Why Everyone Should Be Ted Mosby

There is this trend I have seen lately of my single friends refering to themselves as “hopeless romantics.”

A hopeless romantic is a person who has so much love, but no one to share it with.

These people listen to all of the love songs, cry to all of the sappy romantic movies, and constantly annoy their friends with their romantic quests. It seems like the hopeless romantics of the world would be the best people to date. After all, they seem to have everything figured out already. 

And yet they are still single

It’s not that hopeless romantics are unworthy of love. It’s not that the hopeless romantics are inherently wrong, ugly, or impossible to date. The problem with being a hopeless romantic is in the title itself. Hopeless romantics have no hope.

To live without hope is to say that there is no chance for you to ever find love. 

That’s what they call a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I used to describe myself as a hopeless romantic. After one really screwed up relationship, I begged God to guard my heart, and I would not rest until all of my romantic dreams came true. The thing is, even though I had all of the love of the world in my heart, I could not seem to get myself to actually do anything about it.

That’s because I was hopeless.

I could watch any movie, quote any song, or plan any date.

But I was scared that the next chance I took would be the wrong one.

Hopeless romantics are hopeless because they choose to hide themselves in their stories and their dreams, not because they are unworthy of love.

I did what many hopeless romantics do: I chose to love people that I knew could not love me back. I had crushes on people in relationships, people who were far away, people who already said they weren’t interested, and I even liked guys that were seriously considering the seminary. 

If I could just be better at loving people, then maybe I could just find the exact person at exactly the right time.

That never worked.

I would get mad at God. I would take a drive, and as I drove I would yell at God. I would tell Him that I was pissed off that I lost another gift from Him. I would ask Him over and over again why it never seemed to work.

The reason why it never worked was because I convinced myself that I was a hopeless romantic. I thought that there was no way that there could be a person who could actually like a Jesus-loving girl with curves who can't shut up for two seconds about her family or her lab team. No way could someone actually let me be the innocent little girl I proudly chose to be.

But if I kept hiding, then I would never find love.

See, there are hopeless romantics, but there is another type of romantic, one that I think we all need to take a few lessons from.

Ted Mosby: Architect

Ted Mosby is absolutely filled with hope. Every time he finds someone, he convinces himself that maybe this time they could be “the one.” He says “I love you” too soon. He steals blue french horns, makes a getaway from a wedding, and even tells an unneccessarily long story to his kids so that he can finally ask Robin out again.

As annoying as it may seem, Ted Mosby has hope in a way that everyone should.

He did rain dances, went on adventures, and forced himself to risk everything he had, just to find “the one.” A hopeless romantic will stay in their bubble, only letting themselves outside their comfort zone long enough to find their next muse, someone that they can love but not get close enough to break their heart.

"If you're not scared then you're not taking a chance. And if you're not taking a chance, then what the hell are you doing anyway?" - Ted Mosby

Ted Mosby reminds us all that there is something to hope for, to fight for. This world is filled with so much hate and hurt. It’s no wonder that people are starting to give up on love and peace entirely! That’s why we need more Ted Mosby’s out there: we need people who don’t just quit because life is hard.

More importantly, Ted Mosby’s are always searching for love.

True love.

And he doesn’t get it right every time. Actually, he screws up so many times that it takes several seasons for us to even get close to the mother. The thing is, Ted is willing to make those mistakes. He is willing to go out there, be his architect self, and be the person he is meant to be 

so that when it is time for him to meet “the one,” he will be ready.

“Shouldn’t we hold out for someone who doesn’t just tolerate our quirks but actually kinda likes them?” ~Ted Mosby

I tell people that I am like Ted Mosby, not because I am constantly jumping from person to person, not because I am an architect, not because I like to hang out at a bar, not because I am annoying with fun facts or grammar.

I am Ted Mosby because I took a chance.

I am Ted Mosby because now I have hope

I wrote in a previous post that this year God answered a prayer that I had been saying for ten years on Halloween night. It was the answer to that prayer, in the form of a text from my little brother and the thoughts in my head, thoughts of hope, that made me in to a Ted Mosby.

