Thankful For In 2023

I'm back for my traditional (though inconsistent) Thanksgiving blog post. This year, we are excited about our second Thanksgiving married and our FIRST EVER holiday season spent at home, together, not during covid. :) When I came home from the ice show last year I knew I wanted to spend a full year at home before committing to another show contract. While I would definitely do one again, I will say I feel so grounded and good about stepping back for now. I feel like the whole world has opened up and I have so many new things I want to chase!

We are spending this Thanksgiving with my in-laws in New Jersey! I'm so excited about this cozy few days. This year, I'm particularly grateful for:

- A cozy holiday season at home. 

- All the amazing travel we've managed to do this year! Including trips out of the country (a first for me) not once but twice!

- So many weddings and fun friend events we got to take part in over the past year. 

- Some really incredible skating students, a work life that has really shaped into something I like, and lots of team coaching opportunities this season!

- Living in a great town that is a perfect fit for us. 

- Going back to school (again). 

- Having a really good reading year. 

- Watching all my baby cousins grow up and start really creating their lives this year. 

- Weekly phone calls with a friend. 

- Teaching myself to sew again!

- Morning dog walks together. 

- Having such a fun first year married. 

- Feeling myself settle into my adult self, my adult body, my adult vibe. 

- Knowing that there is so much to look forward to!

Wishing a great start to the holiday season to your whole family.

xoxo Gillian

Read Thankful For In: 2021, 2020, and 2015.

three little rituals in June

Coming off of a whirlwind week and heading into a busy weekend!! Just a quckie today. Here are some additional favorite rituals if you're interested.

Weekly Trader Joes Salad Kits & Youtube. Though with summer scheduling my life is slowing down a bit, this ritual saved my mental health. Chris works a regular overnight shift at the fire department each week. I used to feel lonely on those weeknights, often burnt out from working all weekend and just struggling to do my own routines and make a nice dinner without someone else prompting it. Once I let go of being "productive" or cooking something nice on those nights, everything got better. Now, I grab a salad kit from Trader Joe's on the way home from work, and eat the whole thing on the couch with a glass of wine while watching Youtube. It's the best night of the week. 

Google Calendar & A Notebook. While my Google calendar is how I live and breathe, I've also been using a notebook bullet journal style for a lot of planning. I wrote out a monthly spread, the have a page for each week. On each weekly spread I block of a section to put the days of the week and any large, unusual events on those days to visualize it, then I write lists of what I need to get done for the week. I have four categories: Career, Self, Relationships, and Habits. For me, this is the perfect combo of my love for paper planning plus the necessity of being too busy to not have a digital calendar!

Being religious about nightly chores. I am not the best at doing chores in a timely manner. But, as everything has been so busy this spring I've gotten really good at making sure the kitchen is at least closed for the night. If I have more time and energy, I like to sweep, wipe the counters, do all of the dishes, and tidy things up. If I'm moving fast or am low energy, though, I just make sure the dishwasher is running and prep the coffee for the morning. Waking up to just that makes such a huge difference in the start of the day! I've even been starting to finish those chores up before we go out if I think it's going to be a late night. 

Summer Fridays are basically holidays SO A VERY HAPPY FRIDAY TO YOU!! <3

What I've Read 6 Months Into 2023

Popping in for a quick little list of what I've read so far in 2023! My reading goals for the year were, simply, to read actual books more. For the past few years, I've read approximately 20 books a year with the vast majority being audiobooks. While I love an audiobook, I wanted to reconnect with the enjoyment of laying on the couch and cracking open a real, paper book. I also wanted to tackle longer books and get back to reading fiction. I'm a self-help junkie, and while I always will love a book like that, I'm on a quest to reconnect with my ability to do things for pleasure and reading more fiction ties into that. My third goal (that I've been woefully lax about) was to third at least 12 books of poetry. Right now I'm at two (but two more than last year!). Here's the list:

Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach. This was shelved in poetry at my library even though it isn't really poetry, more like very literary, wandering mini essays. I loved it though! It's the kind of good reading you can't rush and was perfect for winter. 

Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King. I listened to this short story collection on audio and loved it. After every single story, I was sad it was over only to immediately get into the next story. Definitely a Lily King fan!

The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert Waldinger. Another audio read I loved! One I'd recommend to anyone and am excited to return to in future years. 

The Electricity of Every Living Thing: One Woman's Walk with Asperger's by Katherine May. I loved Katherine May's Wintering and this first book of hers is also beautiful, especially as I navigate pursuing my ADHD diagnosis. 

Bargain Bin Rom-Com by Leena Norms. This is a proper poetry collection. I love Leena's Youtube channel and getting to read her writing in a different medium was so fun! Definitely love. 

Bad Vibes Only by Nora McInerny. A quick, fun read. Not my favorite of the year and honestly as an essay collection I think it could have dived a bit deeper, many things seemed surface level. But fun and worth a read!

Spare by Prince Harry. So weird to write the author name like that? Happy I read it, it was by far too long and I do have a lot of criticisms BUT this is a person's real story so like....I didn't read it for the literary value? I need to do a longer post about what I think but I loved Lenna's video, this podcast episode, as well as this essay by the ghostwriter to start. 

How To Keep House While Drowning by K.C. Davis. A great place to start and a valuable book! I'd recommend KC's podcast as well. 

Writer's and Lovers by Lily King. Lily King for the win! Her writing is just so immaculate and the characters just pull me right in. It reminded me a lot of Sue Miller's writing, so anyone who's into introspective, character-driven novels of with a throughline of women going through a life change? I can't get enough!

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff. Favorite read of the year I think! The plot, characters, and pace of this book were so quick and engaging that I could not stop reading it. I read it on vacation over like four days and it was amazing. Laugh out loud funny, while also working with extremely hard-hitting topics like racism, classism, and domestic violence. I haven't stopped thinking about it and will be rushing to read whatever Shroff writes next. 

Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match by Sally Thorne. Cute, steamy, funny....not the best writing by any means and if it was any longer I think the dialogue would have made me unable to finish, but a cute vacation read if you want something brainless with a great sex scene. 

My current reads: I am still plugging along through Middlemarch, and listening to the literary disco Middlemarch from 2020 alongside it. I'm also in the middle of A Better Man (Chief Inspector Gamache) by Louise Penny, How To Love by Thich Nhat Hanh, and A Radical Guide For Women with ADHD by Sari Solden. Also technically in the middle of The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso, though I haven't picked that up in a while. I'm also listening to Trespasses by Louise Kennedy.

Once I work my way through at least a few more of those, I'm looking forward to picking of The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell and Radically Content by Jamie Varon. What have you been reading?

are we still trying for this balance thing?

Tonight, I feel an odd mix of overwhelmed and content. I am excited and nervous for the coming busy workweek. I am proud of what I've accomplished as this work year wraps up, while also counting the hours until we're on a full summer schedule and my weekends truly open up. As the worlds top Chelsea Fagan fan, I know I've mentioned her Tik Tok on not being busy. Well--this is the follow up and I honestly love that one even more. 

At this point on the internet I feel like we understand that the quintessential "work-life balance" is not really an equation anyone has ever solved. Self-care lists are just that--more lists and to-do's and things to leave undone. It seldom feels like we have enough choices about our work lives, our circumstances, to be able to make the changes we need for life to feel more manageable. This spring when life was feeling overwhelming, the phrase I kept saying to myself was I need my life to be tenable. Tenable! Maintainable.

That is tonight's cosmic question into the void: how do we make our lives maintainable? I love working. While the go-go-go schedule of late nights and early mornings and weekends is a little much, I also know myself and know I wouldn't be happy at a more typical 9-5. I love variety in my days and weeks. I love the different seasons of my work. I love being both out of the house and in the house. I love having so much personal autonomy. I love that I am the one in charge. 

