0107: Little Things, They Keep Me Going

Victoria's Secret Love Potion Nail Polish, Vintage Earrings from Manifest Manifest; Jack Black Intense Therapy Lip Balm in Natural Mint, Chloe perfume, NARS Success Lipstick all from Sephora
I've been thinking about my life for the past few months - as nauseously cliche as that sounds. My 23rd birthday was a couple of months ago and every birthday I stop to think about the things I've learned in the past year. But this past year was different. The months between graduating college at 21, turning 22 and then 23 all seem to blur together and I can't quite separate the thoughts or feelings that passed through during that time.

Somewhere in those 20 months I paused to look at my life and asked myself, "At the end of all of this, what is it I really want?" I kept thinking about dinners with my family, sprawling green lawns, the beach 15 minutes away, blue skies, sunshine. Not money. Not things.

S once told me a story about a fisherman, living with his family on an island that decided to spend his life working towards wealth. In the end he got that wealth, and retired to an island to be with his family and spend his days fishing.

I suppose the moral is that most of the time we have what we want, but we get so lost in the pursuit of things we think we need that our definition of happiness and success gets lost. I started to think that what I really wanted was to not spend my life getting further away from the things that really mattered to me - family, friends and... the beach. Haha.

So I guess in a nutshell, that is why I quit my job and moved back to Florida. I left San Francisco in October but wasn't really ready to express why - mostly because the feelings I had were so jumbled that anything I did say was bound not to make sense.

Now I am happy. Truly happy. I don't know that I have really been content in awhile. Not since I was in college, before these blurry 20 months.

I wish I could have written this more eloquently, haha.

xo

...some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

- J.K. Rowling, an excerpt from her Harvard Commencement Speech