Dear readers,

You may have noticed that I promised to deliver “30 before 30” — or the 30 lessons I learned in these first three decades — only to fall short and disappear. Well, here you go. Lesson number 9: the world is vast and mysterious and teaches you exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it.

You’re thinking, “Jenn, what the hell does that mean?!”

I set up this huge, reflective goal about how I’ve grown only to have a train wreck of a holiday season. The past few weeks have simply been hard. Without too much detail: in a variety of ways, I’ve been told just how much I’ve fallen short as a person this past year; my closest, best, favorite work colleague and friend retired; I’m looking at stepping into a promotion that is scary and big; my whole body is rallying against my happiness by reacting to aforementioned with stress-sleep and knots in places I didn’t think could knot. Every single ounce of me was tired and sad and disappointed. (You know, the things you don’t put on the internets.)

But, also, this. A woman pulled me aside at the theatre today and said that I was “one of the most beautiful young ladies she’s seen in a long time,” that it was both my features and my “warm affect.”

Essentially: when life has you crying on your couch at midnight in fleece-lined tights from disappointment in yourself and pain, it also hands you gems that make you start to make you whole again too.

It ebbs and it flows.

Love,

jenn.