For the last two and a half, almost three years, life has looked very different for me.
When my father passed, something in me shifted. And then a year and a half later, my mother passed too.
I think I had already started feeling disconnected from creating before either of them were gone, but if I’m being truthful, it was really after losing my father that I stopped feeling like I knew how to find my way back to it.
Then life just kept happening.
Grief has a strange way of changing your relationship with time. You can feel like you’ve been standing still, and then one day you look up and realize years have passed.
And now I’m sitting here, in the last year of my thirties, thinking about all of it.
Thinking about who I was.
Thinking about who I am now.
Thinking about everything that has changed, everything I have lost, everything I still want, and everything I still hope to create.
For a long time, I think I was waiting to feel completely ready again.
Ready to create.
Ready to show up.
Ready to know exactly what was next.
But I’m starting to understand that there may never be some perfect moment where everything suddenly feels settled and I wake up knowing exactly what to do.
Sometimes you just have to begin where you are.
And where I am right now is somewhere between the life I knew and the life I’m still figuring out.
I’m learning how to trust myself again.
How to listen to myself again.
How to let myself want things again.
And how to allow those things to change as I change.
There are so many parts of my life that I’m still figuring out, and I think this journal is going to become a place where I can share some of that.
Sometimes it may be fashion.
Sometimes business.
Sometimes something happening in my personal life.
Sometimes something I’m questioning, dreaming about, struggling through, or simply thinking about that day.
I don’t really want to separate the woman from the designer anymore.
Because they’ve always been the same person.
And maybe that’s part of what this season of my life is teaching me.
I don’t have to return as the exact person I was before everything changed.
I can return as who I am now.
Still learning.
Still grieving.
Still dreaming.
Still trying to figure it all out.
But here.
And willing to begin again.
