I kept telling myself, “Don’t fall into the cliché… who cares what your 2019 highlights are?”. However, as I am staring down the end of the decade after what was the most trying year I’ve had, I feel obligated to share a peak behind the scenes, in hopes that it might help uplift someone else in need of inspiration.
To recap this year, I lost my favorite aunt (which led to a catastrophic break-up of my once-close extended family), my dad left our family, I left a stable job, Mikhail and I are now doing a long distance relationship (again), and my cousin-in-law got diagnosed with Stage 4 Glioblastoma brain cancer.
As I look back at the last decade of my life, I have lost more friends than I can count. I have been betrayed more times than I can count. Yet, through it all, I end the decade with clarity on the direction that I want my life to go in. My cousin said it best when she said, “You can’t make grand plans because life will screw it up. You just have to figure out what is the most important thing to you”.
If I am to recap on what is truly important to me, then I want to take a second and reflect on who I am. I am a 26-year-old woman who is unmarried, living thousands of miles away from her family, working a 50-hour a week job, and straddling $40k in debt. However, through all of this, I am also a young woman who is in a happy relationship with a supportive partner, who has found her purpose in life, who has discovered who her true friends are, and who has truly understood what is important to her.
I can’t imagine being my cousin and losing my mom, my future with my husband, and my dream job all in one year. That is why I am so focused on taking the negativity energy in my life and turn it into positive energy. I have achieved things that I am so incredibly proud of this year, and you know what, I want to focus on that instead.
I attended a sustainability conference at the United Nations.
To think that there I was in college, reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the first time, dreaming of going to the United Nations one day is crazy… because I actually did it! I had such successful seasons of attending to NYFW and showcasing how we can both be fashionable and sustainable, and to be able to go to the United Nations and hear such words of encouragement that the path I am on is the right one is awe-inspiring. Sure, it wasn’t as though there were red carpets rolled out for me or that I met the
I discovered a true friend.
Back in August, I wrote about what it felt like to find a best friend. To find someone who understands what it is you want to hear isn’t too hard. However, to find someone who will say what it is you don’t want to hear but
Through those two things, I have found new inspiration to keep going and to keep becoming better and better each day in service of my purpose in life, which to put it plainly, is to save the planet.
I enter 2020 with a fresh mind, renewed sense of hope, and prayers for a better future to come. I know that many things will change, probably even in January of 2020. In the end, however, I am okay with that because I have lived in the here and now, and I will continue my life in service of something greater than myself.
They say “it’s a blessed thing to love and feel loved in return”. However, I would beg to argue that, for most of us, we are simply blessed. Our life in comparison to the hardships that goes on around the world is a privilege because we have the power to change our lives and to dictate our own actions. My hope for myself and for the world is that as we enter into a new decade, let’s leave the problematic issues in the past and enter the new decade with love in our hearts for ourselves, our fellow humankind, and our planet.
