How I got here - Episode 1- “The stage is set”

I like telling my story, not because I want to hear myself talk (or maybe I do), but because I think someone else can gain inspirational benefit from it. Not everyone needs to hear the accomplishments of someone else to be motivated, but it sure does help. That’s kind of how I got here. I won’t go through every detail in this one post, maybe i’ll make a bunch of posts that sums it up all together. I won’t start at the very beginning because dissecting my childhood is irrelevant. It’s the usual story of I loved to bake as a kid, my grandmother taught me and I grew up to have a baking business that was unexpected. I’ll start where I think it really began, where I really started yearn for something bigger for myself and had no idea how different my life was about to become. So, here’s part of the story….not all of it, or even half of it, but the beginning of it.

In 2021, my life looked very different. My job title, goals, and some people, 1 in particular, looked completely different than what it does now. The only thing that’s the same is I still love to bake and kept my practice of being a Yoga Instructor. In the beginning of the year, I was in a relationship that wasn’t the best, I started to resent my career I had been in for 10 years, and realized my apartment, that I loved so much, wasn’t working out for me financially. (I promise this isn’t a trauma dump, but it's relevant, I swear.) Being in places like this, you start looking for inspiration outside of yourself, hence why I think my story may help someone else. This is where I introduce to you the concept of the “Second Act”. Second Act was a series of short stories produced by Vice Media that featured individuals, of all ages, who yearned for something different in their life. Many left their careers of 10,20, even 30 years to embark on a whole new journey for themselves. One woman was a lawyer that became a wilderness leader, another left corporate life and became an oyster farmer, and, my personal favorite, a older gentleman who became the owner of Paulie G’s in Brooklyn, who poured his life savings into opening up a pizza place that quickly grew, and now has full restaurant. I used to sit on my couch and watch these episodes over and over because it gave me such a positive emotion. I knew deep down that I would have a story like this. I’d just up and leave whatever I was doing one day, and I did, and it’s just as scary as everyone said it would be. I vividly remember one moment I was standing in my hallway, I closed my eyes and I wished everything I had would disappear so I could start something new, and boy it did.

June of 2021, I decided I had to move from my apartment….…home…..right at before my 30th birthday…....with my parents. It felt like I was going backwards, especially because I had a comment from someone that I WAS going backwards, which felt even worse. To top it off, right after I turned 30, I got dumped, because I was “going backwards”. So, here I was, 30, living with my parents, and dumped. It was something out of a sitcom, the dark humor ones that are actually sad when you take the laughing audios away. When this happens, it’s easy to have a few bad days, and had one really, REALLY bad day, that turned out very interesting. Looking back, I may have been going backwards, but life was getting ready to catapult me forwards.

I don’t have to explain why the day was so bad. You get dumped, you feel horrible, end of story. That day where I was feeling particularly awful, I decided to take myself shopping, thinking retail therapy could give me some sort of temporary relief. I ended up feeling worse. I remember standing in the middle of Aritzia thinking “why am I even shopping? it’s not like I’m going to do anything exciting in my life for me to look nice”. Looking back, it was honestly crazy I was thinking that. I was just in a rut, not dead, even though it felt like I was. It felt like my life ended there. Insane. If this happens to you, please don’t ever think that. Anyways, I ended up getting some things and going to the check out counter. As my items were being bagged, I looked down and saw a piece of paper that you would get from a fortune cookie. I looked at the girl and said “oh, so cool, do you give fortunes out with your clothes?” She had no idea where it came from, or what I was talking about. There it was, a sign from the beyond….or whoever it was that dropped their fortune. It had read “The stage is set. You are now going to embark on a world of new opportunities”. Pretty fitting for someone who was obsessed with a series called Second Act.

I didn’t know what it meant, but it was a moment that was too odd to pass up as a coincidence. I went home and attached it to my bedroom mirror. I looked at it everyday, thinking that something grand was coming. I thought, whatever it was, it was something yearning to find me, but it wasn’t something I found, it was something I created myself. The point is, just because you’re doing something now, doesn’t mean it’s what your end all, be all is. There is always your Second Act, and Sweetie Pies is mine.