2021: Largely A Continuation of 2020 with Some New Curveballs

Many people (myself included) went into 2021 cautiously optimistic that anything had to be better than the dumpster fire of 2020, and I think for most, it just ended up being more of the same. 2021 was a rollercoaster of false hope as we yearned for normalcy amongst setbacks, and new waves. Two steps forward, two steps back. Rinse, repeat.

Without going into too much detail, it always seemed like there was a constant stream of tragedy and trauma on the periphery, never directly affected me or my inner circle but just enough death, illness, and unfortunate incidents in my outer orbit to serve as a constant reminder that the world is still in a woefully dangerous state of unbalance.

As a Libra, I’m acutely tuned in to energy and crave equilibrium and maybe it’s all the dystopian thrillers I watch, but at the sake of sounding dramatic, for better or worse, it feels like the world is being torn in two very different directions with less and less hope of meeting in the middle. Each day we seemingly inch closer to the brink of something major as cancel culture and the woke police become common lingo and a part of everyday life.

I didn’t have it nearly as bad as most and continue to count my blessings, but am left constantly wondering if we’ll ever get back to the blissfully oblivious state we were in two years ago, at the peak of our careers, travel easy, breezy without much thought, and our biggest fear the fear of our own fear of failure, not a global pandemic and world completely out of our control. But all that largely remains and unknown. Until there is a bit more clarity, here are my personal life updates from another year I never saw coming:

Travels

It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since I dusted off my passport as international travel still feels like the risk is greater than the reward, which kills me since I crave the thrill of the unknown, experiencing new cultures, and it’s where I feel the most alive. After going months without hopping on a plane, September took me on 10+ surprisingly painless domestic flights with three solid weeks of back-to-back trips, some business, some pleasure, and some obli-cations as a slew of conferences and weddings quickly threw me back into the groove of life on the road and having life down to one suitcase.

Do I miss traveling full-time? Yes and no. I’ve always said, it’s an exhausting lifestyle but going to an 8-5 is equally exhausting in it’s own way. I’ve always wished I could be on the road half the time or every other weekend, but it never works out like that. I still love getting to see new places and new sides to old favorites, but given the times, it’s still fairly frustrating with each state/city/country having completely different rules and regulations in regard to how they handle the C-word. Whether travel is worth it to you right now is largely a personal decision, but I will say none of these trips felt like a vacation and we were never 100% relaxing as you’re constantly having to research guidelines, double check what’s open, and just all around preplan a lot more.

With that being said, here are some of the standouts from 2022:

New Orleans 

Dan and I went to Nola twice this year, once for V-day / Mardi Gras, which conveniently fell on the same weekend and again for Halloween. It’s quickly becoming one of our favorite places, which we’ll be returning to again real soon. We loved Yardi Gras, their C-friendly version of Mardi Gras, where everyone decorates their yards with floats on a bizarre booze-free weekend on Bourbon Street, which was the complete opposite of the rowdy, raucous Halloween crew where revelers were back in full force and felt like a bit of sensory overload since it’d be so long since we were used to crowds.

Oklahoma

I went on my second trip to Oklahoma, and I fell even more in love with the state. It truly is one of those sleeper places with a little bit of everything yet still under the radar enough that it hasn’t blown up yet. I found amazing floating cabins (yes, landlocked in the middle of the country), Blake Shelton’s bar, waterfalls, and a drive-through safari so wild I left with some unique souvenirs (horn marks on my car that was just a little too close to Tiger King for comfort), but nonetheless memorable.

East Coast Road Trip

With my brother getting married in Cape Cod, the newly retired parentals and I spent a week traversing the east coast and checked five states we’d never been to off our bucket list – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. It was a week of beaches, mountains, city, and, country as we ate our weight in lobster rolls and chowda on planes, trains, boats, and automobiles. I loved Maine and need way more time going up and down the coast, and if I retire to life in a lighthouse, don’t be surprised. Newport Rhode Island was another surprising favorite, but who wouldn’t love their mega-mansions on the crashing waves?

If you’re keeping track, I now have just four states left on my US bucket list – Delaware, Mississippi, New Jersey, and North Dakota, so if you have any burning desire to go to one of those places in the near future, I’m your girl.

