All in love
Writing this post to you from a quiet weekend away with my other half. We spent our New Years 2018 here too and I spent so much of that time writing about what I hoped would come to pass in the next year. And I want to talk what can seem to be a scary and complicated topic: manifesting and achieving dreams.
I have only one resolution for 2019, and that is to do more of what sets my soul on fire! As I began thinking about my upcoming Loving Lately post a few weeks ago, I kept coming back to the phrase soul on fire. I can’t take credit for this little phrase or hashtag, it actually comes from one of my favorite bloggers, Jordan Younger, aka The Balanced Blonde. Her words have always resonated with me, but recently I haven’t been able to shake them. They have become engrained in my heart, mind and soul.
Is it just me, or is anyone else blown away by the fact that it is already December 6th? I feel like it was literally just the beginning of summer two days ago and now we are 19 days away from Christmas and 26 days away from 2019! Say what?!?! It’s that time of the year where our social media feeds flood with the quintessential holiday decor pictures (hey, I do it too, nothing wrong with spreading a little cheer!) but it’s also the time when all the memes/various social media posts start to pop up about how awful this year was and how the New Year can’t come soon enough. I have so been there. In fact, I’ve been there every year since 2015. Let’s be real…life happens. It’s messy and raw and a tumultuous rollercoaster — but it’s also freaking beautiful.
We've always tried to keep this blog positive. We deal with heavy topics sometimes here at LL, and we're definitely not immune to some seriously challenging life circumstances. One of the side effects of hardship (for me) has been that I hesitate to feel happy, to feel joy, to feel like I have my feet on solid ground. When I do feel the urge to celebrate, I think "what will go wrong next?", or "will celebrating make it more likely that something bad will happen?" or "how will I ever get anything done if I'm always celebrating where I'm at?"
So you guys may or may not have noticed… I took a little hiatus. Kelly and I have religiously switched on and off every 2 weeks writing blog posts since Loving Lately began and in the middle of last month I just completely shut down and couldn’t. I didn’t want to write candidly and in detail about what was going on in my personal life, but I also didn’t feel like writing about just anything because everything else felt so inconsequential.
The long story short is Scott and I lost a member of our immediate family to cancer. And we’ve been grieving this for some time now and the last time I was supposed to write for Loving Lately I just couldn’t wrap my mind around what would be important enough to write about and Kelly I’m so thankful took the wheel for me and posted all this gorgeous love and amazement with her Heart’s Delight post.
Mike and I had the profound honor of being asked to speak on the third night of the Hearts Delight Wine Tasting and Auction in Washington, DC. This was extremely monumental for us, as it marked the first time we were both featured patients, advocates, and speakers.
In tonight's post, I tackle what's been plaguing me for almost two months now: abject fear regarding my health and the uncertainty of the path it will take. Let me be completely honest – this is a very new feeling for me and I absolutely hate it. Sure I have wrestled with a plethora of emotions regarding my health: anxiety and depression surrounding the future, trauma from the past, a sense of loss over certain things (like the ability to biologically carry a child) but I have truly never really experienced any day to day consistent fear and panic. In fact, I was the complete opposite.
"I love my friends neither with my heart nor with my mind. Just in case...my heart might stop. My mind may forget. I love them with my soul. My soul never stops or forgets" - Rumi
All of these quotes sum up so perfectly how I've been feeling lately. This post isn't going to be embedded with sage wisdom or earth shattering advice. I'm not going to stress over it's length or it's composure - rather it's going to encompass what we initially envisioned when Allison proposed the title of the blog....something I have really been loving lately!! For me these past few weeks it's been simple: friendship. So this post is all about the celebration, and necessity, of one's best friends. Of girl time. Of escaping reality. Of refreshing your soul.
