Going to get a little serious and vulnerable here, which is pretty uncomfortable tbh. But life the past few months has felt surreal. My friends and family know how fucking hard this year was for many reasons. I lost my best friend (something that will never feel real), had my motorcycle stolen, lost my family dog, the list continues. There were times where I felt like I would never get back to living a fulfilled and meaningful life. I’d wake up most days and just go through the motions. Emotions felt foreign and I felt pretty dead inside, like there was nothing I could possibly feel. Life just felt like it was happening so fast in front of me and I didn’t know how to slow it down or process the good or the bad events. But something changed over the course of the last few months.. I think I realized that the only way to get back to my life and to grow from all of this was to accept everything that had happened and create change for myself. I started getting back into the gym consistently, writing down my goals for each day, going for walks, sharing how I feel even when it’s hard, taking more trips, appreciating the career growth I’ve had this year, and taking action to get out of the mental mess I was in. Fast forward to today and there are still daily struggles, but my outlook on them has changed. A lot of our mental struggles are just the brain creating a narrative to help better understand the events happening and to make sense of it. But I decided to embrace and enjoy the discomfort, because I knew it wouldn’t just go away. So I could suffer through the heartache and discomfort or I could change my outlook and accept them, and grow from them. Life feels different and not the same, because there are new things I’ve picked up along the way that have made me feel stronger. Throughout the chaos, there is always some sort of light and good. My support system of friends and family, who I was able to get through shit together with, is something I didn’t really have a strong sense of before this year. Starting to sound like a broken record here, but I hope people realize that life is hard, and it’ll hit you like a brick. But it’s your choice to smile through it.