Lately

I've been really missing my girlfriends. It comes in spurts and when I feel this way, it really just sucks. I have great friends here and am very excited and glad to have met them but sometimes all I really want and all I really need are my girls.

It's funny, when I was living in NYC single and pounding the pavement in pursuit of my acting or the next fun party, I was always yearning for a boyfriend. A man to love me unconditionally and look at me and just know that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. I wanted that so badly and many days I would mope around sad that he hadn't arrived or upset that the guy I was seeing ended up an asshole or weird or just not right for me.

The grass is always greener I suppose. Here I am in a relationship with someone who says he wants to spend the rest of his life with me- though time will have to tell on that front- and surrounded by my incredible family...only now it is my girlfriends that I miss so much. Here, somedays I mope around, now yearning for a dinner and wine with my girls.

To me it is an important reminder to always try (we are not perfect and are certainly allowed to get down in the dumps once in a while!!!) to appreciate what you have in your life now. To focus on the positive and not on what's missing...because once you get what you thought was missing there will just be something else that you miss again.

This year has been a great eye opener for me in terms of this. I feel most of my life I have been walking around, working extremely hard (often to the point of exhaustion) trying to create a life where I have EVERYTHING. The perfect job, the perfect relationship, my family and friends all in one place, nature and a city, city and some nature...and after this year of great changes it suddenly dawned on me...

There is no absolute, there is no perfect, in life you can't always have it all. Sure you can be happier with some things than others but life isn't perfect. It's messy. It's a lifetime of just figuring it out as you go. It's messy. And the messier it is, the more that you are risking and stretching and trying and growing and learning.

I wish I had learned this in my early twenties, despite many people's efforts to tell me so :)

But then again, i'm still just figuring it out as I go along.