How to Build A Life in Twenty Steps

Step one: Move away from your friends and family in search of a new life.

Step two: Move somewhere that you only know two other people.

Step three: Make sure it is a desert and there is no ocean in plain view (like there was in the place you left).

Step four: Buy house randomly next to the most awesome people on the planet except you have never met them so you don’t know they are awesome yet.

Step five: Get pregnant, watch economy crash, endure first summer with 20+ days of 115+ degree temperatures in a house with no insulation.

Step six: Lose house, lose job, keep baby.

Step seven: Have son, beam with pride, realize you didn’t really know this kind of love until now.

Step eight: Get postpartum anxiety, rely on aforementioned awesome neighbors and bring your parents out for a month, realize you don’t know jack.

Step nine: Move to a scorpion infested rental, pay bills off unemployment checks and find husband new job, start working for your church, get pregnant again.

Step ten: Enjoy little moments with your husband and son and realize that life isn’t a house or a job or anything material, life is not stuff.

Step eleven: Live off less, sell off things, buy only what you need (i.e. food, diapers and cookies).

Step twelve: Have daughter, beam with pride, realize your heart can expand even more though you didn’t think that was humanly possible.

Step thirteen: Get postpartum again, rely on friends, neighbors and family, realize your community is growing from those first two people into a village of warriors that support you during the toughest times, cry a lot, pray a lot, express gratitude…a lot.

Step fourteen: Join CrossFit, get strong, do things you’ve never done, awaken your own warrior within.

Step fifteen: Serve, volunteer, give back to the community that has supported you since you began this journey.

Step sixteen: Get stung by scorpion, no really, get stung by scorpion, realize that after all the years of waiting to be stung by a scorpion in the desert that the scorpion ain’t got nuthin’ on your journey now, trash talk said scorpion, then smash scorpion with a gold Haviana flip flop, ladybugs, bees, butterflies, myriad beetles are all fine, but all bets are off with the demon spawn that are scorpions, smash that sucker!

Step seventeen: move from scorpion infested rental, keep friends, add friends, get rid of perfection, get rid of comparisons, get rid of people who bring you down, add people who bring value to your life and encourage you.

Step eighteen: Give grace first to self, then to others, slow down time, speak kindly, have patience, turn forty, be funny.

Step nineteen: Use everything from the second you entered this world to this very moment to turn your life into gold, pure gold.

Step twenty: Don’t take anything for granted.

I don’t know, but it worked for me. Worth a shot. Build your life and don’t ever look back.

Do you hear me? Build it and never look back.