Fearing Life Setbacks But Not Letting Them Define You | How My 2019 Began
January 1st was definitely not how I anticipated it to be. After an extremely busy holiday season for all things The Gilded Bellini related, I was looking forward to really enjoying a 2 week break and jumping right back into it all come January. I had plans to pitch, plan the next few months, travel a bunch for content and map out my game plan for the next few months. Well…. none of that happened. I’m currently a month behind on work, The Gilded Bellini and my life in general.
On New Years Day, my family had a very scary emergency. Long story short, I spent nearly 72 hours in the ICU with my grandpa, then a few more days in telemetry and then in a rehabilitation center. A few days later, we landed back into telemetry. My grandpa had a major health scare that was totally out of nowhere and to be honest 13 days ago we had no idea what horrendous thing was going to happen - everything was up in the air and things didn’t look good. Fast forward nearly 2 weeks later and I am beyond grateful and happy to say he is making incredible progress and is on the road to recovery… but it’s a very slow recovery. During the last 2 weeks I completely shut off my brain. I was in complete survival mode - no sleep, I was so upset and scared that I was making myself sick, my entire family was a wreck. I had to take off work and couldn’t even remotely handle managing and keeping up with my blog and social media. Nothing in the world mattered more than being in that moment and helping to take care of my grandpa and support my family. On top of it, I got an abnormal mole removed off the bottom of my foot in the same time frame so I’ve been in throbbing pain, limping all while trying to stay on top of handling and getting through this entire health scare in the hospital.
Each day I feel I have gotten emotionally stronger even though I feel like my body is breaking down because of the severe exhaustion and stress levels I have been struggling with, on top of the physical pain from my foot and trying to mentally recover from the madness that was end of the year craziness with work. I’ve genuinely not had a break in months and this entire episode these last few weeks has been the cherry on top to me feeling defeated and totally tapped out.
Despite the fact that I have valid reasons for taking off from my usual round the clock schedule, I had always feared a time like this. I had always feared what would happen if I just lost inspiration because some major life event happened. In the grand scheme of life even though The Gilded Bellini is my baby, the whole keeping up with everything on social media and trying to book gigs and even write seemed meaningless to me over the last couple weeks. I never wanted this to happen, but it did. Now that I fell so deeply behind I feel like I missed out on pitching for stuff for Valentine’s Day. March is my 3 year TGB anniversary and I have to start getting my act together for that. You may think I am crazy, but if you’re a content creator you KNOW how important it is to have EVERYTHING in order and have a plan for at least a month in advance. You miss out if you don’t.
I clued in everyone on my socials about what has been going on the last few weeks and I am so grateful to have such a supportive group of people that enjoy following along - I received a lot of encouraging words about not feeling guilty for taking time off and that they’ll still be there when I come back. I guess it comes down to me disappointing myself because I am SO dedicated, especially to TGB and I get sad if I can’t fully commit. No matter how much I wanted to commit the last few weeks, I just couldn’t.
As I am slowly bringing myself out of this funk (which seems like, inside, me trying to escape out of quicksand) I keep reminding myself that this major life event and my exhaustion and overworking is not a definition of me or how the rest of my year will be. Life just happens and it’s not always the bright, happy perfect highlight reel we all put on social media. It comes with a lot of things we don’t want but through this whole experience it was a big learning lesson for me. I realize now that this entire thing wasn’t a set back at all but it put a lot of things in perspective that I needed to face.
Don’t worry, TGB isn’t going anywhere!!!! I have plans - maybe they won’t happen in February but I definitely will aim to meet my goals in the coming months. I will commit to spending more time with my family and not jeopardizing my health for stressful situations that really don’t serve me in life. I will put more energy into what makes me happy and the people that make me happy.
More to come! Thanks for all your support always and for surrounding me with positivity - love ya Bellini fam!
