Jan 28

Jan 28 Reflecting on 2017 to Start Anew in 2018

2017 was a gigantic year for me in so many ways. It was a year of change and growth, of celebration and holding onto moments that went by too quickly. I spent all of 2016 planning and looking forward to 2017 with so much anticipation and expectation that once the year started, I did not know how to slow myself down. By the time I got to second half of the year I found myself to be someone else with a new name, a new career, and most of all, in a new marriage to my now husband Chris. With all of that change happening in the span of a few short weeks I thought I was ready to run with it and have everything turn into a fairytale of success, but my emotions and inner-self felt differently. As the weeks started to speed past me and my birthday came and went, what I really needed was to slow down but life had a way of not letting that happen and if I can put something off until tomorrow I will. This blog might be the biggest victim of that. My plan was to start this blog on my 29th birthday and use it as a way to catalogue and remember the last year of my twenties and ultimately help me to get past my creative blocks and make something that grows into it's own little world. So that way if I work hard enough and long enough, I can look back at this blog and be proud of myself for actually doing it.

I have been writing and thinking about this blog post for a whole month now, writing and rewriting it over and over in my head. How do I want it to feel, what do I want it to say, can I be open enough to really share how freaked out I am about it and that I am so afraid it will become another forgotten project? Thankfully this has been a month where reflecting and making resolutions is a main theme in everyone's mind, it is January after all. But maybe it's ok that it has taken me a whole month to make this first blog post to kick off this new world I am trying to build. In that time I have been able to come up with different ideas and play around with making a gif so I could tell a visual story as well. I decided to focus on a small cork board that I have had for the past 4 or 5 years now which has slowly collected memories and mementos from my life. It took me a few tries and I had to do it on a day when there was good light outside, which is difficult to capture in our tiny apartment, but as I slowly removed the mementos to put them away, I realized this bulletin board was a perfect little time capsule of who I have been since I met my husband: a sticker from my favorite home store in Hoboken where I get some of my most favorite things, a filter to clip onto my phone from a Daisy project when I was at Marc Jacobs, a small bouquet of dried lavender from a care package sent by my cousin Jessica. There was a photo booth film strip from Chris's brother's wedding which was the first time I was introduced to his whole family, which I am now apart of and even have their last name as my own. There was a rhinestone letter V from my time working at Vera Wang and also matched the initial of my last name, which always made me feel special. Oddly enough my new initial is now a W, which was also a part of her monogramed embroideries, funny how those things can happen. At the center was a photograph of me on my Uncle's sailboat, recreating a photo from my childhood. There was a hand written letter from my best friend back home with a telephone on it since we do not talk enough. There was a Polaroid that Chris took of me the day before our wedding when we were setting up the Airbnb that I was going to get ready in with everyone. Now all of these things have been carefully put away into a special box of cards, ticket stubs, and photos, to be found again and looked through later to bring back all of the memories they hold.

Now that the cork board has been wiped clean, it is ready to start fresh for the New Year. I have decided to actually write down my goals and resolutions this year and put them out into the world to help them become real. So getting them posted onto the cork board that I look at every morning is going to be a great start. I am really proud of myself for writing these down and sharing them with everyone and I am actually looking forward to accomplishing them as well. It will be interesting to look at this post a year from now and see all that has changed from where I am today. There will be good and bad and I know that some of my goals might not happen, but I am going to try, I am going to get the ideas out of my head and into the world, I'm not going to wait to do it tomorrow, I'm going to do it today. It may have taken me a month of reflecting to get to this point, but I am finally, finally, FINALLY posting my real first blog post. Today.