variety of situations. On another note, I think we need to talk about the church's view of purity (or at least the concept of purity that I grew up with), because those photos popped up in one of my social media feeds and I wasn't even looking for them.

+ free. Relevant Magazine released a free-to-download Christmas album.

+ vlogs. My friend, Annie, vlogged about youth ministry because I asked her to. I'll be creating a response vlog at some point, especially because she mentions She Reads Truth and some other cool things. (I say "at some point" because if I give myself a deadline, I'll most likely just watch it pass by.)

+ running. Several weeks ago, I broke one of my toes. By walking into a chair. In my own home. I didn't realize how important running was to me in regard to my personal self-care routine, so I'm grateful to be back on the roads again--and just in time for Alan's brigade run coming up soon!