The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions

 Here’s how my 2018 has been going in a nutshell.I know I touched on how things weren’t going so well earlier this year, but I could never have anticipated that things could get as bad as they did. Negative life lesson: things can always get worse. I know I’m not sounding like my usual optimistic self (having a t.swift moment) – that’s because I think it’s going to take a little time for me to get back to that happy place.I’ve been silent about the difficulties going on in my life because they are almost entirely work-related, and I make a conscious effort to separate my professional life from my personal one. I’m not going to write a tell-all anytime soon, but I am comfortable enough to say that sometimes work can feel like it’s…too much. And if it gets to that point, something needs to change.At the beginning of the year I said:“I’ve had to reevaluate where I can give (my friends, family, relationship), and where I need to step back (work). I need to take better care of myself, and I think I also need to ask for care as well. I am going to practice saying “no” more…”Here are the results:

• I sent out messages to my closest friends apologizing for being unresponsive/not making a good effort, and explaining that I wasn’t in a good place. I felt immense guilt…but do you know what happened? Every single one of them sent incredible messages of support back. I don’t know why I had expected any other type of response, but WOW I felt like I had a wall of friends behind me, ready to catch me if I fell. It was so incredible.
• I went to therapy regularly. That has been a bumpy journey, but one that is overall yielding positive results.
• I spent more time with my family. It became obvious that I wasn’t able to make it through daily life without help, and my parents and my brother stepped right in when I couldn’t. I am so unbelievably fortunate to have a support system that never falters.
• I don’t know if there’s any truth to the seven-year-itch phenomenon, but I can tell you that eight-year-bliss is real. Azim has been the best partner, even though he himself has faced some tough challenges over the past year.

This has been a year of growth in my personal life, and a year of hard lessons learned in my professional one. For the next little while I’m going to work on what comes next for me in my career, while opening up again to my loved ones. I hope that means I’ll be writing more in this space – I’ll start with putting up some long overdue posts from my trips to Tokyo and Iceland.A sidenote about my blog – I had some trouble with my site being hacked earlier this year, and ended up having to move everything to a new server and rebuild. I couldn’t have done this without my amazing friend Cody. It’s still not completely done – you’ll notice missing photos here and there, but I’m working on getting that fixed!Thank you for sticking around. Xoxo, joce