It’s been a while. A long while and I’m sorry. Before I go back to my irregularly scheduled posts, I felt like I had to explain why I’ve been away for so long.

2017 was a good year, I’ll go as far as saying that 2017 was an excellent year! I travelled all around the world, I expanded my social support network, grew closer to my family, got an amazing new job and moved into my own place! I’ll be honest, when I wrote this post, it was out of pure faith. Hope for an amazing 2017, and the firm belief that I would make it so no matter what. 

At the end of 2016 my life as I knew it progressing ended. My boyfriend at the time and I decided to part ways and it broke me internally. All of a sudden, six years of learning, adapting and growing with this person was over and I had to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life. I had spent so long being Dee & .. that I wanted, no needed to know who I was when I could no longer rely on someone else. So that’s what I did, I got adventurous, left my comfort zone and rediscovered myself. I remembered that I am brave, I am resolute, I am fearless, I am a risk taker and I learned that I still have an unimaginable amount of love to give.

So why didn’t I blog? I couldn’t. My blog has always been a place where I could be honest with myself and be honest with my readers. I wasn’t ready to do so. I wasn’t ready to admit that I hurt, that I was in pain. Not to myself, not to those around me and certainly not on this blog for everyone to see. After that first day, I didn’t allow myself to cry any more tears, instead I did the typical self improvement cycle and motivated myself to lose 5kg in three months. I pushed myself further to find a new role to thrive in, to find a place of my own that I loved, to build furniture myself, to travel to Poland and see South Korea play Overwatch (omgomg). To go to New York and see my best friend for a week, to surprise my mother for her birthday in Ghana, to make all the grown-up decisions I thought we’d be doing together alone. Each difficult step I took, I told myself that I was healing, and that things would be fine now. The more I blossomed in adversity, the more I told myself I couldn’t be hurting. “If everything is going so well, how can you hurt?!” I’d somehow convinced myself that if I could keep it together for a whole year, then I would be fine, I would be fixed and it wouldn’t suck anymore. Well, that turned out to be quite the untruth I had sold myself.

Turns out, moving on doesn’t involve moving on in life. It involves all sorts of things, one of which is facing your feelings, letting go of the past and accepting that plans made,  hopes, dreams and goals we made will never happen. That I will have to relearn a new person, maybe more than once and.. that’s okay. It’s okay for things to be sucky for a long time, it’s okay for me to not be okay about this but still be a happy person who is living her absolute best life. This life truth was not one that was easy for me to understand, accept or be able to type out until now.

Now I know this, now I accept this, I can really begin to move on. 

This year I am turning thirty and there was a time that would have panicked me greatly. I would have been scared that I had no real roadmap for the next five years, but I’m really confident. Being alone was my boogeyman, and I’m doing it, thriving even. I know that for years I’ve been treading water, trying to just start at life, waiting for my opening so that I can begin. Now I find myself in the middle of it, I’m yelling into the void, “so what’s next?” and leaning in to hear the response.

2016 felt like the end, 2017 felt like the first year of my life and 2018 year is all about growth, real growth. It’s all about Levelling Up.

I am so excited to be living 2018 with you guys.