Oh my gahhhhhhhh!!!!  Do you guys remember us!?!

Happy New Year!!!!  It’s Sara and I’m so glad to be writing again.   A big piece of me has been missing since we stopped sharing our lives with y’all.  I really hadn’t been feeling like myself until recently. Writing is something that I am meant to do and not only that, I NEED TO DO IT.

Somewhere along the way,  Jenny and I lost our way with the blog and our journey.  The first year was amazing. But, it was all too much, we were spiraling and didn’t see the big brick wall coming.  We were biting off more than we could chew and my obsessive, blind drive and uber controlling ways ruined it.  I sucked all the fun out of Meatballs for me and Jenny.  I turned a really fun and positive thing in to an unpaid job from hell!  I was addicted to the progress like a big bag of black tar heroine (is that how you buy heroine, a bag?! Bad example!) It felt like we weren’t even friends anymore. (That’s dramatic, but we weren’t even hanging out anymore)  So when we stopped, we were exhausted and we needed to find our friendship again.  Which thank goodness we did right away.  #sorryjenny #loveyou #meatballsforlife

I also realized that I needed some privacy.  We were sharing EVERYTHING! Our bodies, and our lives.  And that is what made the blog so great, so vulnerable and so relatable.  But it was also so hard to have anything that was sacred or just ours.  My pendulum swings wide, so I went from describing exactly how my then boyfriend dumped me in the middle of the night over text message, to dating my boyfriend for a year and a half without telling almost anyone. #balance I was (am) still grieving my sweet Grandma Apple.  I was struggling with comfort eating, getting sick all the damn time again, learning I had a mold allergy, getting my tonsils out, I was trying to learn how to have feelings, learning how to cope from childhood trauma from the tornado, etc…it was a lot and it was all coming up and bubbling over at once. #breakdown That takes us to 2017!

Last year has had so many highlights but it was honestly one of the toughest, most challenging ones I’ve experienced. Remember when I fell through that porch at our pal Katie’s wedding, well that was the beginning of a long, drawn out spiral into debilitating pain and ultimately surgery for a torn meniscus and a longer recovery period than I was expecting.

And you guys aren’t even going to believe what happened.  I GAINED A LITERAL TON OF WEIGHT.  I blew right past my highest weight and didn’t even look back.   My career is physical.  The pain started in November of ’16.  I did some holistic work and got to feeling a little better for about 4 months on and off.  But then it was downhill from there.  I was just surviving each day, which is super fucking depressing.  You get in to this cycle of I’m in pain so I can’t work out or I’ll hurt myself which makes me sad, and I can’t go grocery shopping so I’ll order some takeout and gain more weight, which puts more pressure on my knee… I spent a lot of time crying, taking anything that might take the edge off, trying to not move if I didn’t have to just so I wouldn’t miss work and spending a lot of time alone.

My high level of positivity is telling me to remind you all that I have an amazing family and the best group of close knit friends and I career that I absolutely love and that SO SO SO many great things have happened since we last spoke. I have so much to be grateful for!!!  I feel truly connected.

I have learned so much about myself and my needs.  I am finally feeling better than I have in a long time.  I had really unrealistic expectations #imaginethat of how long I would need to heal and how much I needed to help myself heal…that the surgery was only a bandaid if I didn’t start advocating for myself with myself. I started off December with a candida cleanse.  My body and mind are super sensitive to candida which feeds off of sugar…and guys, did I tell you how hard I fell off the wagon!?  To quote my adorable mother, “I started feeling like every meal needed to end with a dessert!”

The cleanse was a set of supplements taken daily and then a strict Whole 30 (no dairy, no sugar-even fruit, no grains, no soy, etc) style eating plan so as to starve out the candida #yeasty’all for about 3 weeks.  And guess what guys!?  There is fucking sugar in EVERYTHING!  Did you know that the all the breakfast meat on the Whole Foods hot bar has sugar in it and the grilled chicken nuggets at Chick-fil-a have sugar in them?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?  This was a turning point for me. I couldn’t rely on my little cheats that prevent me from making a real change.  It forced me to get back in the kitchen…which I love cooking as much as I love writing.

I mean, y’all, it was all so good!  How do we forget these things!?!? During this time I had an education team dinner, work potluck, family Christmas party, management team lunch, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations!

Because who doesn’t decide to make a huge life change during the holidays?  But you guyyyyyyyysssss…I did it.  I made it through all of these hurdles thanks to some focus on my part and the support of my tribe and reminded myself that I am a gah damn Boss.  Queen Sey (did you see what I did there?!) is back and humbled. I’m ready to learn all the lessons that the universe has to teach me.  I’m ready to really do this differently, with patience and acceptance.  Thanks for being a friend!  Thanks for still wanting to hear from us.  We need y’all and we’re sorry that we ghosted, but as you can read…we needed the hiatus to find ourselves…oh and for Jenny to have another sweet little girl! #nbd#babytatum

Love love love you. Hello 2018. Looking forward to chatting again real soon.

Xoxo,

Your loving meatballs