Hi.
A lot of you (so many!) have kindly, gently, insistently asked after me over the past...almost two years now. Almost two years since my life took a detour. Off a cliff.
In those almost two years, I've been writing. I've written so much, most of it on the tiny screen of my phone, that will never see the light of day. I've written about weight gain and loss, about hospital food, about the sheer audacity of hope, but I haven't written about fashion. I haven't set the camera up in front of that giant orange painting hanging in my dining room. And I'm not going to lie to you guys: I'm probably not going to get back to it.
Not that I don't love fashion. In fact, if anything, I love it even more now. I've never been more sure of my personal style and more pleased with the contents of my closet. But, beyond sharing outfit selfies on Instagram (which I LOVE to do so really, go follow us there), I just can't do it. It's like my brain chemistry has changed. And, not gonna lie, my job is just ridiculously over the top bonkers and two kids and oof we are all lucky that I make it out the door with matching shoes on, let's be honest.
Here's the no duh statement of the century: when you go through something like your perfect 1-year-old baby being diagnosed with a rare cancer that has an 8% survival rate (EIGHT PERCENT WHAT EVEN), it changes you. I feel so wildly different on the inside that I keep trying to make my outsides match. Hair color. Ear piercings. A tattoo. But really, there's no matching my outsides to my insides.
These days life is pretty good. I still have the funny conversations with one of my best friends that you guys see here. My kids are thriving for the most part. My work has blown up and I'm busy but satisfied. We're chipping away at renovating our house. I still buy too many pairs of shoes and own too many pairs of jeans, but I'm good. We're all good.
If any of you reading are in situations that seem impossible, I'm living proof that you can get through it. People ask me almost daily, "How do you do it?" I wish the answer was something profound, but I almost always say "I just do." You just do. You do the hard things and you hope eventually it won't be so hard.
And then you buy some more shoes.