And: I hate that it feels like I'm the only one keeping things afloat. I often feel overwhelmed. I dislike driving as much as I feel like I have to and I wish that work was easier to turn off. It feels like I am putting out fires all day--and that's exhausting. I want to feel like I'm building. 

This coming week marks the last huge event of the season, and I'll be in Boston just about every day next week. After that, it's Saturdays off and once July hits, Sundays off! This summer I am planning to help myself reset. I want to make time to learn and invest in the future, not just cram my schedule so I get a larger short-time paycheck. I will be home a little earlier in the evenings. I am going to try to do summer Fridays and only work a half day. I want to do "low dopamine mornings" and try to really curb my scrolling habits. I am going to try, try, try, to really stay on task and intentional with work and then put it away when I'm done. 

To be clear, life is pretty amazing. I go on walks every day. I've read 8 books so far this year. I see friends every week, and am religious about deep cleaning the apartment once a week. We just got back from a vacation to Mexico--and the fact that this outpouring of overwhelm is happening after a week on a beach should be perspective giving, but alas, not quite. I just want to ask, how much happiness is appropriate? How much contentment is...realistic? 

But instead: I would love to ask the age-old question--how do people do it? What is everyone's secrets? Is there a way to clean your house, read, work, go to school, have friends, while not feeling overwhelmed? What is a normal level of overwhelm? Is this really just a reframe, or do I actually need to burn my life down and build something--softer?

A Trip To Iowa For A Family Graduation

Jotting down and scheduling this post ahead of time, as when it's published I'll be away on a lovely trip for a friend's wedding (plus a vacation we tacked on to the end of it). May is a busy, travel-filled month for us. Here's a recap of our recent trip to Iowa to attend my cousin's college graduation!

We arrived on a Wednesday morning around 1:30pm after flying into Des Moines. Even though Chris and I travel a decent amount, we don't typically fly together. Often, he's visiting me or we're meeting up somewhere! So it always feels like a treat when we actually are on the same flight and sit together. 

After landing, we picked up our rental car. For some reason getting a completely ridiculous but fun Ford Bronco off of Turo was the same price as renting something far more boring from the airport, so how could we not?

We spent the rest of the day meeting up with my cousin Ena and her boyfriend at Zombie Burger, then heading to my great Aunt Mary's house where we were going to stay for the weekend. We went for a walk, had a coffee run to Reading in Public (which was so cute), and then dinner at ice cream at home. 

The next morning, we had a slightly lazy morning before heading out to pick up my mom and aunt from the airport and then getting brunch as a big group at The Breakfast Club. After splitting up into a "nap" group and "explore" group, we headed out to the Des Moines Botanical Garden. My Aunt Mary volunteers there and it was so fun for her to show us around! After that we explored the Sculpture Park, before Chris and I stole away just the two of us for a happy hour drink at Exile Brewing. We followed that up with a coffee run to Smokey Row before taking a family drive about an hour south for dinner in my cousin's college town. 

Friday morning Chris and I went out for breakfast just the two of us to La Mie Bakery. The pastries were incredible! It was so hard to choose and honestly I wish I could have tried everything. We also ordered Cafe Au Laits which have been our go-to coffee order when we want something special but want it last longer than a latte. We picked up my mom and Aunt Mary for lunch at the local drugstore where I think every single customer knew Aunt Mary, and we each ordered a huge ice cream soda along with our sandwiches. 

This photo cracks me up.

The rest of Friday included resting up before heading back down to my cousin's college town to grocery shop for a family BBQ, check into a motel for the night, grab dinner with some other family, and then go out with a bunch of college kids. It was a good time! 

Saturday morning we woke up in town and had a much-needed greasy breakfast sandwich at Smokey Row while watching a downpour. We showed up early to graduation to save seats, then has a family BBQ while keeping an eye on a tornado watch. We even heard the tornado sirens going off a few towns over! A very midwestern moment. After a lovely day chilling with family and sitting outside, Chris, my cousin and I stopped at a tap room for a few last drinks before Chris and I drove back to Des Moines. Sunday morning we were up bright and early, on our flight, and sitting in our apartment by 1:30! 

