Leisa Michelle

Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact

When “Facing Your Fears” Doesn’t Work

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“I’ll be praying for you that you’ll have the strength to face your fears.”

This is a condensed version of a text my sister sent me recently.

I’ve been struggling with some really intense anxiety over the last year. Anxiety that I can’t explain, control, or confront. It springs on me at the most inconvenient times. It makes me feel weak and irrational. It makes me feel alone. And, frequently, it makes me feel like a bad friend. I wish I could say it’s been getting better. But it hasn’t.

I’ve been very private and embarrassed about all this. But upon receiving the above text, I realized something.
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Underrated Disney Movies: Atlantis the Lost Empire

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I’m going to do a short series on Disney movies that I feel are underrated. On my list is Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Brother Bear, and Treasure Planet. Know another movie I should take a look at? Comment at the end of this post or email me or something. Anyway, let’s see what the verdict is about Atlantis. Onward!

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Signs, signs everywhere…

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Semiotics and the study of meaning

Signs are all around us. But I don’t just mean street signs or those plaques outside the public bathroom. In semiotics, a sign is anything that has meaning. So traffic lights, religious buildings and insignias, the alphabet, the color white, chirping birds, running water, smoke, and even the entire English language are all signs. Signs can be pictures or symbols or gestures, and they can also be sounds or tastes or smells.

Semiotics is “the study of signs”. It’s the study of meaning, the study of how we communicate. We think in signs, and so we communicate in signs. But before we talk about why semiotics is both so fascinating and important, let’s talk more about what these “signs” actually are.

Get ready to have your mind blown.

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But Can’t I Have Both?

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In a story I wrote, Be What You Are, a girl dreams of being a dancer. But she doesn’t just want to be a dancer, she wants to be one of the most prestigious dancers in society – one that performs for the king and his family and guests. A sort of fairy godmother or guiding spirit, Mother Heron, appears to the girl and tells her that she has to choose: she can either find her own path and be a “true” dancer or be a dancer for the king. She can’t both be herself and be a court dancer.

Everyone has to decide what’s right for them and their own life. But I’ve learned that what you think you want and what you actually want are two very different things.

To use the girl from the story as an example, she loves dancing and is fulfilled by it. At her very core, she is a dancer. It’s what she’s meant to be. And so when she looks at the world, she assumes that this highest dancing position (what’s better or more important than dancing for the king?) is the one that she’s meant to take.

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A “Hypothetical” Plan For Learning Latin

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This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

I got hit by a new wave of language lust the other day. Every other week or so I get an itching to study some new language, usually unprompted and without a sensible reason. This week’s sultry provocateur: Latin.

I try to trust myself and give in to these weird cravings as often as I can. And so within moments of being overwhelmed with a sudden desire to learn Latin, I was browsing Amazon to see what resources they had available.

I saw lots of textbooks, workbooks, grammar references, and parallel readers. Same old, same old. But there were so many things to choose from, and each book seemed to have its own pros and cons. And so it made me wonder (hypothetically, of course!). What exactly do I want in a Latin textbook? Or rather…

What does “learning Latin” mean to me, and how do I do it?

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