...but really? No one does.

Raise your hand if you have looked at someone else and assumed they have their sh*t together!

I do it all the time. If you get out of a clean, shiny expensive car...

If you are well-dressed and groomed...

If you hold down a high profile, highly stressful job and can still easily smile at the person who is ringing out your groceries - I assume you have a great job and a great life. I don't assume it's perfect but I look at you and think you got it together. Go you!

And a lot of the time when I am making these decisions about what kind of life you must lead in my head, I am comparing you at what may be your best with me at my worst.  With my paycheck-to-paycheck life because I can be rather impulsive.  With my forgetfulness and lack of concept of time. With the $50 I still owe EZPass but keep neglecting to pay, despite getting a few hate letters from them and what they call a "permanent suspension."  What?  We'll see about that, EZPass.  We'll see.

Sigh.  I am comparing what you put on display to the small, silly details of my life I don't have a grasp on.  Let's face it - no one really has it all together all the time. Life has too many moving parts and I don't care how fabulous of a multi-tasker you are; you're bound to fudge it up somehow.

There's never a better time to realize this than when you're at an event with an open bar....like at a wedding! Once the alcohol is flowing, suddenly people let their guards down and you're able to - if you're reasonably sober, that is - really see what people are struggling with because they'll just come out and tell you.

You could be a complete stranger to them or know them distantly but when drinks are had, sometimes people just need to talk it out.  The facade of quintessential adulthood comes down and their inner demons come out - it makes me think that maybe people need to be more connected to each other.  There's no reason why we should hold anything inside of us and let it come roaring out when we can't seem to control our impulses anymore. It's embarrassing; I've been there. I used to be the drunk without a filter.  I used to be the person who'd wake up the next morning and wonder if I'd have any friends left because I acted out of line. It's an ugly feeling.

So this weekend I learned about a few people.  People who you'd look at and say "Man, they just have it all GOING ON!"  Newsflash:  They don't.  They are struggling with different things just as you are.  As I am.  As your cousin is.

I spoke with someone this weekend who's struggling with PTSD; you'd never know it in passing. But they did things in their military duties that haunt them.

I spoke with someone who's still mourning their divorce; trying to find the affection and validation in others that is missing from their life. Fun story - this person leaned in and tried to kiss me, knowing full well my date was there. It made me sad ~ I know what it's like to feel discarded. But that rejection must have felt strange the next morning, if they remember it at all. Been there. Done that. Hid the t-shirt.

My message is this: No one has it all together. We all have various layers of life we're wrestling with and we how we handle it is all different. So if your life is what you would consider "a mess" right now, don't bother comparing it with others. It's all a mess and it'll all be okay.

New Life.

It's been a while.

I've been, pretty much, just 3 different places:  Home, work, or the YMCA.  I've been doing exactly what I want to do when I want to do it.

But yet, I've found myself worried about the convenience of others rather than the convenience to myself - almost apologetic that maybe the ideas I have may adversely impact others. The associate attorney in the firm brought this to my attention the other day when I was discussing the moving of files that I'm working on into my office - her words were:  You do what you want to do, dude. They're your files. 

It's really such a simple thing, but I suppose I was used to having to tiptoe around my ideas and present them in such a way to others so they'd be more receptive. I'm aware that I can appear brash, blunt, stubborn and, at times, obsessive. I get it in my head I want to do something and all be damned...I'm going to do it.

That won't change, but there's no need to apologize for the basic personality traits that have gotten me this far in life.

Speaking of things that I won't apologize for...I've been spending obscene amounts of time making, fixing, re-creating, re-thinking things...here's my latest project in my studio (YES, I'm going to begin referring to my craft room as my studio!):

Before:

This is what it looked like once I got it out of the frame.  Broken, sad, "nobody-wanted-me" 3D wall art from TjMaxx.  It was heavily clearanced to $12 and I knew I was up for the creative challenge.

Current (not completed):

I'm still working on the embellishments and hope to finish that part up today.  After that, a minor clean up, back it goes into a very nice glass frame and BOOM!  A sellable, very unique piece of upcycled art that soothed my soul to work on. Much better than letting it end up in the trash, wouldn't you say?

Projects like this is what really made me want to start my own Etsy shop - USUpcycled.  I wanted to take old, perhaps broken things, and turn them back into something beautiful and useful.

It goes along with my view on people. We are lead astray, we fall, we make mistakes, we royally screw things up. But we can be restored; forgiven. Every day we can can wake up and decide to be different. We can be upcycled humans, too.