*Be warned. These are scattered thoughts. Take this for what it's worth, for how I meant it.

Let's rewind back to last summer.

As the leaves started to turn in August, I spent Sunday nights sobbing about having to go back to work and do another week.

I spent hours after I got home from work taking tests called "Find Your Passion" and "What Is Your Dream Career?" and "What Should Your Hobby Be?"

I was so lost. A Huffington Post article called "On Being 23" left me in absolute pieces because I read it just a few weeks after my 23rd birthday, and nothing had ever resonated with me so much.

I couldn't explain it to my friends. I couldn't explain it to Randy. I couldn't explain it to myself.

I didn't feel like me. I was a stranger to myself. I was unmotivated, which if you know me, is something I've never dealt with. I felt bored, uneasy, unsure. I consider myself a fairly confident person, and I wasn't. I am normally so organized, wanting to do a million things and have a million projects. And I couldn't make myself do anything.

I wondered if I should completely switch my career, go back to school, if we should move, and a million other things.

I've tried to write this up a million times and while I was in the depths of feeling so unlike myself, I could barely type a sentence.

Even now, I can't type this without sobbing.

I post this now, not because I want pity, sympathy, or to be "in-fashion" as a young adult who has gone through hard things.

I post it now to reflect on, to remember this crunchy and complicated part of my life. So that one day my children can read about it. And because writing about it is the best thing I know how to do.

**Hi, it's six weeks after I wrote that first part of this post. It's so terribly hard for me to write about this, and I'm unsure why. Normally words like this just flow out of me and fit comfortably on a page. But for some reason this story and this piece of crunchy and complicated take all of my strength to type.

Here's the reality. Life is insanely hard sometimes, for no reason at all. I was doing everything right. I had everything I could have ever wanted. I had a husband who adored me and was always so wonderful to me, family who would drop anything to help me and made me laugh, I was excelling in career, I was attending church and fulfilling my callings, and I was still unhappy. More than unhappy, I was miserable.

I think sometimes we just have to go through hard things. And I think that time in my life was preparing me for something else. Because I was so sad when everything should have been great and wonderful. Everything was easy and rosy, just something was off with me. I had to figure out how to power through, how to find happiness. So when things aren't always as easy or as rosy as they technically were during that time, I know that I can handle it.

I read the Magnolia story toward the end of this weird funk, and it spoke volumes to me. Joanna talks about Thriving not just Surviving. That's become sort of a thing for me now. I had to figure out how to thrive, not just survive my everyday.

I made some career changes, I spent more time finding and doing things that I like, I checked out of social media so I couldn't compare myself to other people, and I leaned on Randy to help me figure it out.

And I prayed harder than I ever have. And no, it wasn't instantly that things got better or that I was myself again, but I was sure that I wasn't in this alone.

Sometimes life is just hard. As Amy Poehler puts it "Life is crunchy and complicated, and all the more delicious. "

Today, I'm happy. I'm excited to go to work, I'm excited to spend time with friends and family.

I'm looking for reasons why I needed to go through a hard thing like that, and I've found hints here and there that show me why.

I guess the whole point in this, is that a few things helped me figure it out. Chocolate ice cream, reading books and articles that made me feel like I wasn't crazy, time with family, having a pity party some nights.

But the two most important things were Randy, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This hard point in my life made me absolutely certain of Jesus Christ, of His reality and of His knowledge of me personally. I kept going to church, I kept reading, I kept praying. And He was there.

He's the reason we can get through anything.