"Mediocre people do exceptional things all the time"

The world seems to be getting more and more cutthroat. Sure, there are more opportunities, greater technology to reach a bigger audience, but it also seems more difficult?...daunting?...harder to leave your mark?

Think about it: it seems that everyone has their own etsy shop. Everyone dabbles in photography, art, or making some kind of product. If youre a blogger, someone has already written it (and they wrote it better). I feel like the arts are becoming like Mary Kay. Everyone's selling it, so where's the opportunity for someone to leave their mark?

Ok, so artistic styles differ compared to standard Mary Kay products, but the concept feels the same. The doubts are the same - what's different about what I have to offer? It's enough to make me want to give up before I've even started.

Yet, as human beings, we all have an innate desire - or even a need - to create. Whether it's a piece of art, a photo, a meal, an accessory, an item of clothing, a song, we all want to create something that didn't exist before. We want to leave our mark. But...what do we do when there is no more room on the canvas that is life. Or when all the marks on it seem the same that ours won't even stand out? How do we make our voices heard? How do we continue to create when every message we hear tells us "why bother"?

I think what I want to know most of all is, what even is my voice? What do I want to leave the world? Am I a writer, an artist, a craftsperson, a photographer, a stylist, a chef, a DIY queen?

To echo Sondheim, "what I want most of all is to know what I want."

Full Circle

Last week was my 33rd birthday, and we celebrated in the best possible way - a weekend in NYC with family and lots of good food.

The weather was beautiful for most all of the trip - it did rain on my birthday, as has been a habit throughout the years, but it held off for most of the day, and we enjoyed a sunny, springtime morning and afternoon.

I'm not sure when during the trip it dawned on me that it was TEN years ago that I spent my 23rd birthday in NYC. It was a rough period of my life, but my brother and sister-in-law invited me to get away for a few days for some fun in the city - and boy, did they spoil me! My brother introduced me to cupcakes and banana pudding at Magnolia Bakery, my sister-in-law and I got TONS of shopping time together (when I got one of the best pairs of shoes I've ever had), and they sent me home with a custom-made birthday cd. It was full of happy, hopeful songs, and I still remember tears streaming down my face as sat facing backwards on thr train, listening to Rascal Flatts' "Bless the broken road." (I also remember the woman sitting a few seats up from me, looking with a concerned look on her face. She must've wondered what was going on.)

And now, ten years later, I spent my birthday again in the city. This time, I was spoiled by ALL of my siblings - my brother, my sister-in-law, and my sisters. My niece and nephew showered me with lots of love, and I had my amazing and adoring husband by my side. I don't think that I could've imagined such a sweet life for myself a decade ago.

Dancing in the rain

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine, and she was recounting the latest chick flick she'd seen. It was a Nicholas Sparks-soft-filtered-everyone's-a-model kind of love story, one that goes for every romantic cliché. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for chick flicks, but sometimes I get so frustrated by those romance stories that try to tell us that they are the ONLY kind of romantic stories out there.

When I was thinking about what I wanted to do for Feeling 33, one of the things that I thought would be cool would be to slow dance in the rain with my beloved. I've never done that before, and it's one of those clichés that seems to have snuck its way into my proverbial bucket list.

I haven't made it happen yet. Maybe because I'm either at work when it rains, or it's like a monsoon-hurricane when it rains here (as was the case last night). Maybe someday we'll make it happen.  Meanwhile, I think about the things that do happen on a weekly basis - like talking together on the couch that leads to laughing-so-hard-I'm-crying-and-stop-my-stomach-hurts-I-can't-breathe, or lip syncing / playing air instruments to music in the car - that I feel makes our love story pretty much perfect.

Sorry, Nicholas Sparks, but my life beats The Notebook any day.

Mamah and me

Maybe it was from my obsession with Jane Austen films. Maybe it was something my nickname-creating littlest sister came up with, and it just stuck. Whatever caused it, at one point I began calling my mother "Ma-MAH" on occasion. Mom and I always had a very close, special relationship. Even when I was a "moody teenager", my mom was one of my favorite people to spend time with, and as I grew older, the facet of friends was added to the Mother/Daughter facet of our relationship.

While there is still a great deal about life that I am still learning, one thing I do know is that it never turns out the way you expect. That's why it isn't completely difficult to believe that my mother and I both had our weddings in the same year.

At my mom's wedding reception - August 2014

With Mamah on my wedding day - September 2014 (photo by livehappystudio.com)

After all, it's the unexpected, unorthodox experiences that tends to make life sweet. And then there are the moments when you're stressed to the max (and you have so many stress hives, your body seems to have turned into one huge hive), feeling anxious and worried, and you wish that things would just be "normal" and "typical" and that you could just step in the footprints of all of those that have tread the same path before you...

..but my path seems to always be off the beaten path...


















Maybe it would be "easier" to have a more "typical" life, but I couldn't help thinking as I talked to my mom on the phone today, how, for lack of a better word, COOL it was that we we're now both in similar periods of our lives. There may be thirty-something years between us, but we're both going through the same kind of transition - as newlywed brides.

If you have ever told the 13-year-old me that LOVED Jane Austen romances, how my life would be two decades later and all of the things I would experience, I probably would find it hard to believe. But I love my story - because it's mine, after all!

And I love my mamah.