This is 38.
 
I like both number 3 and number 8. 8 in particular. Those 2 numbers sitting next to each other feel like comfort, like 38 is a warm, safe, fuzzy space to find me in. I found 3 grey hairs and some cellulite on my upper thighs this year and I’ve worried more about the worry lines that a gentle wedging their way between my brows this past year than any other and I wonder what it would like to truly cherish these indications of aging.
 
I don’t mind them but they bewilder me because I don’t feel the way I imagine a 38-year-old should feel. I feel like I’m 10 years younger but am armed with a strong sense of self: self-love, self-worth, self-compassion, self-understanding, self-respect, that I wish I’d had 10 years earlier.
 
A few things happened this past year, but not any big things. This year was a quietening for me. A time to indulge myself with time to me, to do, well… nothing. I needed a year like this. Here are the highlights:
 
— I celebrated my last birthday in Hungary at a music festival dancing the days away in the shade of ripped lycra panels under the dry East-European heat with 8 friends for 6 days and then returned to my little flat in North London and my work as if nothing had happened at all. I wrote This is 37. then and felt an unbridled sense of freedom am like anything was possible with my life.
 
— I also wrote: My single ultimate secret to my youthful appearance (+ 4 tips).
 
— And I spent a lot of time dreaming up a new future for myself. I seem to find myself in this place once again. Perhaps it comes with the reflection of the year just passed that provides the fertile ground to sow new seeds for the person I am becoming and the life I am creating. Every year those dreams adjust and ebb and flow and evolve and stretch and morph as I reinvent myself over and over again.
 
— After I wrote about my career — and how I got to where I am today, I started to feel the pillars upholding the foundations’ shift. Businesses tend to have a soul, a voice and a vision of their own once they grow strong enough, and I have been feeling the tendrils of those changes waft in with little messages, inspired ideas, and a sense of resistance or resentment to some parts that I used to love. The clarity is still not fully present with me. Change tends to happen very slowly at first and then all at once for me. I do believe that this time next year, I will be holding the infant of a whole shape and form in my work.
 
— I spent a week in Edinburgh and fell into a deep poetic obsession with this magical little city. I have romantic notions to come back and live there for the summers in my future. To indulge myself in creative nonsense, to just make art for the sake of beauty and making and art and frivolous romances with young men well below my age.
 
— And then I left London for Mexico for the winter, I cannot manage to live more than a month without direct sunlight covering every inch of my skin, and this place calls to me, and with the move life became entirely my own. Suddenly 2018, was over and left me realising that its biggest gift fro me was teaching me what I don’t want.
 
— I wrote many more helpful articles and worked behind the scenes with my private clients in between living my soft, quiet beach life. Articles like:
Help, I can not sleep!! What do I do…
10 tips on how to (actually) be feminine
3 questions to ask yourself to start a new life.
The money story that kept me in poverty for 10 years
7 simple shifts to have more money (that anyone can do).
What to do with all your old journals when they’re full and done.
For when you are moving across the world and don’t know what to do with all your belongings.
 
— I lived between a tiny triangle that consisted of my little casita on the hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my favourite, hidden little bay that takes 20 minutes of clambering over rocks and rock pools and other bays to get to, and the Old Town known locally as Romantica to go to the markets and meet friends for long chats over drinks. I deleted Instagram and Facebook off my phone for 10 days…. and thought often about love, men and relationships and what I was calling in, romantically. I started running. I’m still running.
 
— Then life started to speed up all on its own. It was as if the universe was ready to catapult me into a new direction. I accidentally adopted a kitten and decided to stay in Mexico, went to Las Vegas for a wedding, cried a lot and met a man.
 
The past year taught me that life has its own ebb and flow and that I have control over nothing… except for how I respond and how I choose to feel. The only thing I can control is my perception.
 
The past year has been a massive clearing out, like the storage system of my mind and body were Marie-Kondo’d. Does this bring me joy? No? Goodbye. It hasn’t finished yet. I’m still in the midst of this big energetic de-cluttering, sometimes catching myself like a hoarder, holding onto something so old that I definitely don’t want or need, but thinking but I like it or maybe one day it’ll come in useful
 
This year has edified my central nervous system. I am calm, I sleep well, I feel whole and yet I sense that many more years of life had to be released into the ether to make space for a whole new way of showing up. I am still in the midst of this.
 

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