On Turning 27

My birthday kind of sneaked up on me this year.

Last year, I crowd-sourced my birthday blog.

26 has been kind of a crazy year for me with a lot of ups and downs. I traveled a lot, made lots of crazy leaps in my life as a whole, and settled on starting my own business.

Oh, and I became a cat lady. 

I’ll be honest. I didn’t think I’d get to this point in my life.  When I was in my early 20s, I thought that I would be stuck there, living at home with my parents, forever. When I moved out a couple of months after my 24th birthday, I was a mess.

A complete mess.

Then I grew up. A little.

Even as recent as the past few months, I’ve been a wreck but I’m more in control of my life so it’s been easier to recover. I finally started to put myself first when it comes to life decisions because I have a tendency to think about everyone else. (Even this past week, as I’m planning my birthday dinner, my brain is in overload because I’m thinking about every single person in the group).

I don’t have some huge insight about my life or who I am right now.  Things are messy. I don’t do resolutions. I don’t even try to plan things because I get easily disappointed.

The one great thing about my life now is that I’ve been able to weed out the people who are flakes, backstabbers, and just plain old fakes. I’ve been more introverted lately, trying to figure out what makes me tick before I get so worried about what other people think. I’ve made some decisions about my life, my business, and the direction my life is going in. I’ve decided to stop trying to see myself the other people see me (or want to see me).

I just want to be.

The world (and sometimes DC) makes me want to crawl inside my own skin and never come out at times but I’ve been lucky enough to meet a few people who have become great, true friends.  With my best friend in Seattle, and some of my closest friends plane rides away, it’s been a lonely couple of years after I lost a few local friends. It was harder for me to really trust but a couple of good eggs broke through the walls.

That’s who I’ll be celebrating my birthday with this year. Not a huge group of people, but a small group that I would trust to invite into my home.

I don’t think 27 will be too different. I’m still obsessed with penguins, coffee, and traveling as much as possible. I’ll still watch stupid shows, laugh over the stupidest things and be as random as ever. I’ll be taking random pictures, most of it won’t ever make it to my Etsy shop but that’s OK.

I’ll just always be an April Fool.

Oh, and I love you guys.

A lot.

I’ll do the same thing I did last year:

Your mission, should you choose to accept is as follows:

In (at most) 3 sentences, describe me to someone who’s never met me AND who’s never been on the internets. So no references to anything blog/social media related.

<3