It's funny to go back and read posts from when I was younger of how I imagined my future.  Usually I said that I was going to get an English degree and have a career as an author {I'm still wanting to be an author but I missed the mark on the degree}; I wanted to marry a tall football player {check}; I would have have six kids with Biblical names {our name ideas are different, but maybe I'll still convince Dallin to have six instead of three!}.
Maybe I will read back at this post in a couple years and chuckle at my idealism. But for now, here are some ideas:

• I would love to live in Germany or Austria for three years or so. Meeting American families living abroad while I was on my mission showed me the value of teaching children that the world is bigger than their own native culture. These families would go on casual three-day-weekend trips to Budapest or Prague {because it was so cheap and so close}, and their kids became bilingual very quickly.  If my kids were young, I would just stay at home with them, but if they were in school then I could find a job as an SLP.  There are so many English-speakers in some of the international cities or by military bases that I'm sure I could easily be employed with my ASHA certification.  In addition, Dallin is part of the tech industry, which is in high demand over there!
• While I was writing my grad school applications, I was interested in working with the school-aged population. However, I am currently interested in focusing on traumatic brain injuries in my line of work.  Seeing how far my cousin Ryan has come since his accident involving shrapnel a few years back has been such an inspiration to me!
• I want to adopt! I would actually like to bare some of my own babies {especially the oldest}, but I would love to give other children the opportunity to live in a loving home. 

     As the discussions of equality continue worldwide, one word that has been used a lot is privilege. 
     It was a concept I used to not understand. Sure, I thought, I grew up in the United States of America in a loving family with the gospel.  But I worked for what I got!
     Now, I realize that my privilege was far much more than that. My privilege was not only to grow up in a home that was loving -- it was to grow up in a home free of abuse and neglect. Working in a treatment facility has taught me that my perfect home situation is nothing more than a fantasy for far too many children.
     I am a successful adult because I worked hard my whole life and earned what I got, I thought. Actually, my privilege was not only to grow up in a loving home -- it was to grow up being TAUGHT the work ethics I needed to succeed as an adult, and to be GIVEN the resources. My parents helped me with my homework throughout my school years {my mom was a stay-at-home mother} and not only encouraged me to take the ACT, but paid for me to have a tutor so that I could get a higher score the second time I took it.  I will have a good future and make money because I made the choice to go to college, I thought. Really, my privilege was to have parents who emphasized all growing up the value of getting a degree, and then for them to pay for a good portion of my school expenses until I was eligible for scholarships.  Sure, I got lots of full-ride scholarships, but could I have pulled off the good grades if I had had to work more than 15 hours a week to pay for the previous semesters?
     White privilege is a thing of the past, I thought. But I realize there ARE stereotypes.  Why is it that we still make comments, innocent or not, when a white girl decides to go out with a black guy, or vise versa? Why, when we tell a story, do we have to mention specifically if the person was black {why does it matter}? Maybe my privilege was to be able to play 007 {similar to Cops and Robbers} as a teen without my neighbor automatically thinking my friends and I were up to no good and calling the cops. And yet people are "suspicious" if they see black people out and about in their neighborhood, even if it's for no more than an evening jog.
     My privilege has given me an unearned advantage in society due to the circumstances of I was born into. I have had the opportunity to travel the world, and I have enjoyed the everyday luxuries of upper-middle class suburban living.  My mom was one of those people who was able to rise up above the odds of her tough childhood and create the life that I have.  But for me, my successes as an adult will always come back around to these blessings I had as a child. It's not to say that I don't have freedom of choice, but many of the choices I make will only be available because of the opportunities I was given from the beginning.

     So what can I do with this privilege? Sometimes we say privilege like it's a bad thing, like it makes us ungrateful, naive and spoiled people.  We want to deny it and say, Well I had challenges in my life! Having privilege does not invalidate our challenges, of course.  But we can still acknowledge the advantages we've been given.  For me, I hope that I can use my privilege of having kind parents to pass along the messages of self-love to my girls at the treatment facility. I hope I can use my privilege of having parents who helped me pay for college to get a degree where I can help people who have been put at the disadvantage of speech-language disorders. I hope I can generally see beyond my self and guide others who are in pain.

    Recently I read that the anorexic high is a real, physiological thing. Apparently, when the body is in starvation mode, it releases endorphins as a survival mechanism before slowing the heart rate, metabolism and other internal functions. Reading that made it click for me.  It made sense why I used to {and still do} crave something so horrible, something so contradictory to every evolutionary concept of survival. Starving did feel good, in some insane way, even when it gave me a raging headache, stabbing hunger pains and utter exhaustion. I couldn't explain why, when I first started along the recovery path in 2018, I would hear hiphop and rap and suddenly crave starvation with every fiber within me.  I know, it seems weird. But I needed it, it seemed.  I could cry I wanted to relapse so bad.  Now, however, I wonder if it had something to do with these endorphins.
     Lately, I've had to check myself  because I am starting to feel again like petite is my identity. I developed an eating disorder a couple years ago because I had felt like petite was part of who I was all growing up, and when I gained some adult weight, I felt like I had lost a part of myself.
     At my new job at the treatment facility, I work with teenage girls. Being in college and on a mission over the past 5 years, I had forgotten how much teenage girls notice other people's size and appearance, because rarely do adults ever comment on what I look like physically.  If adults compliment me, it's usually on my fashion sense.
     But since I started working at the treatment facility a month ago, I hear comments about my physical appearance multiple times a day.

• "You're smaller than me!"
• "You're so little!"
• "Why are you a staff but you're so little?"
• "Why are you so small?"
• "I thought you were a student, not a staff!"
• "You're so petite!"
• "You're arm is skinny enough to reach under the bed and grab my ball!"
• "I wish I was as skinny as you!" {I nip this one in the bud}
• This 13ish-year-old girl is OBSESSED with my size because we are roughly the same size. Every time she sees me she says over and over, "You're so tiny! You're so tiny!" Today she told me that she thought she weighed more than me, which seemed insane to me since she is so small.  I shrugged her off.  But since neither the girls nor I ever get to know our weights, I guess we'll never know. 
• Although this is more with face than body, I have heard things like, "Hey! Pretty blonde staff!" or "Isn't that staff so pretty?" 
• Etc. 

     A few days ago, a black man named George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for eight minutes. Despite pleading "I can't breathe," and bystanders trying to intervene after he stopped responding, the officer would not release the restraint. Floyd's crime? A counterfeit $20 bill.
     Now, the entire world has erupted in angry response.  First, it was peaceful protests, but then it evolved into violent riots that forced the National Guard to get involved.  In Minneapolis, five-story buildings burned. In SLC, a cop car was flipped over and burned and a man with a bow was shooting arrows in the open before other people knocked him over with their skateboards.  Targets nationwide closed their doors after a looting, and countless other businesses--big and small--have suffered smashed windows, theft and other devastation.  My dad's friend is sleeping in his dental office because the business next door was vandalized. In Washington D.C., fifty Secret Service agents were injured in riots that sent President Trump to his bunker, flags were desecrated, and St. John's church was reduced to ashes. People have rammed their cars into police officers, putting one in critical condition, and in another city a journalist went blind in one eye from a rubber bullet fired by officers trying to control the crowds. Many cities and even whole states, including Arizona, have issued 8:00 curfews.
     Last night the Orem PD sent out this message: