General Conference

This past weekend my church had it's annual General Conference. Instead of attending church there is a broadcast from Salt Lake City with sermons given by the Prophet, 12 Apostles and members from the Quorum of the Seventy. If you are curious, the entire conference can be viewed at www.lds.org.

Conference brings out some warring emotions in me. Half of me feels spiritually fed and uplifted; the other half feels guilty for all that I am not doing. Eric and I were talking about this last night and he reminded me that there is no reason to feel guilty and that God and Christ care more about progression than getting it perfect the first time.

On Sunday Eric was gone all day so I felt a little lonely but I was quite proud of myself because I made a lot of good choices through out the day. However, at dinner time I was still feeling a bit down and overwhelmed. My mind kept battling between "You are enough" and "You will never be enough". It is exhausting.

One of the areas I really want to work on is self-motivation. If I have made a commitment to someone else I am really good about following through. If I make a commitment to myself there is about a 15% chance that I will follow through. With the depression I feel like overcoming personal shortcomings is twice has hard. When trying to describe this to Eric I decided to use an analogy he would know: X-Men. In "X-Men First Class" Mystique works to keep her appearance "normal". At one point Magneto tells her if half of her attention is on her appearance she is only half paying attention to whatever else she is doing. That is what it is like with depression sometimes. Half of my mental energy is going towards keeping the depression at bay leaving me with only half of my mental energy to do everything else.