All in all, a great few days with family and a wonderful little re-set while life at home and work was starting to feel chaotic. Looking forward to an even longer reset this week!

the right aesthetics

 

Tonight I am sitting in bed, stubbornly refusing to allow defeat on my Friday writing streak. Just three weeks ago, I decided that I missed writing and was re-committing to posting something on this blog every single Friday. I am sitting in bed, overtired, trying to make that happen. 

I didn't sleep enough last night, and my body is tired. My heart, though, feels almost unusually contented with the day. In my chest there is a distinct feeling of brimming. A persistent, if exhausted feeling of curiosity and the desire to mix things up and try something new. 

I've been feeling burnt out--a little crispy. Spring is a busy work season that comes on the heels of the other busy work seasons, winter and the holidays. Tomorrow is my last Saturday of the summer working (!) and I could not be happier. I am teaching my typical Saturday mornings schedule, and then there are shows at both skating clubs I primarily teach at. It'll be a busy day involving two rinks and essentially being on from 8am to at least 5pm. But when we are done--oh! I'm finding a cute restaurant with Chris and having a drink and releasing myself into a bit more languidness. 

Like seemingly the majority of younger-millennial women, my TikTok feed is filled with both *aesthetic* day in the life content and supposedly anti-aesthetic (bust still pretty cute...) lifestyle content. I eat it all up. I can't lie: I've been a lifestyle girlie from the beginning. When I first discovered blogs in late middle school, I would scroll to someone's first post and attempt to read the whole archive. In high school I wrote lengthy, existential emails to my favorite bloggers asking for advice that when boiled down came to: "how do I...live? Like, exist?" I do want to get ready with you. I do want to see what you eat in a day. I definitely want to see your 5-9 after your 9-5 and I love a dramatic anti-hustle culture audio over footage of your pretty productive day. I soak every bit of it in, and then I look around at my life and wonder how I could wrap this up in a bow. 

I think I have a more positive view on all this than most. I tend to believe most people are simply creative and trying their best; that people are just as authentic online as they are in real life (a place I've find to be surprisingly inauthentic) and that everything is fake and posed and filtered and we need to accept that and move on. But the piece that does strike a chord, is the desperation of everyone to find a little more light, space, and joy amidst a day of fitting into all of the boxes. 

A swipe of my thumb shows me younger and younger women buying flowers, making beautiful food, sitting on their apartment porches and reveling in the clink of ice against their metal straws. They pull their hair back and get to it, grinding through day jobs and side jobs while still pulling out their gratitude journals, taking a walk, making their beds. We can laugh at the pointlessness, the typical-ness, of a too-early morning routine that has you lighting the same candles as everybody else. We can wax poetic on how much of this we should believe, how they're too young to sound so war-worn and how maybe they would feel less overwhelmed if they put their phones down. 

Or--in a world that was built without their voices; after a girlhood where their preferences and dreams were trivialized, then commodified, then sexualized; after the lie of "doing the right things" leading to any stability--we can honor the bravery in showing up with bells on any way. This is a fight for survival, and we're refusing to even look ruffled. 

An Ambitious Life

Aunt Mary showing us the topiaries she cares for at the botanical gardens. 

This week, we are traveling with family in Iowa for my cousins college graduation. We are staying with my Great-Aunt Mary in Des Moines, about an hour north of where my cousin went to school. Aunt Mary is 83, bikes 10 miles a day "whether she needs it or not," volunteers at the botanical garden and has stories from travels all over the world. Her and her husband had a great relationship, and lived together in their cute little cottage complete with a potting shed. Aunt Mary worked full time up to a few years ago, when she felt she was too busy with her hobbies and volunteering to continue working full time. She's been a widow for 20 years, and while she clearly misses her husband--and talks about him often--she has also led a vibrant life filled with international trips with friends, birthday lunches, and so many hobbies. 

