Pearls&Grit

Many years ago, in a faraway land…

Okay maybe more around eight years ago, in the high desert of Wyoming, a newly married, 20-year old was hugging her knees to her chest in a fifth wheel trailer. She sat on a chair covered in a brown scratchy blanket, watching in horror as field mice gleefully frolicked out of the corners and across the floor. Great big alligator tears streamed down her face.

That girl had a choice. She was either going to wither in the face of rodentry, remaining in that chair indefinitely or she was going to have to dig deep.

That girl chose to get gritty. She chose to bravely put her feet down on the carpet that the nasty mice had touched. Across the faux wood floor that the nasty mice had touched. Put on her boots that the mice had most definitely touched by the little teeth marks on the toes…and she went to the store where she bought a few mousetraps and some steel wool. She chose to solve that mouse problem, even though she mostly wanted to burn the trailer and the land it sat upon to a crisp.

I know you will be extraordinarily surprised to learn that girl was me. Since that moment sitting on the scratchy chair, I have had the exact same scenario play out in countless ways, and not necessarily in rodent form. I’m talking about the choice to accept what was happening graciously and figure out a solution — or flip a lid and refuse to deal.

The choice to make a pearl out of irritating grit. I realize it’s a little cliche, but it is so powerful.

Do you know how pearls are made? It’s an interesting phenomenon. Little irritants slip in between the two shells of an oyster. To protect itself, the oyster makes a special fluid, which coats the irritant. Layers upon layers of this fluid eventually build up, creating the lustrous, but not always perfectly round pearl.

I’m a pearl. You’re a pearl. Everyone can be a pearl. We take the problems that inevitably arise in life and we create something better because we’re tougher than the issues that get under our shells.

Living an unpredictable life, I’ve had to make sense of some awfully topsy-turvy situations. I’ve had countless opportunities where I had to decide if a circumstance was going to make me or break me.

I want this blog to be real. I want it to be raw. I want you, my readers to feel those emotions with me, as we navigate the difficult things that life throws at us. No one knows what is going to happen…we all set our first little houses (or trailers) up with rosy hopes and dreams, with exacting expectations of how our life is going to go and what it will look like. But I’ll be the first to tell you that unless you have been blessed by the golden hands of all the angels above, those first sparkling aspirations will mostly not happen in their entirety …and that’s okay! That is as it should be!

I also want this blog to be a place for those of us who are fiercely independent. The bullet-proof ones. Sometimes, (and here I go being brazenly transparent right here, right now!) I feel overwhelmingly lonely. Perhaps that is my own fault, perhaps it is partly a product of my nomadic life, perhaps it is a mixture of a little bit of everything from the day I was born…regardless, sometimes it gets lonely. I want this blog to be a place where those who are bouncing around feel okay letting down their guard. To feel and validate those things they are not able to share with anyone else, to have a connection that doesn’t require much of them in return.

However this blog is not going to be all seriousness and emotion! Who wants that!? Not me. I’m also going to share random thoughts, useful information and plentiful amounts of humor.

Let’s rejoice in the difficulties in life, because we know we are in charge! We decide how we want to be and who we are. We are pearls. Sometimes it seems like the layers are getting awfully thick, but we are the ones who make the choice to allow those layers to form.

So poke around! Send me a message! I’m in it for the long haul, y’all! (I’m allowed to say that cause I live in Texas right now.) I can’t wait to get to know you, and to grow better relationships with those of you whom I already know and love. Welcome to Pearls and Grit.