Hello again! Are you recovering from Christmas yet?

I felt like doing an end of year review/life favorites/chit chat/rambling session so here we are! I just drank my third cup of coffee for the morning so grab your own cup and let’s have coffee together and chat about life for a little while.

When you think about it, it’s kind of weird that we arbitrarily think of a whole year as being a bad year or a good year. Life doesn’t really fit neatly into our 365 day time chunks does it? That being said, 2017 was a fucking weird year. In a lot of ways it was the absolute worst. But in a lot of other ways it was an incredible year for me.

I spoke about this at the end of one of my posts a few months ago, but there were some amazingly shitty things that happened this last year. The Boy got diagnosed with a terminal disease, spent months in the hospital, got a lung transplant, spent more time in the hospital and then tragically and suddenly died. So for me, 2017 will always be marked by one of the absolute worst events in my life. But that’s not entirely fair because out of that horrible awful thing, so much good was brought into my life. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing good about losing your soul mate. It’s beyond words. But if you’re paying attention in life, there are always little sprouts of goodness that spring up in the wake of something terrible. They don’t take away the bad, they don’t make it better, but there they are. Little gems of beauty.

Because of the loss that happened this year, I had the opportunity to see entire communities come together in a way that was awe inspiring. The Boy was a cop and when he got sick, the Law Enforcement community rallied around the two of us so quickly and thoroughly that it made my head spin. They put together fund-raisers to pay for his medical expenses, they ran errands for us, they traveled for two hours to visit him in the hospital, they called me regularly to see if there was any way they could help. I knew without a doubt that if I needed help with anything, they would absolutely be there for us. After The Boy died there were people from our local skydiving community that mowed my lawn for me. They would call or show up at my house and make sure I was distracted or comforted or taken care of in any way I needed. I’ve had neighbors that I never spoke to before come up to me to hug me and tell me they’re thinking of me and looking out for me. I’ve built new friendships with people that were brought into my life just because of the crazy events that were going on. It’s easy to look at the world and see the bad. If you watch the news you know full well that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. But I’d like to challenge you to look just a little bit less at the news and look at the people around you in your community, because there is so much good in this world and that’s where you’ll find it. You’ll see people looking out for each other, you’ll see people performing little acts of kindness that they think no one will ever notice. You’ll see people giving their time and energy to one another. It’s all right there and we can all be a part of it. You can be a part of it! If you reach out to someone that’s hurting I can promise that it will make a difference to them. I’m incredibly humbled by the generosity of spirit that I witnessed this last year. And having gone through something horrible and survived it, that opens up a door for me to turn around and give support and comfort to other people around me. There’s an opportunity that comes with loss. I can’t tell you how many people in the last few months have approached me and shared their own experiences with me. And I feel so blessed to be able to listen to those stories and understand in a different way, what people are going through when they’re grieving. I have an incredible chance to support them and listen to them and witness their suffering and be a companion to them on their own journey with loss.

I feel like there are so many lessons in life that I learned this year. I learned that you really should love like there’s no tomorrow. There’s absolutely no sense in not expressing your love to the people around you. Let them know what they mean to you, give some of that beautiful shining love back to them. At the very worst people will think you’re overly emotive. At the very best you take that love and pour it into the people around you and it grows and gets passed on to their loved ones and we all start expressing love more freely. How cool is that?

I also feel like this year has really sharpened my awareness of what I actually enjoy in life. There can be a lot of pressure to enjoy the “right” things but the truth is, the “right” things are going to be different for everyone. The key is to figure out what your “right” things are and then incorporate those things into your life as much as possible. If you love reading, make more time for reading. If you want to travel, set up that travel savings fund right now and make that trip happen. If you want to spend time with your friends, call them, make a date, have a party, don’t wait, just make it happen. I always felt like there was a sort of obligation to want to see the world. And it’s good to go out and see the world! But travel isn’t what most sets my soul on fire. So this year I let go of that need to want to travel. There are a few trips I actually do want to make but I’m not going to keep thinking about the trips I should want to take. What sets my soul on fire is writing. In any form. Blogging, fiction, letters, diary entries, lists…I just like to write. So I’m going to do more of that! Find something you enjoy and start thinking about that instead of what you feel like you should enjoy.

Lastly, I want to thank YOU for being here. I love that there’s a little corner of the internet where people who are nerds about makeup can get together and share that passion. I love that we can chat in the comments and read each others posts. So thank you for taking time out of your day to read my posts and talk to me. You add something valuable and precious to my life.

I hope that you’ve had a wonderful holiday season and I wish you all the best for the year to come.

With love,

Jenn