I've been thinking about ambition often. I've talked about how it feels like we are in the beginning of a whole new season. At times, I have felt lost with what I want work to look like and found it hard to claim anything I want in the future other than a vague sense of *vibes.* But there are so many ways to lead an ambitious life, and certainly, so much more to living well than having a big job. 

As we enter this new season, I want to take myself seriously enough to pursue my work as a proper career, to set myself up in a situation that will allow me to do work that is meaningful and fulfilling and fits into the rest of my life. In doing so, however, I want to acknowledge the rest of my life. I want to put energy into decorating a cute apartment, starting our marriage off on the right foot, taking time to foster our friendships and to figure out our new roles in our families. I want to plan fun vacations and spend our free time exploring the places we'll live. I want to have go-to coffee shop orders that feel fun and whimsical, and read books while curled up on the couch in the summer. 

My cousin, Ena, is graduating college. To oversimplify it, she is at a threshold of getting to make so many decisions about how the rest of her life will turn out. Move home? Go somewhere else? Which job to take? The meaner part of my spirit can be jealous of that clear, fresh start. I didn't leave home to go to college, I didn't have a clear first day at my new grown-up job, and I often feel behind because I never had a clear starting line. But I can give that fresh start to myself. At any moment, I can decide that we're moving, we're mixing things, we're changing our lives and upending everything to run faster towards the lives we desire. Lives that involved work but also lots and lots of play. 

In so many ways it feels like my Aunt Mary defies ageing. She is fun and comfortable, she has a great sense of humor, she still has new experiences and still has new thoughts at 80. She marvels at the world. I want that in my future, but I also want that today. 

noticing

 

We are in that typical New England time of year where we oscillate between desperation that it is still so cold out, and unbridled joy when the sun feels like we're already in mid-summer. Neighbors we haven't seen in months are suddenly outside on their annual dog walks. New noises drift through open windows. I am getting excited to have some outdoor plants this year. We don't have any private outdoor space, just a little bit of gravel around our parking spot and then a large porch connected to the shared entrance to our building. I want to put some pots of flowers out (maybe zinnias? and marigolds?) and attempt some tomatoes as well. I am being patient, though. Most of the time, the first warm day hits and I plant everything too early, dooming myself to watch their slow and anticlimactic demise. Instead, I've been taking my dog walks past the houses with the best, most cared for gardens and front porches. Like my own personal groundhogs, I'm waiting for the first sign of freshly bought mulch or clay pots pulled from the garage, the first hopeful tray of grocery store pansies sitting in the driveway waiting to be repotted. These garden houses certainly know better than me, and I'm trying to notice and follow their lead. 

I spend a lot of my time running around from one thing to the next, so much so that sometimes it's easy to miss that the underlying feeling of frustration underneath is my impatience that this is also a season of waiting. When I take the time to notice, I can see that both Chris and I have landed in a place we used to dream of. This June will mark five years since we've been together, and while that is such an incredibly small percentage of a life it is also a huge percentage of the time we've been adults. It feels like we've made it to the end of a chapter, and have checked off a lot of dreams: getting married, getting a dog, Chris working at a fire department, me skating in shows and coaching full time, an ambitious road trip honeymoon. I want to not just notice but to revel in these achievements, these things that felt so out of reach just five years ago when we whispered them to each other. But it's hard to revel in something when I am also finding myself anxious for the next step, itchy and restless and desperate for some direction so I can know who I am in the world. 

I am noticing that I spent a lot of the beginning of my twenties in survival mode, desperate to become someone and changing rapidly as I discovered who that was supposed to be. My inner world has settled more now that I am 26, and I feel more capable of looking at the whole picture of the person that I am. There are so may pieces I am dissatisfied with; how I cry almost every time I say what I think, how I can get so angry and combative before I've even noticed myself starting to get frustrated. I'm proud of the person I've become, but I also think I'm not always a good friend. I would like to be more level headed. I would like to feel like more of a grown-up to myself. 

