gratitude.

Thanksgiving is this Thursday, and I am going up North tomorrow. I am excited, but also bittersweetly sad. My aunt has end-stage cancer and now weighs under 100 pounds (and is about my height, 5'6", maybe an inch or two taller), so it's not looking good. My grandparents are getting older - at my age, I am very, very lucky to have three living grandparents - and I don't get to come up North as often as I'd like. I'm excited to see my nephew, who always brings a smile to my face and joy to my heart.

This year has been an eventful year - more so than I would have hoped - but this Thanksgiving, I am very thankful for many things. I am thankful for my health. After two foot surgeries in eight months, I am finally starting to feel like my foot is going to be okay, and I am starting to walk pretty well again. I am thankful for my family, for all of their help and encouragement and support. I'm thankful that I took the risk and followed my heart, committing to writing, even though it scares the hell out of me most days. I am thankful for the family I babysit for down here, who have welcomed me into their family over the past 2 years and bring a smile to my face and make me laugh. I am thankful for friends who remind me of all the goodness out there in the world. I am thankful to all my mentors and guides on this path called life, who have encouraged my writing, believed in me, let me make my own mistakes so I could learn, and who have shown me all the possibilities for the future. I am thankful to be alive, because if anything, the past week has shown me that life is truly a gift. I am learning not to put things off until I have a "real" life, and to live in the moment without regret. This year has been hard physically, emotionally and spiritually, but as the writer Audre Lorde once wrote, "But of course it is out of Chaos that new worlds are born."