My hope was there all along, but it burst in to my life and transformed my heart one evening as I laid my head down on my lab desk in the pitch black with a text from my brother as the only light in the room.

As I lifted my head and read his encouraging words, I was transported back to a moment that I cherish to this day.

This moment was not the one that changed my life, but I believe it is a really good representation of how my life has changed since I used to scream at God in the car. I was hanging out with a guy I dated for a few weeks. I showed him the pilot of How I Met Your Mother.

"Oh you see Ted there?" I said, "I'm exactly like him."




For those of y'all who don't know, in the pilot episode, Ted tells Robin that he loves her on the first date. Pretty sure that's one of the worst things I have done when it comes to talking to a crush. Then again, I am an awkward turtle.

Yet as I sat there, with a guy that I did not necessarily know what would happen next with, I felt a sense of hope in my heart. Not for him, not for all of the Ted's out there, but for me. It was ok that I was a dreamer because there was someone worth dreaming of.



Everything that I did, while perhaps a bit insane, was not a loss at all. In fact, each moment of my life was leading me to the person, the place, the situation that I am made for.

My family raised me to pray, not just for myself, but for everyone in my life. And since I am a Ted Mosby, I always prayed for my crushes. When I was younger, it would be for them to have a good day the next day or for their game to go well. When I got older, I would ask God to do His will in the relationship, even if we were just friends.

Oddly enough, it was always after that prayer that these boys would move on.

I took a look at my past, and I saw how good it was that God spoke through the Holy Spirit to those boys. They weren’t bad people, but they were not the right guy for me. Some could have hurt me, but most of them just were not right.

Even the most perfect guys had their reasons to leave.

"And if we're the reason you must leave, promise me that you'll believe yourself and not my stuttered pleas for you to change your mind" ~Reasons, Bombadil

And I was finally ok with that.

Because my yellow umbrella (which is more likely a perfect swingset to be honest) is out there.

Somewhere out there is a person to love. Each romantic out there is worthy of so much love, and they should hold on to that hope. With all of the hurt in this world, wouldn’t it be better if we all hoped in something greater? Believed in something greater?

If you find yourself to be a hopeless romantic, take a look at yourself.

You are not a hopeless romantic. You have a reason to hope, a reason to believe, a reason to fight. In your heart, you know that to hope is better. Hope does not mean that you will do anything crazy. After all, being crazy doesn’t make you romantic, it just makes you crazy. But if you have hope, then you become something greater:

You become… Ted Mosby: architect.

Be an architect. Design your own dreams. Make them happen. Even if you have to fall down a few hundred times, keep on trying. Because there is nothing greater in this world than love.

“Love doesn't make sense! You can't logic your way into or out of it. Love is totally nonsensical. But we have to keep doing it or else we're lost and love is dead, and humanity should just pack it in. Because love is the best thing we do” 

~Ted Mosby

Just Supplementary Figures

After seven months, I have hung up my experiment that I started in June. It is not that I did not get any results or that nothing was going to work. In fact, my DNA construct worked, and I was able to get images.

“They’re supplementary figure material” I told a friend.

For those of my Dear Readers who are not super science-y, supplementary figures are figures that are added to the end of a paper, or are placed in a separate journal. It’s not that they are not important figures; they just don’t have a high impact. Supplementary figures are often experiments that are done to appease a reviewer or small support for the original idea.

When you spend seven months working on something, you want the results to be important, or at least important enough to be included on a “real” figure in the manuscript.

There are many moments in our lives that feel like Supplementary Figures.

Day to day life is not always exciting. While people are often saying that “every moment matters,” we know that not each second should change the entire course of our lives. In fact, there is a condition called hyperthemesia where the patient cannot forget anything about their lives, and it actually cripples them.

Not every moment needs to be a big deal.

We want to keep investigating parts of our lives that do not play a role in our personal or professional development. We believe that we are looking at what we want to change or what we think is perfect, but at the end of the day, we know that we need to stop turning our wheels.

Sometimes you just need to see a part of your life and say goodbye to it.

