Welcome

You know what the best way for me to get over a bad mood is?

To think about all of the things I'm grateful for.  And there sure are a lot of 'em.

Like lunch with good friends.

A meeting about a group I am so excited to be a part of.

Being involved in campus life in general.

Bruno texting me asking me for my address because he still wants to send me their CD for free.

But as odd as this is going to sound, I think the brightest part of my day was when I was leaving my meeting with Tracie, the College Dems president, and my friend Gabe was walking towards us and called out from forty or fifty feet away "Hey Mallory, how are you doin', hon?" and came up and gave me a huge hug.

It honestly still blows me away, the level of acceptance I have found here.  Maybe it's my self-esteem issues, maybe it's my trust issues and rough past in dealing with other people my age, who knows.  All I know is that I feel surrounded by people who don't give a crap about what I look like.  I can finally be myself and be accepted for it.  The people who do judge me are few and far between, rare enough that I forget about them.  Instead, I get doors opened for me by complete strangers.  I get hugs from guys who never would have spoken to me in high school.  I get people asking for my help in class because they appreciate it, not because they want to use me.  The only other place in the world that I have ever felt this accepted and welcome is at Camp Don Lee, the camp where I got saved when I was 11.  It's so beautiful.

I remember several of you, along with others in my "real life" (and I hate saying that because the relationships I have formed through this blog are just as real and precious to me as any of my in-person friends, but you know what I mean), trying repeatedly over the past few years to tell me that people would start to love me more if and when I learned how to really love myself.  But I know back then I didn't want to hear it.  I was too caught up in my self-dug hole of misery and complaints to accept the fact that I had/have a hand in all of this.

Well, I'm starting to think you were right.  And I am so glad you were.  So if you were one of the people who tried to tell me that, over and over again fighting against my too-thick head, I have one thing to say.

Thanks for not giving up on me. :)