continually surprised & amazed, pt. 4
adventure, story, & the culmination of my own growth & investment!
A new favorite picture, taken this morning, of two lovebirds
and four sleepy, sleepy, still-waking-up Sunday morning eyes 💞
Three days ago, on my drive home from work, I recorded the following blog post as an ad-lib voice memo (the second one this week!).
It turned out to be much longer than I expected, and it has become the largest project I’ve taken on so far on Everyday Magic!
I’ve transcribed and edited it into a four part series (which has taken hours, spread across a few separate work sessions in the last two days!), and each part also includes the attached audio file, raw and unedited, as a sort of podcast-style addition to the series — the origin of the whole project. If you’d like to listen instead of, or along with, reading, here you go!
*note: the audio file came first, but talking and listening is different from reading and writing, so some edits have been made below for clarity and brevity, as well as minor add-on thoughts I had while transcribing. Thus, the audio and textual versions are nearly identical, but not quite.
I could just talk about this forever. This recording is twenty three minutes long already! Twenty three fucking minutes!
I was driving home listening to Green Day and Blink-182 and positively floating on air. I thought, “okay, I want to capture these feelings and these thoughts so I can write them later.” So I decided to start voice recording while I was driving. I had just left Mojave and hadn’t gotten on the 58 yet, and I talked the entire way home! Well, I’m not even home yet, I’m in the gas station parking lot but I can’t even get gas yet because I had so much to say! Now I’m sitting here in my car, voice memo-ing in a gas station parking lot, grinning! I have a silly, stupid Cheshire-Cat grin on my face because I can’t contain it! I cannot contain this joy.
I can’t overstate it: it surprises me every day. I am fucking surprised. It’s like I forgot I could feel this way. It’s astonishing, I don’t know how many times I’ve said that! I cannot impress enough how much this has amazed me. Just the difference, you know?
So yeah, it’s the work situation primarily, and then add to that I have kept going with two things I love the most, that I’m most proud of as far as my personal projects go, and how I’m spending my time and what I’m building. The bricks I’m laying in my life. The chain I’m linking together that I hope has a grand future; both of these things have a grand future, I hope. My writing and my lifting. Those three things together, and I feel thrilled. I feel right where I am supposed to be. I feel like this season is exactly as it’s meant to be, challenges and all. Limitations, finite struggles, and all. Astonishing.
On the note of better than it’s been in so long, I really think personally, certainly professionally, I am the most thrilled, aligned, satisfied, fulfilled, and in the perfect spot than I have been in probably two years or more. I don’t know, maybe more.
I feel giddy and excited and useful — so useful! — I feel healed and healing, I feel like I’ve transformed, I feel like I know myself better than I’ve known myself ever before. I feel like I am striving and happy, and I am doing it! I’m living my life, the life I’m meant to be living, the life I want to be living for right now, it’s a fit! This is where I’m supposed to be! And it doesn’t have to be forever! Right now, it’s just right.
I feel just as excited and useful — that’s a big factor for me; I want to feel useful, it goes back to contributing and generosity — I feel more useful, creative, utilized, respected, trusted, passionate, and excited about what I’m doing than I probably have since the early BRI Music days. Right now, I feel like I felt when I was starting my studio and churning out a thousand creative ideas every day, coming up with tons of directions the business could go, building creative projects, designing stuff, teaching, connecting with people, color!
Color, color, color. My life is full of color again. My work is full of color, literally and figuratively. I am doing fun shit! I get to plan events again, use my basic invitation and image design skills, people skills, talking, writing… I do it all! I do fucking all of that at my job, and it just blows my mind! Accessing and using all the different parts of my skills, passions, and expertise. I get to be organized, I get to multitask, I get to be engaged, and it’s just cool. So, so, so cool.
I feel like I felt in the early days of starting my business, living on a dream, just colors and creativity coming out of all of my limbs, straight from my heart, and through my smile. I feel like what I’m doing now matters just as much as what I was doing then. It really feels like it matters. It feels like I am part of something that is bigger than me again. Once again. And it has been so long since I have felt that way. So fucking long. On such a personal, elevated level.
I have worked so hard for this. For a while, I wasn’t even sure if I would ever feel it again. Jake reminded me last night that for a long stretch, I kind of started to worry, express doubt, and half believe that maybe there wasn’t going to be another job for me that I would love this much. That maybe I just wasn’t going to find something this fantastic. Of course, that was a limited belief talking. Negative, cynicism, fears, doubts, anxiety, incorrect information based on scarcity. But I felt stuck for so long, and that was the picture I had for so long.
It’s here! I’ve moved through that picture and past it, into this one! This amazing season.
That feels like more luck than I had any right to ask for, and it’s also not just luck. It’s my own hard work and astonishing evolution and becoming and investment. Your life is your choose-your-own-adventure story, and right now, I am really proud of where mine currently is. I’m so delighted by my adventure.
Here’s to the story. Adventure on!
P.S. Of course life is never static, and every moment is part of the process, and this is not meant to say I’ve Arrived & Am Done. We’re never done! Keep growing! Keep learning! I’ll always be an adventure and work-in-progress, and will always discover new areas of opportunity and ways I can keep healing and improving, but it’s important to celebrate the wins and successes along the way. This is a big deal. This matters. Here I am, and I am so happy to be here. I wouldn’t have gotten here without the journey of the past many months and years. Gratitude.
