As I stumble over myself trying to come up with the perfect words for this blog post I cant help but become more frozen. The pressure of curating images, and meaningful words seems to have gotten the best of me.

Heavy thoughts cloud my mind, all of life’s goodness and troubles compounding my heart. Seemingly all at once, I tend to fight the waking moments, finding myself in a battle once again over staying underneath the covers hidden when it gets hard. This time the battle hasn’t one; I have the many tools to not covert back to old habits that once destroyed me. Even if it’s the constant reminders of the three brave souls that came from me, the children are always all right; it’s the parents you have to watch out for.

You probably have no idea what I’m talking about; I guess that’s okay. Maybe you get it. Maybe not. Anxiety and depression is a bitch. They are just symptoms of habits you teach yourself to try to stay afloat in the scary world. The thing is since they are just symptoms I can tell them to go away now, and they aren’t needed anymore. Clearly it’s a battle, but more importantly, a battle I can come out on top of. The problem with a lifetime of experiencing trauma is sometimes it does come up. So I chose to meet it, share it instead of tucking it away in a tiny package and pretend it didn’t happen this week. Its not like I fell off the wagon, I guess what I’m trying to say is its just where I was at, that my friends is the truth. I won’t get into the details because it’s not about the details. It isn’t the time or place and I’m not paying you to listen to those boring stories of my traumatic childhood. My goal was to give you a lovely story, a handful of images and a recipe. That is the purpose of this blog right? See, what I mean is things aren’t always, as they seem. Sometimes we even choose to see what we want, that could make our real lives much easier to handle. Or the social media easier to handle. What do you think?

Now where I am today, not yesterday. Today, I feel clear, I am remembering all the new things I taught myself and realized that my shield can go back into the closet until I need to use it again. The world isn’t a scary place and the 4-year-old girl instead me, well she will be okay to. Ramble over.

No recipes to share, but below are some images of my 3-year-old Stella Baking her little heart out.

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–Nicole