Published!

1. A few weeks ago, I shared a post about my journey to improving my mental health. I’m still receiving such beautiful emails from you all and I can’t thank you enough for opening up to me about something so personal. Reading some of your messages saying that you’ve since taken the leap and found therapists of your own is just…man. It means a lot. So thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who commented, liked, shared, sent your significant others to therapy after reading it, ALL of it.

Ok but the point of this post is to share a direct result of an action I took shortly after I began my therapy sessions. I’d spent an evening evaluating and reevaluating the things that meant the most to me – the things I could envision myself doing for the next several years  – and narrowing them down to three choices. The task was to create goals within those three realms and set out to achieve them in no particular order. The theory: as long as I’m moving towards something, I’m doing it right. So one of the goals I set was to have my work published in a local print magazine. At the time, this seemed really big and scary and impossible because most things seem really big and scary and impossible to me. This will likely never change. All I’m hoping to do is learn to push past the perceived impossible and that’s what I did the day I emailed Houston Family Magazine and asked for my work to be featured in their publication. I was at The Dunlavy eating avocado toast, drinking a decaf coffee (hey, Kendra) and staring at the absolutely gorgeous surroundings. I was feeling good. I sent the email. I didn’t care if I never heard back from them (and I didn’t hear back for 2 months). I’d done a thing that I couldn’t bring myself to do just a month before because the fear of being told that my work wasn’t good enough – that I wasn’t good enough – wouldn’t allow me to.

So now it’s two weeks ago, and I receive an email from HFM asking me to send outdoor/camping photos. I send a over a shoot that I’d done for a clothing company. The editor picks one but it’s of ONE twin. Had this been a quarter-page photo deep inside the magazine, it may not have been a problem. But this photo of my ONE twin was going to be on the cover. I was so very happy and so very sad because YAY! I’d done it! and BOO! I couldn’t do it. I cried a little bit, cursed my luck, and prepared to send the email that would burn that bridge forever. After a lengthy 36 hours, she emailed a proof of what would be the cover featuring BOTH of my beautiful baby boys. And here it is. I’ve never Tootsie Rolled so hard in my life.

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