Thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve y'all! I don't have a new recipe for you today, let's be real- you've got more Thanksgiving recipes than you can possibly cook already I'm sure. I wanted to just write a little blurb about what I'm really thankful for this year. 2012 has by NO means been an easy or overly wonderful year for me. It's been hard, lonely, challenging, and even displaced at times. But 2012 also brought great reflection to my own personal self and helped me really discover who I want to be. Being a military wife can make you feel like you have absolutely no control over your own personal life. My husband tells me when he leaves and for how long, where we'll live for undetermined amounts of time, basically the United States Air Force has full control and I'm just along for the ride. I found myself at times just being my husband's wife, but I often forgot about being ME. It sounds a little silly, how can you lose your own self? But it happened. I lived for my husband but I feel like along the way I stopped living for me and what I truly wanted. When he deployed I found myself totally lost, when the one person you center your life around is gone you're kinda forced to get your own self together again. I started this blog just to share some of my recipes with my faraway friends (when you're military ALL of your friends are faraway at some point) and family. I NEVER expected people from all of the country to find this little site and read my recipes too. Then I logged on one day and saw that a whole ton of people had been reading. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? That was my initial thought, and then I was super excited! Writing has always been a passion of mine, and I couldn't believe people were actually reading what little 'ol me had been writing. Creating new recipes and writing about them became very therapeautic for me. I had something to actually do, something that inspired me and that I was passionate about. I found ME again. The beautiful thing about this little site is that I can write anywhere! For example, I started blogging in Florida over the Summer, I have been writing in Arkansas for the past few weeks, and I am writing to you right now from outside of Chicago, Illinois! Along the road of blogging and cooking and getting back to everything I loved about myself I've found the desire to take much better care of myself- to eat good nutritional foods and to excercise regularly. Those are things I've lacked for YEARS. I feel better than I can remember, I feel like I am taking care of myself first, not just my husband, and you know what? I think he likes me a lot more for it. So what I'm trying to say (far too long winded-ly) is that I'm thankful for YOU, the person reading this right now. I'm thankful for every person who's read any single word I've written on this site. I'm thankful for the kind words people I've never met wrote me while my husband was deployed. I'm thankful for finding something that brings me so much happiness that it inspires me to be a better me. 

I hope you have a wonderful holiday and that you also remember to take the time to think about the things that you're thankful for--- and THANK YOU for reading. :)

xoxox
Brittany