For example, many people participated in a sport or art form in high school, never to get on the field or stage again. While some may be able to return, most will have to hang up their uniform/costume. It hurts, but you have to do so.

However, you should be grateful for that time because it helped shaped who you are. Just as the supplemental figures are able to shape the paper, so too can these past moments.

But you are not your past.

Ended relationships should be viewed in the same way. I love seeing my old friends/crushes/exes find new connections.

For me, seeing new relationships with old companions is like going to a high school football game as an alumnae. While I know that I do not belong on the field anymore, I know that there was a lot of joy in that moment, and I know that those women on the field are experiencing what I did, maybe even moreso. Some may have been on the team for longer than I was on varsity. 

So too is each new relationship.

Regardless of how your relationship ended with a friend/crush/ex ended, you should not have to feel like you need to dwell on it. Yes, feel what you may, but remember that that past was nothing more than a high school football game. Happy memories are good to have, but are not worth looking back on for much longer.

“There’s a light at the end of letting go.” ~Letting Go, Sawyer

I will admit that I am the worst at “falsifying the data” of my life. When something happens to me, and when I feel something other than my usual joy, I want it to be important. It can be happy. It can be sad. It can even be angry. All I want is for people to hear my story and feel something because of it. I often try to make these moments more significant than “the data” would show.

Trying to make a mountain out of a mole-hill does not change anyone’s life. What happened happened.

No one cares.

I mean, people often skip the supplemental figures anyways!

Now I would like to point out that there are some types of supplementary figures that we really should pay attention to. Maybe we don’t spend a lot of time on them, like we would the real figures, but these figures are important in their own right. 

So too are the little moments of our lives.

We just need to put them in the proper perspective

My work from the past 30 weeks taught me this lesson. I study a protein called StARD9. It has a signal that tells it to go to the lysosome, like a zip code if you will. I removed everything from that signal onward to see what would happen in the cell.

Nothing major happened.

The protein just floated around the cell. (Or was soluble for you Bio Kids)

It was not groundbreaking for my lab to know that StARD9 did not go to the lysosome without its signal. While it was what we were expecting, these results did not make a huge difference in the course of our research. It did not reach our specific aims, and it would not make the final figures on our StARD9 paper.

These results may not have been important to me

But they could be of value to someone else.

Recently my lab found a poster abstract of a Japenese doctor who had a patient with this exact mutation. It resulted in some serious developmental defects, and the physician could not explain what happened to this young girl. For however long it has been since this girl was diagnosed, the parents of this patient have been without an explanation.

My results don’t tell them anything.

I won’t be getting a first author publication off of my first year work recreating this patient’s mutation. All I may have to show for it is a supplemental figure with the somewhat non-descript phenotype of StARD9 just floating around.

Sometimes the little moments of our lives mean more to others than they do to us.

I like to think that someday, when the parents might be given the StARD9 manuscript and see what should happen when it is in the lysosome, that maybe they could have some closure.

All from a supplemental figure of their daughter’s mutation and a little bit of connect the dots in their reading.

While it is very important to remember the impact of our lives on the world, it is also important to look at our lives properly. I know that my work could have broader impacts, but I cannot dwell on the past. It doesn’t help anyone, and it doesn’t change the results. No matter how much work you have put in, the broader impacts and the larger figures are not solely dependent on your supplemental figure and your small moments with those around you.

I know that there are people who have benefitted from decisions I made, suggestions I gave, and relationships I fostered.

I joke about how I should get all of the credit, but I shouldn’t. Each of the moments that have led to greater things for others in my life very rarely impact me. They are just supplementary figures to my life story. 

My friends are the ones who did the work to get the figures/big moments. They are the ones who made things work, took the risks, and found their place in the world. And much like the sports that I can no longer play and the dances I will no longer dance, I know that I have to hang my hat and move forward.

Do I have to forget my past?

No.

I just need to accept that there are parts of my life that are now parts of someone else’s life.

We will all play some role in the lives of those around us. We will all make a difference, whether we recognize it or not. The same goes for each life that has entered our own. For however long we know someone, they will have the opportunity to make an impact on our lives.

Even the smallest moments with someone may make the biggest difference in the future.

