New Year. Another fresh start.

It’s amazing to go back and read through the past year and see how far I’ve come. It really is interesting to see the difference a year makes. I started 2012 without a job and at the heaviest weight I’ve ever been. It was in truth, one of the more difficult years of my life, but one of the most memorable.

My search for a job was one of the most trying times of my life. Much of it was well documented here, but I’ve never felt more low than I did during that time. It lasted well throughout my part-time job, because I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. So for 11 months of the year, I was battling every day.

But then the most amazing thing happened.. I stumbled onto a career in the entertainment industry. I found myself losing weight and enjoying exercise. I finally started feeling like myself again. All the heaviness of everything I had been dealing with started to fall away.

I’m starting 2013 as light as ever. I have so much I want to accomplish in every aspect of my life. I’m looking forward to this year and facing all the challenges that will come my way. I feel like my life has finally begun!

So I have a few more minutes left on this first day of 2013 and it’s time I make some resolutions.

1. Continue my journeyfor30. I’m half way there!
2. Do more things in Dallas, alone or not, get out there! Enjoy the city.
3. Save 10% of every paycheck.
4. Take conscious moments to appreciate how far I’ve come both professionally and emotionally.
5. Get involved in the running community more. 5Ks and beyond!

And as always cherish loved ones.

To 2013 being the best year yet!

Christmas Time.

The holidays have always been a bittersweet time for me. Well not always. As a kid, the holidays were the best. You get out of school, get a ton of gifts, not responsible for anything but being a kid.

These days the holidays bring up a lot of other emotions. There’s still the excitement of seeing family, giving and receiving gifts, and of course food. But the holidays always bring up other thoughts and emotions. You tend to recap the year. Look back at what you accomplished, what you didn’t, and everything in between. I’m unimaginably lucky to have finally found the career of my dreams. I seriously paid my dues for this one, but it paid off far and away more than I could have possibly thought. I didn’t even know to dream up a job like this with so much potential ahead of me.

I managed to start really making progress on my Journey for 30. I’m 18 pounds in and going strong. (Except not right now with Christmas cookies and what not.) I finally had my wrist surgery and fully recovered. I even moved into my very first apartment that I absolutely love! I made a lot of new friends that I hope to have for a very long time. Seems everything is starting to align for me after years of feeling hopeless.

As for the bitter part of bittersweet, it’s seeing couple after couple get engaged, celebrate anniversaries, announcing babies, buying homes… you get the point. It seems like it’s the last piece of the puzzle for me. That last little piece that either wasn’t put in the box or was eaten by the dog… I feel like I’m almost there, but that hole keeps staring me right in the face. Incomplete. The good news is that my puzzle is more complete than it ever has been before, which makes the blow of every engagement a little less devastating.

One thing I really need to work on is having patience. This year has shown me, if nothing else, things will work themselves out if given time. I’ve removed people from my life that brought me down and found wonderful people who are nothing but supportive and gracious. I can’t wait to spend another year embracing the people in my life and working diligently to further to my career.

Merry Christmas to you and a Happy New Year! Until then!

Stuck in a serious rut.

Lately, things have been going from tough to impossible. Having three jobs paying me sparingly and I thought that was challenging is nothing compared to what I’m going through now. I’ll be very honest, I’m making about 40% of what I have since I moved out on my own. My sitting jobs are non-exisitent, my sales have gone from $10,000 every two weeks to about $3,500, so I won’t be getting any commission. I’m making minimum wage and I only work about 35 hours a paycheck. You can do the math. That is my sole source of income. It’s not enough to even pay my rent. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. We’re heading into the holidays and I can’t afford to pay my bills much less buy a single Christmas gift. It’s an impossibly dark place to be. I’ve been stretching myself so thin doing all these other jobs for no pay just to try to further my career. None of it is working. I’m still making minimum wage at part-time hours with no other paying jobs.

I’ve been trying to distract myself with exercise and my weight-loss goals. You can probably guess that even that is failing me. I’ve written about those challenges on my journeyfor30 blog. I just feel like I’m failing in every single aspect of my life. I don’t know how to turn things around, or if I even can. It’s a place I never expected to fall into, and now I don’t know how to get out. Crushing debt from student loans, a dead-end job, and the obvious stress that gives me nightmares every night are becoming too much to handle. How do I try to stay positive when I can’t find a ray of hope?

Update time.

