To My Sunshine,
Where do I begin?
What would I like to say?
I love you.
I’m so proud of you.
Before we talk about where we’re going, I want you to know that.
You were eighteen when you began building a life with what you knew and what you had. You learned to work, to listen, to read a room. You learned how to make people feel welcome, how to bring calm to someone else’s difficult day, how to keep showing up when your own heart needed tending.
For more than a decade, you have worked for other people, grown through other people, and given so much of yourself along the way.
You did a beautiful job, baby girl.
I hope my younger self can hear that. I hope she lets her shoulders soften. She doesn’t have to wonder whether I’m disappointed in how long it has taken us to get here. I know how hard she worked. I carry everything she taught me.
Now, a week away from twenty-nine, I’m sitting with feelings I haven’t quite learned to name.
There is gratitude. There is restlessness. There is fear.
And somewhere beneath it all, a little excitement I keep trying to quiet.
I have always been good at moving through hard decisions. I can be practical. I can do what needs to be done. But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether the life I was managing was a life I wanted to live.
Today, I find myself surrounded by unfamiliar faces, in a job I’m unsure of, wondering how a company in the people business can leave the people running it feeling so unseen.
Thirty-one miles between home and work. So much time on the road to think about what I want, and so little energy left when I finally get home to begin.
So dare I leave?
Dare I build something of my own?
Even writing those questions makes me nervous. I know what it means to earn a paycheck. I’m still learning what it means to believe in my own ideas enough to give them time, structure, and a chance.
Be Calm, Stay Cool.
Take a breath, sunshine. You have so much left to learn. You’re allowed to begin while that is still true.
I want to give myself the care I have so freely offered others. I want to come home with something left for my own dreams. To sit down and write. To make something with my hands. To see an idea through without always placing it at the end of the day.
I love love.
I love passion.
I love the way a small idea can keep me awake with possibility.
And I love myself enough to take that possibility seriously.
So I am making myself a promise: I will invest in this life. In my creativity, my peace, my work. I will learn what I need to learn, make room where I can, and keep the promises I make to myself, even when progress feels quiet.
To the girl who got us here: thank you. You gave me so much to begin with.
To the woman I am today: we can be afraid and still take the next step.
It’s a new day and a new adventure, baby girl.
Let’s live.
Love,
Liv.