This noticing sucks so much more than noticing when the first crocuses pushed through the snow, or when you can first smell the wet dirt in March. I hate it and I want to push it away. It's not a task that I can add to my monthly list, or an aesthetic little reset I can make a tiktok about. There is no quick fix. While I know it's good to look into the deeper recesses of yourself, I also just DON'T WANT TO and I really hate that in so many ways I am the problem. hi! It's me. 

I am noticing what makes me uncomfortable and what makes me comfortable. I'm noticing the thousand ways each of those is good and each of those is bad. I am noticing that I am in a season where I need to listen a lot more than I usually do, and I'm noticing it's high time I challenged my gut reactions, old dreams, ways things have always been, and the inner dialogue that tells me if I'm behaving the way I want to. I am taking the time to notice what is next, to notice where I am going, instead of racing there and misunderstanding the path. Someday, I would love to turn 36. I would love to have decade-old friendships and feel like todays demons are well behind me. And I would love to be in-tune enough with myself and with the world to know when a season is coming, and to sense when it is time to plant. 

three little rituals in April

 One the greatest joys of adulthood has to be finding your own rhythms and rituals. Look at me! A person out in the world deciding my own preferences. The absolute pleasure of identity-making (or at least identity exploring?). Here are some of my favorite rituals over the past month:

A favorite walking route. Most mornings, Chris and I take Bear for his morning walk together. While we have favorite routes we take often, Chris especially tends to mix things up each time. On days when Chris is out of the house for work, though, I have one favorite route that I always take Bear on for a solo morning walk. We go past my favorite garden house where we stop to drink from the dog bowl and see what's starting to grow, then past what I've decided is our future house to admire the porch. We go down a short stretch of a paved walking trail, then loop back past my friends house. Finally, we go past some flowering apple trees and a house with chickens. The perfect morning loop. 

The quietest Friday nights. Currently, weekends have been jam-packed with my regular coaching work, plus shows and rehearsal schedules for both the company I skate on and the company I direct. This has led to Fridays being one of our chill-est nights. While I often go to happy hour on Wednesdays only to stumble back at 10pm, on Fridays, I get home from work and find Chris already starting dinner (often from the vegetarian cookbook we're working through). We chat together while one of us takes lead finishing dinner, have a drink, then curl up with our comfort food in the living room. We usually only watch one episode of something (recently: Beef, now: Ted Lasso and whenever the Bruins are playing). Then I shower, we clean up, we talk, read a little, and go to bed early. 

A reading break from the world. Spring is a busy season for work, and I've been working hard to ensure that I keep myself grounded and happy even while running around. I'm proud to say it's been a little better this year. One of my new year's resolutions was to stop working when I get home at the end of the day, and I've stuck to that. I've now also started to add in some reading upon walking in the door some days. Ideally, it's a beautifully sunny day. The sun is still out. I grab a beer, then curl up on the couch for 20 or 30-minutes with a book. Sometimes, Chris joins with his own book or a video game. Ultimate reset. 

Happy Friday! xo

Winter 2023: A Scrapbook

 

Somehow, winter has come and gone and I am typing this while snuggled up on the couch on a relatively warm March evening. I am currently enjoying what I think must be the best part of any long-term partnership: Chris is currently making dinner, and has also explicitly said that he doesn't want me to help or to talk to him so he can cook while watching TV. The beginning of relationships are so fun, but I think my heart is partial to being able to give each other space without feelings being hurt. This is what a marriage of two introverts looks like, and I love it. 

January and February have been jam-packed with activities and have been busy work wise, but somehow, I still feel like there's been a lot of time to just...exist? Throughout most of my adult life, I have considered myself a little better at working than at playing. From 18 until very recently, I've held down multiple jobs at once, had periods of life where I was training skating almost 20 hours a week, and been a student. I love the purpose that comes with being a "busy" person, and overall I think I'm more emotionally even when I keep my calendar relatively full. It is not good for me mentally, however, when that drive pushes me over the edge into anxious territory. I watched this Tik Tok from our light, our life, our love: Chelsea Fagan recently, and honestly have been thinking about it for weeks. I know I have internalized a sense of always needing to be busy, and I do struggle with my self worth when I do something as simple as take a day off because I'm sick. I want to be better at reframing the parts of my life that are self-imposed, instead of making myself a victim of my owl compulsion to do everything.