I’m back! So much has changed since my last post. I’m stunned I haven’t been here to unleash all these crazy thoughts and emotions running through this head of mine. I’ve needed an outlet through it all. I’ve had some moments boil over, but right now I’m just feeling very unbalanced. I thought getting on and working through it all in a different forum may help.

First things first, I have a couple of jobs and my own apartment now. I hate my main job, but it pays the bills. I love living by myself, and my apartment is perfect. I’m doing what I have to do to make ends meet, but recently it’s not seeming to be enough. I work on commission, which I would never recommend to anyone. It’s one thing to be paid a decent base plus commission, but I don’t get that. I work for minimum wage with a bogus commission scale. My pay and hours are completely unpredictable, which is becoming a major problem as my student loan payments are coming up due. My second job cut all of my hours this month, so making the bills this time around is going to be a challenge.

So not only is the job itself not great, but mixed with the commission scale and unpredictability, I’m on my feet ALL day with very few breaks. I didn’t rack up thousands of dollars in student loans and earn a bachelor’s degree to deal with these kind of conditions. It’s frustrating to work so hard for so little. I’ve been continually applying for other jobs, and I’m well over 110 applications at this point. I’ve had some interviews, but no offers. Every rejection digs a little more at my core. I’m stuck. It’s a dark place to be, especially trying to deal with it myself. I never wanted to have to ask for help once I got out on my own. Working in the industry I do, makes me very aware of how lonely I am. When I already am not a fan of my job, that realization clearly doesn’t make things any easier.

I managed to make it to Colorado for my cousin’s wedding last weekend. It was so nice to get out of Texas and away from my dead-end job for a few days. It’s amazing how at home I feel there. More and more of my family seem to be heading that direction, so I think it’s inevitable I’ll end up there soon. Another bright spot is meeting some of the great people at my job that I hope will be in my life for a long time.

I still can’t keep my mind from racing a million miles a minute these days. I’ve been waiting to hear back from a second interview for awhile now. I really want the job, but the longer I wait, the more discouraged I’m becoming. I’m in this limbo of having to continue going to a job I hate every day (last seven days straight) and starting to apply for more jobs I probably won’t get. How much more rejection can I take?

Stop Kony 2012.

The video went viral yesterday, and continues to spread like wildfire today. If you haven’t seen the video (or at least heard about it), you might as well be living under a rock. I’ve linked it here. As with any kind of campaign that gets this magnitude of exposure, the doubters will arise. Those that question a charity’s validity are just as important. It should be a concern for everyone to know where your money and support are going. This morning, I’ve seen many opinions about the organization, Invisible Children, and wanted to research on my own to form my own conclusions.

Invisible Children, became a non-profit organization in 2006. As a NPO, they run under the strict sanctions established for all non-profits. Their largest goal in this campaign to make Joseph Kony famous by spreading the word through the sharing of a very highly produced video intended to push you to take action. As I watched last night, I was one of the influenced. (Full disclosure: I immediately bought a bracelet to support.) As I woke up this morning, the cynic in me wanted to verify the validity of all of this, because my emotions took over last night. As a human being, you want to help end things as atrocious as what we were told is happening in Africa.

I’ve heard about genocide, malnourished children, AIDS epidemics, and poverty in Africa. I knew things are bad there. I had a close friend go to Rwanda and tell me of his experiences he saw first hand. (You can read his account here.) I never for a second questioned the horrible conditions those people face daily. So, my first instinct was, “let me learn everything I can about Joseph Kony.”

Of course the viral video tells you he is the leader of the guerilla group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). He’s been around for much longer than anyone with his kind of power should. US Military powers have gotten involved to stop him. The World Bank estimates that under his leadership the LRA has abducted and forced around 66,000 children to fight with them during the past two decades. The U.S. Africa Command has embarked on multiple missions to find and capture Kony. The International Criminal Court has placed him at the top of their list to arrest along with four other members of the LRA.

In an effort to as fair and unbiased as possible, I support what this organization is doing. It’s extremely important for the global population to be familiar with Joseph Kony and what he has done to the people and children in Uganda. People are being critical of the fact that Invisible Children support the Ugandan military who reportedly have not been the most upstanding help to their people. You can read about that here. Political corruption in these African countries is an outstanding problem, so it’s hard for me to criticize a group for trying to align with them and fix a broken system.

