was it ever a question that I love animals? here’s a snippet of my summer. animals galore. fur, feather, scales, hair + everything in between!
four highland/highland mix cows. a mama + her three babes 🥰
eleven chickens, with a new egg layer as of yesterday! 🤗
four cats - two of them tiny baby kittens that I can’t get enough of. 😭
two big white fluffball dogs - and of course Sammy boy!
a crested gecko named goobie that always makes me laugh - and his unphotographed siblings (a bearded dragon named Waffles, and two more that I forgot 😜) not to mention my zoo 🤪
usually with simple + beautiful photos like this, I like to caption it with something meaningful. some sort of philosophical Andi-rant or life lesson or optimistic outlook. but this one is different. this one calls for a little self reflection.
three years ago I was struggling HARD. like, harder than most people know. I was driving the struggle bus while towing another, bigger struggle bus that was filled with tinier, but heavy struggle busses. i think you’re understanding, right? it’s not something I wanted to burden my friends or the outside world with because I was legit terrified of scaring people away. I had just “scared” the man I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with away, and losing anyone else was a fucking terrifying thought.
you may have noticed I used quotes around scared. if you’re wondering why, it’s because I want to call attention to the irony of my thoughts at that point in time.
you see, my brain had somehow mapped this idea that I was “too much”. I don’t really know what exactly I was too much of, but all of my thoughts had convinced me that it was THEE REASON that my life suddenly being flipped upside down. (I’d like to take a minute just sit right there….any Fresh Prince fans just get that jingle stuck in their heads right now? no? alrightythen, I’ll carry on.) maybe I loved too much, maybe I nagged too much. perhaps I was too fat, or too lazy, or too bossy, or too boring. perhaps I wanted too much out of life, or perhaps I was too passionate about my job, my life, my future….I spent the better part of three years literally going over ridiculous things like that, wondering what it was about me that caused this. how could I have done anything differently to change the outcome?
what I’ve since been learning - and I say learning because I’m not done yet - is that there really is no such thing as TOO much of anything about you that can cause someone to up and leave. or cause someone to ignore you. or cause someone to stop being your friend. whatever has happened, or is happening, or will happen to you that is similar to my story (if you are a new friend or don’t remember, my fiancé called off my engagement (CONT IN COMMENTS...)