Work

Work undoubtedly had the most significant changes for me this year. Between my blog traffic going to 💩(thanks Covid), influencer still a dirty word, all my editorial contacts leaving or being let go, and my full-time job becoming a little more full-time, I felt like I lost my identity a bit. Every day I was coming home exhausted and finding it extremely hard to find the motivation to blog, freelance or do anything outside the 8-5.

Thanks to one of the million conferences I went to (SATW), we got to speed date with the editors of major publications and I’m happy to share I landed not one but two of my dream bylines which will hopefully be out in early 2022 (2/2 on pitching this month — that’s a pretty good batting average), which temporarily reenergized me to make that a priority again. One of those has been my #1 goal ever since learning I can never write from the New York Times travel section (they have this stupid rule that if you’ve ever taken a comped trip, there’s no way you could possibly be unbiased), but hearing how excited this new editor was about my ideas motivated me that I could make legitimate travel writing a regular thing again if I wanted to (jury’s still out on the work-life balance). I was also recently a guest on a fairly high-profile podcast talking about my love for a certain city which will also be out soon. I’m excited to dabble more with some of these newer media forms next year.

Beyond that, it was my first full year in Beaumont at a full-time job. I finally felt like I was getting in a groove and finding my footing with some semblance of normalcy, until everything changed. We killed it with Artaco and Beaulympics, two new festivals we hosted from the ground up, and were really changing the tide on a tough year. We launched two new foodie passports, a geocaching tour, and numerous other initiatives. I spoke at a conference, we won awards, you could really feel the momentum shifting and people getting excited about things we were doing, which is exactly why, seemingly out of nowhere, my job completely changed. People took notice of what we were doing and asked us to do it on a much larger scale.

Following the Parks and Rec playbook, I was tasked with leading Communications for the entire city. As in not just working for the CVB but helping 38 departments and creating a division from scratch. So a few months ago, I pivoted from the happy hoorah of talking food and travel all the time to learning everything there is to know about municipalities, getting tuned in to local politics, and learning how things like the water and sewer departments work enough to be able to explain them to others. I say I’ve basically become a translator of complex engineering concepts with the goal of making a normal person understand and care about how and why various aspects of the city affect them.

While it may sound a lot more boring on the surface, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how much I like it. It’s an interesting new challenge — the city does way more for people than an average citizen would possibly know, and it’s been cool to get to see the inner-workings of everything from the Municipal Airport to 911 Dispatch.

There are still a lot of unknowns, and it’s been a complete rollercoaster from the logistics of moving and remodeling an office to hiring and training a team. But if I ever have a bad day, I can just pop by Animal Care to cuddle some puppies. I’m sure there will be many more updates on this front next year, as I plan to stay here at least five years to see it through, and then we’ll see where the wind takes us.

Personal 

I certainly couldn’t have predicted having deep morality discussions with friends, but it’s been a year of hard conversations and hard moments, interspersed with happy moments and major milestones. My bro and Dan’s sisters got married and it seems like everything that had gotten covid cancelled was back on the books all in the span of a few months (a September to remember).

And while we love our house, we learned the joys of homeownership first-hand, from plumbing woes to the HVAC going out and not having AC the hottest week of the year. Most recently, a surprise pipe burst underneath our house, which destroyed our beautiful hardwood and turned into a 20k emergency project I wasn’t planning on doing this month…or ever. It truly is always something, and lesson learned: always have insurance and a warranty.

It’s been a year of highs and lows, and honestly, I can’t even predict what 2022 will bring, but if we’re following the same path of the roaring 20s, we still have a few more years of strife before the Golden era, and then hopefully this all becomes a distant memory. 

I wouldn’t call myself an optimist, more a realist (and definitely subscribe to the party of logic and reason), but each new day does reaffirm the hope that we’re closer to the end of this than the beginning. And if there’s anything this year has taught us, it’s don’t wait to do something because you may not get the chance.

So cheers to taking risks, living in the moment, and making the best of this crazy thing we call life. Give me an update on how this year was for you when you get the chance.