For me, it was 30 weeks with a point deletion on basepair 11760 in a patient I’ll never meet.

While we should not focus all of our attention on the little moments of our lives, we should be willing to give the “supplemental figures” in our lives an opportunity. Take time to read the moments that we are thankful for, feel heartbreak over, and are intrigued by. Maybe what we do won’t make a big difference, and maybe what we experience won’t matter to someone else.

What does matter is that we are grateful for all of the effort we put in to this life.

To the people and places and experiences that served as supplemental figures in my life

I am ever so thankful for y’all.

God Bless.

Cardboard Castles

For those of y’all who are unaware, I am actually a pretty big fan of rap music.

There is this song by Watsky called “Cardboard Castles.” The narrator, Watsky I presume, is in his room, building a castle out of cardboard, shoestrings, soup spoons, and tin foil, even though he is a grown man with a real life and real responsibilities, such as rent.

Why would he be doing so?

Well as Watsky says, “I’m still dreaming after all of these years.”

It’s one thing to dream as a kid. If anything, it’s easier to dream when you are a kid. There is always someone out there saying that you can do anything you set your mind to, just so long as you do the work. You don’t know what can go wrong, and you don’t care if anything goes wrong. 

After all, we have all had our block towers come crashing down.

I have written previously about how the world tells us that we have to grow up. Somewhere in history, the idea of dreaming became more of a joke than a reality. The American Dream became the American Hand-out. As we grew older, we were reminded over and over again why we were not going to be successful. 

Dreams are for children. Stupid little innocent children who don’t know any better. The castles they build in their hearts will amount to nothing more than a cottage in the real world.

So then… if we want more dreams to change the world, then we are going to need a few more child-like people. People who are willing to build cardboard castles.

That can be you.

"Because if we don't build it, who will?"

I’m a child. I’m so child-like that I can be found skipping down the hallway late at night with a Tootsie Roll Pop in my mouth and giggling about nothing in particular.

I don’t do sad for very long.

When I have my bad days, it shocks a lot of people. I don’t like to be sad. I don’t do sad, and the month of November was the most uncharacteristic month of my entire life. Crying to my friends on a weekly basis about something stupid was just not like me. 

People do not believe that it is possible for me to be such a happy person. I have to be fake.

The thing is, my joy is real.

Many people would believe that this is possible because I have not had my dreams dashed yet. In fact, there are two boys that actually make fun of me for being happy, and they spend a lot of time trying to make me angry, just because they want to see if it’s possible. They think it’s funny that I am happy. And as much as I wish it was only them, I have had many people egg me on, just to see if they could get a rise out of me. From boys throwing gum in my hair to now, my child-like spirit has been under attack.

“You’re too innocent to understand Felicity.” they sneer and snicker.

It is true that I have been saved from many heartaches of this life, but I am not without burden. Do I wish to broadcast the darkest parts of my life? Certainly not. Do I wish to make myself a martyr and say that I have overcome great trial to earn praise? Certainly not. What I am trying to say is that while it may appear that I have never had a truly painful moment in my life, I have seen and heard and experienced things that I sometimes wish never happened, or that I had not done such things.

But those moments were in the past.

And my castle still stands.

See, my Tata taught my little brother and I to build all of our towers with a strong foundation. My parents took that to the next level and raised all of the Newton kids to build our lives on a strong foundation. If we wanted our dreams to come true, then we were going to have to start with the best foundation.

With a strong foundation, we may be broken down, but we have a place to start again.

Not all is lost.

Such a foundation is difficult to find. You have to find a foundation that is larger than life itself. It must go beyond your wildest imagination. It cannot be something in this life, something that you can control. If you base your whole life on your own strength and merit, then you are going to have a bad time. 

I know this because I have based my life in my own triumphs, my own glory, my own notoriety, and I let it all fall apart.

When I was in high school, I based all of my hopes and dreams on meaningless romances. It became so real that one boy was actually able to convince me that I was unworthy of love from anyone other than him. All of the hope that I once shared with so many others was dashed, and I lost the ability to believe.

My foundation was dismantled, and my castle fell apart.

