Our Lives, Lately
Life, its a tricky thing isn’t it? We all live it but yet, we all live it so differently. For the most part we all want the same thing, live our best lives, be kind, giving, and the best we can be. From home decor and renovations to struggles and depressions… we’re covering it all with a small glimpse into our lives, lately…
Life of Jocelyn:
Somehow evaluating ones current position in life can make you feel like an anxious school kid awaiting grades on a report card. Oftentimes we forget to pause and step back for a moment of objective evaluation. My life over the past couple of months has been consumed with the daily white noise of our home renovation and everything that comes along with working on the blog. Its gets harder and harder to break the constant loop of setting little milestones here and there, working towards achieving them and then going back to the drawing table. This post is an honest reality check on where I stand within my current journey towards XYZ.
If you are new to the blog, you may not know that my husband travels a ton for work and Chelsey (my sister/blog partner) works a full-time job alongside NNB. As a result, I am the one who holds down the fort for not only the blog but our house and this never ending renovation. We are into week 13 of not having our own home and week 10 of renovations. This experience has at the very least tested my ability to roll with the punches…and the punches come in bunches. Thankfully our contractor has been nothing short of amazing. He is communicative and honest and I HIGHLY recommend him if you are looking for someone in the Orlando area. However, with construction it seems like every step in the right direction is met with equal amounts of friction and set backs. For example, the cabinet guy who is doing our kitchen and bathrooms is a major source of friction. I won’t get into it on this post but I’ll be certain to do a whole post on our renovation and give you the scoop on everything. We are close to being finished, and I’m hoping for a 90% completion by this Friday.
As for everything else…things are busy but really good. I was working part-time with a guy who flips houses on and off for about 5 months and decided to part ways for many different reasons. Sometimes it’s so hard to prioritize where to invest your own personal resources. As I get older I value my time so much more and I’ve developed a certain lack of patience. So now I am thankful to be able to just focus on what’s important to me, and I honestly couldn’t be happier.
Some closing thoughts…In the midst of micromanaging our day to day lives, more often than not we forget to pause and reflect on the underlying forces that put us all on our current path. In actuality, by forces I really mean choices. At the end of the day our choices are at the root of all of our current life situations and the processes we use to make those choices are even more ingrained in who we are as individuals. Think about it, how did you choose who you surround yourself with? How do you choose your personal goals, big or small? Most of our choices happen without us even realizing we had a choice to begin with, the majority are just white noise…but what do we do with our moments of clarity? The proverbial fork in the road can challenge each and everyone of us to dig deep into our personal ethics and character in order to choose a direction. It is these choices, in moments where we recognize we have a choice that put us where we sit today. A purposeful reality check should be high on our list of priorities if we are to make more informed choices to lead us all to our goals, but first and foremost goals must be set. Whatever works best for you, just remember that we can all get lost in the rut of our day to day lives. Setting goals should come first, choices on how to get there ultimately come next. Trust your intuition and chase who you want to be while remaining always cognizant of who you are. Learn from the choices that got you here and make future ones based on where you want go.
Life of Chelsey:
You know that feeling when you’re questioning exactly how honest is too honest? Well, I am toying with that exact idea at this very moment. Do I divulge my entire mind-set with my life, or keep it slightly topical? I guess I’ll play somewhere in the middle. We will kick it off with the good and then wrap up with the bad and the ugly…
The good: It has officially been 7 months of living in Manhattan. I’ve made a handful of new friends and work is going well. In case some of you don’t know, I am building out a national recruitment team that focuses on clients with 5-10k employees and we assist with their staffing and recruitment efforts. I have a team of seven working under me and I oversee everything from a process improvement stand point, to sales and business development. It’s great, but it’s time consuming. Working my “day job” 50-60 hours per week, then flipping to my “night job” for Not Necessarily Blonde, can be taxing. Overall, living here is probably one of the better choices I’ve made in retrospect. The opportunity to grow both professionally and personally are unrivaled.
The bad: I could go into an entire soliloquy about how costly it is to live in Manhattan, but that’s another post. The hardest part is my struggle with feeling lonely. Some mornings I wake up and want to literally do nothing but mope around. Finding friends (post college) is hard! People aren’t always in the same head space as you. It’s also a challenge because I see a lot of my friends either getting married or starting to have kids. It makes you take a step back and start to re-evaluate if you, personally, are missing or lacking something. I feel like I’m normal – mostly. 😉
The ugly: Okay, I’ll stop dancing in the middle and touch on this for a moment. Depression is a very real thing. I’ve written a post before about the difference between a curated life and real life. I’m far from perfect. I look in the mirror and hate the reflection sometimes, as I’m sure many do. I wish I worked out more often and didn’t eat 3 slices of pizza in one sitting (like I might of JUST done). Sometimes I feel sad because I’m in a big city all alone, with not a ton of friends or family. Add stress from work and keeping 7 mouths ‘fed’, it’s a lot. Although I don’t think I am a clinically diagnosed individual who struggles with a remarkable level of depression, I can say I think it’s important to recognize when you’re feeling down. It’s okay to let your self feel overwhelmed or cry or get angry. However, it’s equally important that you allow yourself only a certain amount of time to feel all you’re experiencing and then pick yourself up again. This weekend, I felt super low. I did nothing, I spoke to no one. I didn’t even answer my phone for my own mother. I needed some time to regroup, rethink and feel… well… just bad. Then Monday hit and I’m back at it and you can be too.
The summary: You know I am going to bring this full circle. No matter if you’re feeling great off a high or want to cry yourself to sleep at night. You’re not alone and it’s okay to feel how you feel no matter how grave you think it is. Feel down, but get back up. Feel like watching 10 hours of Netflix (like I did with Ozark), then do it, but your butt better get moving the next day. Life’s not easy, but it doesn’t have to be done alone. Our blog is not just about fashion and pretty pictures, it’s meant to be a place where you can find inspiration and information, all the time!
Dream big & keep pressing on,
Chelsey