Heading off to Portland ME!

Used bookstore in Portland.

One of my goals for the New Year was centered around working more intelligently, and no longer allowing the constant sense of "always being working" to keep messing with my personal life. I decided to set a hard limit on the admin side of coaching. Since the start of the year, I have a hard rule about not working when I get home from coaching (depending on the day, this could be as early as 6:30 or as late as 9pm). It's been life changing! At night, I have no agenda and just hang out with Chris and Bear, make dinner, watch movies, or read my book. In the morning, I wake up with a lot less dread because I gave myself time to unwind the night before, and I've been so much more focused at getting stuff done during the day because I don't have the option of figuring stuff out in the evening. It also makes me way more likely to see friends in the evening, because I have no sense of keeping the time available in case I need it for work (which I always did when it was an option). 

I think this mindset of actually "leaving" work at the end of the day has been especially important for me right now. Over the past few months, I've been working through a lot of self doubt and inadequacy, and all the shame that comes with feeling those things while also "getting" to "live my dreams." Weird territory! So it's satisfying (and grounding) to feel so proud of my personal life at the moment. For perhaps the first time, I feel like my life is full of friends, adventures, satisfying relationships, hobbies, and quiet time to lay on the couch with the dog. I love my personal life right now. It is joyful and playful and creative and life giving. I am proud of the years it has taken for me to cultivate this, and I don't want to take it for granted. 

Saturday afternoon relaxation of choice: Youtube and a lunch beer.

Tacos and beer on the coldest day of the yar.

We've made room for so many adventures over this winter: In January, Chris and I took the train up to Portland ME to go to bars and walk around bookstores. It snowed SO MUCH but we loved it even when we got chilled, and catching the train back home was so fun. Towards the end of the month we had friends over for what I called a Friendsgiving (even though we were well past the holidays, I served pasta, and the only remotely festive thing was a pumpkin cake). It was the most people we'd ever had in our apartment for a party and I LOVED it. This will be the year of parties. In the beginning of February, we also experienced a few days with below zero weather. While we mostly stayed in, we did sneak out for tacos and beer at one of our favorite walking-distance spots and sitting in the warm bar while we watched frost form on the windows was exhilarating. For Valentines Day, we decided to be a Proper Grown Married Couple and got reservations for the Saturday before at Cava in Portsmouth, a *fancy* tapas place that we'd only been to once before. We sat at the bar and did their fixed menu option and really enjoyed it.  

Also for Valentine's Day, I made Chris a homemade coffee cake. By a stroke of luck, I unlocked all my own nostalgia: this recipe tasted exactly like the Krusteaz mixes my mom would buy and  make on Sunday mornings before church. Also in the homemade date category: February we experienced a Disney resurgence and watched so many movies, new and old. While Turning Red was probably my favorite of all the new watches, my favorite night was when we watched Ratatouille while eating homemade ratatouille, with crusty bread, a cheese board, and wine. Probably my favorite at-home date nights we've ever done. 

Ratatouille date night.

UNH Hockey Game

Mid-February, I took a leap and got a wolf cut. I love it! And honestly feel like this is the most "myself" I've ever looked like. Styling bangs again is a trip but thankfully I'm much better than my 13 year old self was (scroll through the archive for proof, at your own risk). Other highlights of the month were seeing a comedy show at WHYM brewery, going to a UNH hockey game with friends, finding what we believe to be the best happy hour in town (it's The Brick on Wednesdays), and my first time night skiing in four years. To round out the winter, we saw Couch in Burlington VT with friends at Nectar's, a small bar and concert spot downtown and walking distance from their apartment.

Seeing Couch in Burlington VT.

