25/04/2021
life update - these last six months have not been easy. honestly they have been some of the darkest & deeply transformative of my life. something i couldn’t have really fathomed after finding out i had a chronic illness last year, losing my father to cancer the year before & navigating a pandemic. what more could life throw me? the circumstances didn’t really leave me with a choice; i had to embrace change in every aspect of my life. so i put all my belongings in storage, sold my house in LA & moved in with my mom in ojai. i have been caring for her since october, while she went through cancer surgery & now multiple rounds of very aggressive chemo. i’m going to be honest here; some days have been so emotionally excruciating i wake up in shock i am still alive & breathing. i haven’t had the words or energy to share more than this because i’m still very much living it. but i know in my heart there are brighter days ahead. there has to be.
the one thing that has brought me some amount of joy through all this is buying a house on an acre of land here in ojai. the house itself was quite unremarkable, but i immediately fell in love with the multiple mature fruit & oak trees, the view of the mountains in the distance & the potential. i have been in the process of fixing up the backyard & renovating the house for the last few months; something i have no experience with, but man have i learned a lot. a lot the hard way. in fact, practically everything that could go wrong has. i don’t have a contractor or a designer so it’s been a full time job and then some. the house is slowly coming along & i’m hoping to move in sometime in the next month or two. it’s not photogenic quite yet, but it’s a pretty big transformation from where it started & i’d love to share it with you. are you interested in seeing some of the renovation process in stories?