Please enjoy this excerpt from my new book:
You, Beautiful: Getting gorgeous from the inside out.
Coming soon!
Blossie’s Books started with journal entries, just pages of scribbles and reflections about my life: a young marriage, his infidelity, then divorce. Remarriage, infertility, miscarriages, then one day, two beautiful babies.
Working for other people, then myself as I built a business up from nothing. Employees came and went. I held on by my fingernails through hard times. I’ve had $5.62 to my name, been financially comfortable, and literally everything in between.
I’ve lived through textbook narcissistic abuse in both family and romantic relationships and carry the deep wounds these experiences leave behind.
I survived a full decade with anorexia and recovered, in itself one of my greatest achievements.
Those journal entries…
…they were a kind of furious writing. A notebook from Target, a stubby old pencil I dug out of the junk drawer, and me sitting in the kitchen, in the garden, on the porch, on the grass: just writing, writing, writing. A second notebook, and then a third.
When I stopped to read what I’d written, I had the strongest impulse to go back and tell my younger self, “You’re doing great. You can’t see it yet, but those struggles will become your strengths. And the joys? They’ll give you hope. You’ll see. Just keep showing up.”
And it’s the same now: in five or 10 years, I’ll look back at the person I am today and think, “She was doing so well, trying so hard, and she didn’t even know it at the time.”
We bloom
This is the great lesson of time passing, beautiful someone, isn’t it? When we look back, we can see patterns, growth, a kind of blooming as we expanded into the person we are now. Smarter, stronger, more aware of ourselves. More understanding of the world. More compassionate of other people who are going through things we went through once and survived.
And we can be sure that the future will be the same. We’ll move into the next part of life, and the next, growing through what we go through.
It’s comforting to realize this, and also emboldening. We can have the confidence that no matter what we try, and no matter how it goes, we’ll grow in understanding and experience.
Don’t judge
I’ve learned three rules for succeeding at every stage of life:
- Be willing to be bad at it at first.
- Stay in the game. Persist.
- Don’t go back and try to perfect your early attempts; just keep moving forward.
And now, I’ve got to add a fourth one: Be kind to yourself. Trying something brand new is always hard, sometimes messy. Don’t judge.
Just put one foot in front of the other. And when you look back at your early efforts and cringe a little, keep moving. You’ll get it.
And become even more beautiful in the process.