First Half of 2020 Recap

One of these years, I am not going to let my life get in the way of my blog. This has not started out as one of those years.

Last October, I tripped and tore my labrum in my hip, which was only possible because I have/had(?) femoroacetabular impingement. Thats an extremely long and difficult phrase to basically say, the ball and socket of my hip ain’t quite right. This February I had surgery at Mayo Clinic to repair the torn cartilage of the labrum and correct some of the bone and structural irregularities that made my ball and socket low quality. This was my first true surgery of any kind and it threw me for a loop - the recovery, the general handicap of not being able to do things I wanted to do unassisted, the myriad confusing emotions that came with the entire process. It was weird - for a second time in my life, I felt the frustration of feeling like my “youth” was being stolen from me in a similar way to when celiac disease knocked me for 6 in 2013 and made it hard to manage daily chores. Here I am just 26 years old and having hip surgery, walking with a cane or walker.

It was especially difficult because unlike my experience with celiac disease, I had a difficult time turning my hip into a power crystal to motivate me to a better life. When I got the celiac news I jumped into learning about what this new life meant and started my first blog, started going to events, and immersed myself in the community. This hip injury and recovery experience was a lot less inspiring and I felt a lot of shame for that. I withdrew from a lot of areas of my life and feel like I slept through much of the first quarter of this year. I was in no mood to share anything with people around me let alone the internet.

Then COVID-19 hit - right when I was planning to go back to work. Going back to work felt like a life preserver that I needed to pull myself out of the recovery funk I’d become accustomed to, and then all of a sudden my work which is a college campus is entirely closed for safety and we are all relegated to working from home. On top of having to immediately adjust to working from home after being out for 2 months on disability, I also adjusted to being in an entirely new position on an entirely new team with a new manager - remotely. I am no longer an Executive Assistant after a few months of realizing the position took too much of me, and that I wanted a different kind of responsibility and perhaps less personal connection at work. Initially this felt like failure because I had worked so hard to be able to even qualify to be an Executive Assistant, and boy do I feel like I let down my last exec, but when the dust settled and I returned to work as a Content Developer instead I immediately felt less constantly anxious and on edge.

Oh, did I forget to mention that my boyfriend and I still have some pretty rough growing pains after I moved in last summer? And that I was really looking forward to being back at work so that I could have my days back and we could have some space from each other? Yeah, all of that. It was starting to feel like we’d made a big mistake when I moved in and it didn’t feel like it would get better after months of the same old bad days. Getting the news that I was to work from home (after already being home for two months) sucked big time.

This takes us to about a month ago. My hip was hitting the home stretch of healing, and I had gained some comfort in my new role and working from home. I had some realizations about my mental health and organized the help I think I need. I’d spent the past almost 6 full months so angry and shortsighted that I truly felt like May brought a dawning of a new perspective and I’m truly grateful for whatever energies or planetary bodies shifted to give me a little bit of my light back.

I have spent the past month and a half embracing my creativity to the fullest and for the first time in my life actually see how I can build a side hustle instead of merely wanting one. My boyfriend and I don’t want to choke each other everyday anymore and are starting to find our household culture. We laugh again and make a noticeable effort to show appreciation and respect like we should have all along. I’m connected with amazing people who inspire me to create and learn things I never thought existed, like green witchcraft. I have had the joy of creating a real, first prototype of a product and holding it in my hands. I do something creative almost unconsciously every day about it because I accept that I need that feeling in my day.

I have always felt that both blogging and maintaining my presence on social media are directly tied to how full of a life I am living. If I am doing things, creating, exercising my mind or body, going places, any combination of the above and more - posts come easily because all I have to do is take 2.5 seconds to snap a photo or remember the details of an awesome day when I sit down to write it later. If I am stagnant, overwhelmed by depression or anxiety, and not exercising the blessing of being alive every single post or photo takes so much and feels so fake. January to June of 2020 taught me that lesson again, a little more sharply this time around. I’m grateful for the struggle and to be able to recognize lessons that the Universe decided I needed to learn again.

Here’s to a more active, more powerful rest of 2020 - there’s a lot of work to be done.