Sorry I’ve been so quiet on the blog front. As the title will lead you to believe, I’ve been pretty busy lately. Starting with the middle of last month, I’ve: spent a long weekend in Denver hanging out with a close friend and then immediately flew to Las Vegas with that same friend and a group of ladies to see the opening night of Def Leppard’s residency (so much fun); flew directly from Vegas to Ohio to attend a wedding and hang out with my mom for a few days; came home for less than 24 hours and then went for a week and a half to Budapest for work; home for a week; and then traveled to New York City to spend five days there with another group of friends.
And I’m not done yet…I have a concert on Thursday here in Austin and then I leave next week for another round of Adam Ant concerts (aka my midlife crisis concert tour), spending time with another close friend in the Miami area; then it’s ACL (Austin City Limits – a weekend long music festival); then I head back to Florida for another weekend with more friends; then it’s F1 weekend here in Austin; then to San Antonio for a weekend with close friends; and then it’s time for my annual Thanksgiving Abroad trip. The rest of 2019 is going to fly by! (And I think I used the word “then” a record number of times in this post.)
I’m excited that I have so many things in my life to look forward to. I think about the days back before the melanoma showed up on my leg and remember how I was just going through the motions – not doing much to shake myself out of the doldrums, disinterestedly watching every day of my life rush by. It’s amazing to me to see how differently I am approaching life these days. I’m eternally grateful for my days now – now that I am highly aware of how limited they really are. I know I’ve said in this blog before, but cancer (or any life-altering diagnosis) can really put priorities into perspective. I’ll absolutely be the first to admit that I’m not a great friend and my introversion can inhibit me from being demonstrative. But I feel like I’ve gotten a lot better at showing the people close to me that they matter to me. I realize that traveling as much as I do isn’t everyone’s idea of how they want to spend their time; but I love it and for me travel is the best way to force myself to be present. In this day and age, being present is so hard when smartphones pull your attention to a tiny screen instead of seeing what’s around you and interacting with the people with you. (I actually phone-shamed my friends in NYC when I looked down the bar and everyone but me was bent over their phones. “Hello you idiots, we’re in NYC at an amazing place with people we pretend to like, and I’m the only person not on my phone. What gives?” It worked, and everyone was much better about interacting with the humans rather than the screens for the rest of the weekend.)
So I guess the point of this post is that gratitude can be an amazing thing. And despite my loathing of pop-culture psychology, I do firmly believe that once you do find gratitude in your life, your life becomes fuller in ways you can’t imagine. It sucks that it took melanoma to make me realize that but seeing where I am now, I don’t think I would change anything about what I went through to get here.