This past weekend I went home because my younger sister wanted to see me one last time before she went back to school in Chicago (group awwwww), and there were some guys buying, or just getting stuff out of the old farrowing house (the building where the baby piggies would grow into big piggies). Being back home at this time of year and seeing them there doing that physical labor just kind of struck a note with me. I really miss physical labor.
Physical labor is something I desire and something I enjoy. Last year at about this time, I was being a butthead emotionally and not working a “real job” but that gave me the chance to actually help dad on the farm some, and I LOVED it. Scrap metal prices were really high, so Dad and I would go out and salvage scrap from the farm that Dad was no longer using and grind the bolts which were worth less off, and use the oxy-acytelyne torch, and other fun stuff like that. There is just something refreshing about being outside and doing hard physical labor. Going out in the morning and working with the cattle all day, whether it was building fence, or making the little boy calves not so little boy calves if you know what I mean 
gave me such a sense of worth and dignity.
As a female so many times I’m not given the opportunity to just go out and do that kind of work that I love. Just going outside and digging around in the mud and putting a seed in the ground and somehow a plant miraculously grows and because of that food comes. How amazing is that? So, Here I am, at college, getting my degree so I can do that blue collar labor I find so fulfilling. Waking up most every morning and sitting in the geology library with the books and going to class on tuesday and thursday and studying, when all I want to do is to use my body and be outside.
As depressed and as rough of a time last spring was, I really learned a lot about myself. I started to find my passion, the thing I love more than almost anything. If you had asked me a year or more ago if I could change anything about my life, I would probably have told you that I wish I had not let myself get depressed to the point I had cut, or even that the last five years just hadn’t happened and I could go back to my junior year. No, not anymore. Yeah, these past years have been incredibly painful. The hospitalizations, the medications, the side effects, the emotional anguish, having to watch how badly I have hurt so many people; I wish I could just control alt delete those things. However, had I not gone through the pain, and lived what I have lived, I would still be that emo little teenage girl who hated the world and hated herself and had no confidence. Therefore, I dont’ think I would trade the last five and a quarter years for anything else.
peace, love, and rock n roll.
Angela