I could tell the whole story, but to save space and time, I will simply say that my little brother showed me his foundation, one that I could share, and my life was changed for the better. It was the single most powerful moment of my upbringing, and Mark does not even remember it happening.

It was not without effort that I rebuilt my life. What made it possible for me to rebuild was hope. It was the hope that God had given me. And like all other great things, I did not find this gift by myself.

I was given this gift of hope from the joy of a boy in my University Catholic community.

When I was a freshman and a sophomore at Belmont, I was struggling to build my castle up again. There was this boy that was just so happy. It seemed like nothing could touch him, not even the impending life decisions he was making. As stressful as life should have been, this boy was filled with joy.

The dots connected: the same foundation that my brother gave me was the same one that held this awesome guy up.

I wanted to be like that.

What was that foundation?

The Cross.

Like I said, we have to find a foundation for our castle that is not going to fail us. It has to be beyond this life, something that cannot be shaken by this world. There are many powerful forces, such as family and friendship, but there is nothing bigger than God. I mean... “God is bigger than the boogie man, he’s bigger than Godzilla or the Monsters on TV.”

Believing in Jesus means that I have Heaven at my side.

With Christ as my foundation, all of my dreams have a chance.

“Dreams that bear the mark of love are dreams that never die.” Moving Forward, Colony House

You do not have to just rebuild when your dreams are contested by life. In fact, with a strong base, we are able to remodel pieces of our lives. If the roof comes in, then we know how to reinforce it for the next storm. If our windows shatter, then we know which glass to use in the future. Dreams can change and grow, especially when they are founded in something that cannot fail.

“This life’s our greatest project. The journey is an art”

~Cardboard Castles, Watsky

I am remodeling myself every day.

That is why I do not appear sad for long. 

Much like the boy I witnessed as an undergrad, all I want to do is share the joy I have found with the world. I want to share that even though there is so much hurt and suffering and plenty of reasons to quit that there are many more reasons to keep going. My foundation has changed my life for the better, and it is all because of the joy given to me by the amazing souls that have touched my life.

Speaking as someone who had to rebuild from the foundation up, I know that it is difficult to even consider founding our life on something we cannot even see. Faith is not easy.

But do you know how much God loves you at the bottom?

Hint: It's a ton.

A little while ago I was blessed with the opportunity to see this love. Many of my friendships begin with an overly emotional conversation. It’s not my fault, but people always seem to share their story with me. I don’t care, and I don’t tell people about the hardships that my friends experience. That’s just not cool.

But anyways, there was a beautiful soul that was sharing their story with me.

Over and over their castle was broken down. Yet they kept building their castle, time and time again. They believed that they could make it better, that if they just kept trying that maybe just maybe it would be ok. Even still, this soul was kicked and beat down in ways I could not fathom.

So there this soul sat, completely vulnerable and empty.

I was speechless for the first time in my entire life.

It was odd because I was not sad or scared. I was not confused or hurt. No. As I sat with this friend, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sense of love. This person was a dreamer, even though they could not keep themselves standing for very long. They had loved and were loved, but they could not find true love and happiness in this life. 

The love did not come from me.

It came from God.

There were no words for me to say. It has been quite some time, and yet I am still without words for how beautiful it was to feel such love in my heart for a dreamer with a broken down castle. I was incredibly humbled to share in that experience, and I did not feel worthy to speak. Whatever love I had was pathetic in comparison to the immense compassion filling my heart. 

For the first time in my life, I saw myself as God saw me. 

I saw this beautiful friend, and I loved them.

God showed me this soul, the soul of a child crying out for love and support and care, and He told me “I love this person. Look at how beautiful they are.”

All of us are children. Whether we choose to accept that or not is up to us.

We are all meant for amazing things. There is no dream too great, no goal too difficult, no hope unworthy for us because we were made by a great God who can do all things. Much as a child can believe that their parent can do anything, so too can we believe that God can do anything. It may not look like what we expect at the end of the day, but it is all worth it.

I don’t care if I am found dancing or laughing. I don’t care if people call me a child.

All I can hope for is that they see my joy and some day find it in themselves.