Overall, an epically full godsend of a Winter. I'm so grateful for my friends, my husband, our sweet Bear and Charlie, and the chance to be out here trying new things. Spring is looming and looking busy, so I'm excited for: soaking in and really noticing the sunshine and longer days, creating more at-home date nights, doing some fun travel, and getting outside more often. Thanks for being here! <3

I can't move on until I say something about 2022

 

I've been working on a post that adequately sums up 2022--a year that was equally full of the most heartbreaking moments of my life, as well as the most joyful--and also explains every way in which I intend 2023 to be better. To be fair, I didn't intend for 2022 to be so challenging. January of last year, I was also journaling and planning blog posts and getting ready for a busy year of achievements, new hobbies, travel, better habits. But some years are just like that--unexpected avalanches of challenge and grief. I think it would be more fair if these moments were spread out, like mini snow squalls of unhappy things spread over a decade. I guess we have about as much control over that as the actual weather, though. 

Amongst everything else, there is something about this year that has felt so solidly grown up, so adult. When something goes wrong, there is no one to tell, no one to get. I can (and do) tell people about it, but there's a big difference between retelling a story and leading with "help!". I also find myself using the word "adult" more than any other adults I know. Somehow, I am constantly looking for the grown-ups, trying to mimic their behavior and walk in their shoes in a way that definitely comes off less cute and more naïve than when actual children do it. I wonder if large, out-of-our-control circumstances is what helps people turn the corner from looking for the grown ups to being looked to. Alongside the anxiety and grief and weight of this year, I've also felt a perverse sense of pride, even of joy, in how we (my husband and I) are able to handle things. An unexpected move and six weeks living apart, my partner's concussion, loosing grandparents, and loosing someone who was basically my brother in law unexpectedly a week into our own honeymoon. The shitty circumstances remained shitty but I am still proud of how we reacted. We took actions, came home early from trips, were reliable and present and made ourselves voice our thoughts. We showed up--dressed appropriately, with tote bags of food and markers for guest books--and stayed afterwards to clean up, like the grown ups we apparently are. Is this really what we were looking forward to all these years?

Because everything about growing up is gray and nuanced, it would be unfair to write bout 2022 and only list the circumstances that were hard. This year also held a jam-packed, adventurous summer, making a lot of art I felt strongly about, moving to a new town and feeling like it is exactly where we wanted to be. This was the year I got to marry the man that stood by me and picked me up and made every hard circumstance of this past year doable. Our wedding was beautiful and fun and very us, and we cried the whole time. 

My whole life, I have felt both incredibly excited and incredibly terrified to grow up. I was one of those kids that was always a bit too grown up; prim and proper and obedient, never overly excited and (predictably) too wrapped up in the approval of adults. I never felt like a kid, so imagine my confusion when I hit birthday after after birthday and instead of finally feeling "my age," I started feeling younger and younger. I became somehow more inept and confused, and way less impressed with my own capabilities.  I have spent this first half of my 20's feeling remorse for all the ways I wasn't more wild when I was younger, feeling embarrassment for all the ways I haven't felt more grown up, and desperately throwing myself on the hamster wheels of "catching up" and "good enough."

Perhaps this year was a chance to stop and realize that life comes at you too fast to worry so much about being on top of it. Our lives are often messy, chaotic, unsatisfying; sometimes it's our fault, and often it's not. Life is just all the things, constantly. The parts of my life that often feel the most embarrassingly non-grown up didn't affect how I showed up with my family as we were grieving, or how Chris and I planned our wedding and life together. You don't have to be emotionally mature to clean the house, but you definitely do to attend funerals that really shouldn't be happening. Or host a huge party and not yell at anyone. 

In the mundanity that's (luckily) filled our lives this fist part of 2023, I'm enjoying a sense of feeling grown up in more gentle ways. Throwing flyers in the recycling instead of on the table when I check the mail. Lighting a candle to make dinner. I am grateful to be enjoying these things. To not be worried if I'm too young or too old, but just to be who I am, where I am, carving out some space for myself amidst the noise.