Life Lately...

Over the past few years battling chronic illness, and then even more so with the craziness of life since the pandemic. I've had to learn to roll with plans changing in an instant. In this case almost every plan I had lol. Now I'm realizing it's almost the end of January 2023 and I've hardly posted anything. Normally the holidays are my happy place, so usually in January (even though I'm bummed Christmas is over) I'm sort of still riding off the excitement of it having just been Christmas. If I'm being 100% honest, the holidays have been a lot harder for me without my grandma. Birthdays are even harder than that. Grief is a process and I'm working through it one step at a time. Building my joy back up.

This year over the holidays I had Covid so that kind of short-circuited my plans and joy lol. We had to do Christmas late and I missed all the lights, events, and parades. I spent a great deal of time in bed, sleeping, running to the bathroom, drinking Pedialyte, battling cold chills, sweating out fevers, and blowing my nose raw. Covid broke my face and lips out in an awful rash, I lost my sense of taste and smell and my hair got dry and thin and started coming out (thankfully my hair is almost completely back to its fuller curly self). *tears*

Then in January 2023, my mom had breast cancer surgery, a family member ended up in ICU and I broke my stupid foot lol. So it's been an adventure, to say the least. I gave myself some space to catch my breath and recharge before trying to get words on a page again. I am holding on to faith and hope that 2023 will turn out to be an amazing year despite its rougher beginning.

I am thankful that I can swing myself back to being thankful and happy for simple gifts like the blue sky, the birds singing and a breeze on my face. Sunlight, breathing and the squirrels seemingly playing tag in my yard lol. So here I am back to me and ready to share more with you about how I survive the hard stuff, and believe me I know there has been a lot of it lately. I will be sharing my writing, various things I use to keep me focused on gratitude, daily practices, etc. I hope some of them help you as well.

Also, I will be setting up a live reading of the first few chapters of my upcoming book (not sure if this will be in person, via zoom, or Both) but more on that in the coming days. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and going with me on this crazy life journey. I wish you all the best of days for 2023 and I look forward to sharing with you all I've been working on over the next few weeks and months. Thank you so so much for all your support and patience.

Be honest, Be real, Be you

Bobbie De Leon