ACCORDING TO ZAC

What is it about hearing a song or going somewhere from the past that activates this really distinct feeling I can barely explain? It's happy, but a little sad too. It's fun, but does have a sharp edge on it. “Sweet Disposition” by Temper Trap gets me feeling that way, and I'm right back in it after finding  this cover  of that song this week. That song takes me to really clear time of my life where I was really flying, right around my sophomore year of college. There were some growing pains then too, but by and large everything was really clicking; my ward was great, I was coming into my own spiritually, enjoying my major, and felt deep satisfaction in the relationships in my life. Back in 2020, as we were still in the early days of the pandemic and social distancing, I wrote about trying to reckon with the nostalgia of the past without overlooking the goodness of the present, which seems very akin to what I'm feeling now. I described it then as a combination of “long...

I’ve been overcome this weekend by the significance of people in my life and all they have done and continue to do for me. This isn’t new, given my reflections on Shaley , my two best friends , and how much a ward family can mean in recent times. But I feel it in my bones yet again, and it feels important to pay attention to. A lot of this started at a White Coat Ceremony for my second year PT students on Saturday. I loved hearing families and friends cheer as their loved one’s name was read. There was a really dapper older guy a few rows away from me (the rare occurrence where a fedora really worked; he looked great!). He was sitting alone, and when his person’s name was called he stood and clapped, not making much of an audible or visual statement in such a big space. Yet his act of showing up as one person in a busy room to support someone he cared about that was deeply touching to see. To be one in a sea of many can feel like it’s not much impact, but this guy knew that somet...

I feel like I’m at an intersection with a bunch of crossroads and exactly no idea what road looks even a little bit better than any of the other ones. Normally I find people in situations like this really unbearable. Can someone truly have no opinion about where they want their life to take them? Is it really that hard to make a decision and trust that it can get cleaned up if it doesn’t go as planned? But now I’m that exact person, and it’s not a great time. It’s interesting to consider my indecision, but perhaps more interesting to consider where that indecision comes from (does it sound like I’ve been in therapy a long time?). I think I’m needlessly worried that I’ll be seen as some kind of failure if I make a choice I have to back out of later. Who wants to eat crow? There’s some worry about how people might perceive me if I make a big life change they weren’t expecting. I also feel like this might be the first time that I need to make some decisions where there’s less immediate sa...

It’s Sunday night and I can’t sleep. I’m mad about it. But I should have known this would happen; I took a nap at 3:30 this afternoon. As I’ve lain here, my brain keeps going over a surprising situation I’ve found myself in (that I won’t be chronicling in detail here… yet?). It’s something I’m completely surprised by, something I wasn’t planning, yet something I’ve speculated on for a number of years. It also happens to be something I have prayed about but haven’t really found any answers. For many elements of my life I love to use trial and error and know that the Big Guy is waiting in the wings in case things go sideways. Then He and I work to find a better route. However, this is something I was hoping He’d give me the nod for. All I’ve gotten is radio silence. In replaying the last two weeks and forecasting the one ahead, I somehow had a memory pop up from 2015. It was the last summer I lived in Tucson, and we befriended two guys who had moved into our ward for the season. I though...

For a minute there, I was mad at my therapist. Not for a breach of confidence or any other kind of unprofessional behavior. No, I was mad at him because he’s right, and he has been for the better part of the three years I’ve been working with him. Change is hard, and the process to develop personally can be grueling. But even if I was mad, it’s not lost on me how lucky I am that I’ve got a trained professional to help me through it all. Most remarkable about what I’m realizing isn’t that this guy has been right all along—I knew he had credentials and a wealth of experience at the outset—it’s that he has allowed this process to be mine , even if it probably (certainly) prolonged the outcome. He has let me move at the pace that’s appropriate for me, even though the path through this maze has probably looked pretty clear from his vantage point. While the endpoint, the goal of getting through this maze, was why I started working with him, the fact that he didn’t dictate anything has meant ...

Because of who I am (gregarious, emotion-driven, etc.), I’m predisposed to become emotional when I watch other people doing something cool. And usually it’s emotional in a good way, thankfully. And sometimes it feels sort of cosmic, or like there’s this great big interconnectedness between complete strangers that I can only catch a glimpse of every now and then. Instead of making me feel small, given how many people there are in the world, it actually makes me feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be by virtue of the commonality I share with literally every person on the planet: we’re all human, and we’re all trying. Yesterday I went to my first concert since last 2019. The screaming was fun, the singing was great, we didn’t get trampled in the pit like I thought we would. There was a lot of good happening! But I think what was most significant was early on in the band’s set when I thought about how incredible it is that there were a few thousand people in one place for the same re...

It’s not uncommon for there to be lulls in conversation during my sessions with my therapist. Sometimes they feel like a bit of a standoff to see who will fill the void first; those are the days that I’m not feeling as introspective, or our previous conversation hasn’t sparked much for me to sort through. But other times the quiet helps me make some sense of what I’m feeling (or reel from being confronted with something I don’t know how to make sense of) and then decide what to jump into next. This week there was one of these pauses, and I’ll admit that I didn’t feel like I was really working through much. But I wanted to wait out the break to make the doc determine the direction we would go. It’s a tricky game of chicken because he will either ask me, “What are you thinking about?”, and that doesn’t always work on a day I don’t have much bouncing around my brain, or he’ll ask me a question that cuts right through me. It feels like there’s absolutely no in-between. This week he leaned ...