As for Invisible Children’s financial criticism, I’ve looked at the reports. It actually shows a breakdown of total expenditure with 80.54% going directly into programs and 19.46% going in to Fundraising and Management/General Expenses. I didn’t see any discrepancies. Maybe I missed the controversy, but I don’t find this charity to be a scam. They are trying to make a difference. It takes a lot of money to run these organizations, and even more when they embark on a campaign such as Kony2012.

Bottom line: Their goal is to educate the global population about a heinous individual in Uganda that a very limited amount of people would know about otherwise. They are not requiring anyone to give money if they don’t feel comfortable doing so. They want you to spread the word about this man. Regardless of your feelings on the IC, they’ve been pretty damned successful thus far. If a campaign like this can accomplish getting the world talking about the problems in Africa, I’m behind it. It’s about time that these issues are part of the public discourse.

Stop Kony. This is just the first step of great things to come from people who want to make a difference.

One week later.

One week into my new positive life, things are so much better. It’s amazing what changing your frame of mind can do for you. My weekend trip was more fulfilling than I could’ve expected.

Let me preface this weekend by saying if I could replant my Houston friends in Dallas, my life would be perfect. You might be asking yourself, “Why doesn’t she just move to Houston?” It’s a valid question. The short answer is that I hate Houston. To expand on that, if I’m moving out of my first love, Dallas, it’s going to be to my second home, Colorado. I cannot stand Houston’s weather or their sports teams for that matter. They don’t even have an NHL team. I also could never in a million years deal with the traffic in that city. It’s unspeakable how many bad drivers there are in Houston… so that’s the long answer to why I could never live there.

Moving on to the weekend, I hadn’t seen my oldest friend Kara in nine months, which was my reason for the trip. We have been friends for almost 20 years! I can’t even begin to explain how much I needed this weekend. I had some amazing conversations with Kara about our lives. We discussed ups and downs and everything in between. It was so therapeutic for both of us. I knew seeing her would be just like old times, but I had no idea how wonderful it would be to catch up. I’m so happy for all of her happiness. I love that girl like a sister. She knows she’s a part of my family.

Getting to see my other friends that live in Houston was so special. With everything I’ve been through in these last eight months, I needed a reminder that there are people who I care about that find me worth while, too. So I can’t thank Alora, James, Brian, and Ivy enough for taking a moment of their time to see me. It may have not seemed like a lot to them, but it meant a lot to me.

I think it’s important for me to explain why this weekend was so incredibly poignant to me in the course of this last year. I’ve been through an extraordinarily low eight months with my job search and my fair share of traumatic events. I don’t want to get into details too much until I’m more comfortable with it, but this weekend was a giant step in the right direction. Until next time!

Positivity.

Today starts a new chapter of my life. I’ve been reflecting on the past few years recently. All the successes and failures I’ve faced made me consider what led me to where I’m at now. What better time than now to put all the negative things behind me and focus on a more positive, bright future?

Of course, at the forefront of my mind is the difficulty I’ve faced in finding a job. I’m realizing I’m not the only one suffering. I’ve now applied to 80 jobs in 3 states with no luck, so I figure there’s no better time to start focusing on building something for just me. I’m not desperate thanks to a very fortunate part-time job as a nanny that I’m using to build some sort of savings. But now I’ve started a new certification for a new career path I never saw myself walking down, but I think will be great. I’m finally excited about a part of my life that has been a sore subject for so long!

As for the negativity in my life, well I’ve kept that around for far too long. I’ve mentioned before how I value friendships more than pretty much anything in my life. I used to tolerate a lot of nonsense, because of fear mostly. I had fear of losing what I was used to, a fear of being alone. What I understand now is that all I ever did was force that fear on myself. I was never strong enough to let all of that go and embrace all the positivity I had around me all along. Now that I’ve cut those ties, I’m free. I feel lighter without all the crap, for lack of a better word, pulling me down. It’s like I’m seeing for the first time. I’ve reached out to old friends and am reconnecting with beautiful people that value me. This step I’ve taken has made me want to get back on track with journeyfor30, because I now feel worth it all again (and my wrist is almost healed).

If you’re feeling as down and out as I was, figure out what is bringing you down and remove it. Don’t fear the repercussions, because you might be missing out on a life that’s brighter and lighter than you ever thought was possible by just making a few changes. I wish I would’ve figured out it was this simple a long time ago. It would’ve saved me a lot of heartache and time wasted on distractions.

Signed,
A Rejuvenated Britni