Birthday reflections

Every year I look back at my life in the rear-view mirror..

15 trips and 12 countries

8000 new photos on camera roll

Fell in love, trully

Learned how to ski (well started at least..)

Re-watched Sex and The City seasons

Completed Tony Robins course

Had a lot of wine

It is very easy for me to feel like "I haven’t done anything" not just this last year but in my 30s..

I've been physically and mentally supporting my mum, living in fear, pain and anticipation, fighting for her life for 5 years. Eventually losing the battle..

I've been doing the same job, with no significant rise or change.

I've been on probably more than 30 first dates and I'm still neither happily married nor with children.

I took a mortgage to become a home-owner, always believing that would make me feel like a success, but in reality I've been through hell dealing with it all.

I have maintained my physical health, with regular exercise and 7 step skin care routine twice a day.

I've deepened some connections, meanwhile letting go of others.

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Compared to my 20s, it really does feel like nothing.

In My 20s I moved to London - working and studying, incredibly tough years of my life, with huge learning curves and growing pains.

After that I embarked on a 5 month backpacking trip through South East Asia. Unable to land from that “high of life” I found a way to get a 3 month internship in New York - a city of my dreams. What a crazy dream come true that was!

When my 90 days expired, I continued the “high of life” and spent 30 days in India, getting my certification for yoga teacher training. On my last day there, I received an offer for a temporary job in New York!

I really squeezed the most out of coming&going, living there while on tourist visa and almost two years came to an abrupt end when I was refused entry.

From there, I continued a social media job remotely and for a while I didn’t have a home address. Bali, Australia, Europe, always on the move!

Covid forced me to land somewhere and that’s when I settled in Riga. Not for very long, as it turns out..

I can’t find a better term than “manifested” when I speak of connecting with Ieva, a travel influencer, who needed someone to join her as her +1.

Three weeks in 5 star hotels in The Maldives, and countless luxurious properties&destinations that I could only dream of. I was traveling with her, as her photographer/videographer, having a lot of fun drinking too much wine at our lobster dinners. Like what even was that ?

There is a big contrast between the life I lived in my 20s and the life I lived in my 30s.

Bold, daring, exciting, untethered.  My 20s were the years of making all the big dreams come true!

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My 30s have been much more reflective, defined by inner transformation.

Watching myself change - my values, or perhaps the value I attach to things. Becoming more aware of what affects me, what gives me energy and what takes it away. Wanting more depth, more meaning. Asking the big existential questions. Slowly moving away from the old me, but not quite able to let go.

Because who am I if not the familiar version of myself?

I now dream of changing people's lives, but feeling like I am not capable or smart enough.

I now dream of being a wife, yet I still stumble in relationships, often letting old wounds and familiar patterns shape the outcome.

I now dream of becoming a mother, yet I find myself fearing everything it might ask of me - my life, my freedom, even my body.

I overthink where, how, what. It’s my safety mechanism - rationalising my way out of everything, holding onto something for safety. Ironically, travel, that is such a scary experience for most, is the one thing I'm comfortable doing.

My therapist keeps asking, “How did this make you feel?” and I’m humbled, because I thought I knew so much, but I’m still learning - sometimes even to differentiate my own feelings from my thinking.

My heart might not be racing the way it did when I lived in New York City, but I’m in a different season of life now.

I’m discovering the quiet whispers of inner knowing, facing the bigger challenges life throws at me, slowing down and slowly redefining my own values.

Freedom was once the ability to travel and move whenever my heart desired.

Now, it’s having the wisdom to choose what feels right - even if it means staying.

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I see it so clearly in others, and I recognize in myself the prisons we create in our own minds. We limit ourselves with our definitions of success, we narrow our possibilities with outdated beliefs, we build these inner structures to feel safe, to feel in control.

The irony is how much we’re encouraged to believe in knowing and certainty.

Life is uncertain. Even when you know the weather forecast for your upcoming holiday, or macros of your next week’s meal plan. Even when marriage promises “till death do us part,” or when government tells you what your pension will be - none of it is truly guaranteed.

You can hope and you can pray, you can plan and you can control, you can resist and you can rebel, or you can accept the one truth of life: everything is uncertain (and when I say accept, I don’t mean it in a defeated way..).

Be as you are, do as you are, but loosen your grip on control, loosen your grip on a single desired outcome.

That is something I have wished for myself this year, as I continue to walk through seasons of life - courageously, one step in front of the other..

Even if it sometimes just means resting and reading a book for two hours.

P.S. never stop celebrating yourself and your Birthdays