Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my 41st birthday, and I wanted to take a minute to celebrate and appreciate that here on the blog.🎉

Side note: You might also enjoy last year’s What I Love About Turning 40.

Y’all! This trip around the sun has been the most intense, difficult, agonizing, beautiful, painful, scary, unexpected and amazing one yet!

If you are new around here, about a month and a half after my 40th birthday, I was diagnosed with stage three Hodgkins lymphoma. So much of this year has been dedicated to healing from that, finishing chemotherapy and putting my life back together now that I am in remission.

Thank you, Jesus, for that!🙏🏻

I am so thankful to be alive to see another birthday! And I am feeling gratitude to the point of tears today. Just intense gratitude, y’all. 😭🙏🏻

When Life Gets Upended

We are no strangers to game-changers in my family. In the last five years alone we have had many upending life changes, including my losing my full time corporate job, giving birth to our daughter, turning my food blog into a career, and my husband losing his job last spring. And then of course, my cancer diagnosis this past year.

One of the biggest lessons from this whole year is how I have learned to surrender my plans to the Almighty, on a much deeper level. This past year was not how I envisioned my life going at forty.

I had all these grand plans y’all. And everything changed the moment I heard the words “you have cancer.” It felt like I was thrust onto some weird alternative timeline/ reality, and I was watching all this play out to somebody else. Life can change in an instant.

I had to practice accepting the circumstances I could not change, and I learned to surrender all that. Those who know me in real life (especially from my teens and twenties) know how much of a planner I can be.

All my plans had to wait. I stopped everything, and suddenly surviving became priority number one. I did survive, and for that I am so thankful.

For all of you that may be in one of those reality-shifting, game-changing seasons, I feel you. 💖

Choosing a New Normal

So what will 41 hold for me? I do have some plans, y’all. 🙃 Haha, old habits die hard.😉

But I am doing my best to hold on to them loosely. I choose to leave space for the unknown. And I choose to trust that Divine perspective always knows better than I do.

I choose to hold tight to the new realization that difficult seasons can birth some beautiful and unexpected gifts.

Truth is, none of us know what we may face in any given year, day, or moment. I choose to enjoy this moment.

I choose to embrace ordinary fun, like lunch dates with my son.

I choose to pause to honor all I have been through this year.

I choose to celebrate how precious, fragile, valuable and profoundly beautiful life is. Happy birthday to me!🥳 If you read this far, thanks for celebrating with me, friends.😘