TWENTY TWENTY

Hello

I want to wish you all a very HAPPY NEW YEAR full of health, love, and success.

Every December, when the year is coming to an end, I write down my New Year’s resolutions. I find it helps me start the new year more focused and centered on the things I find I need to work on, be it on a personal or professional level. This year I’ve made working on the blog one of them, so don’t fret, I won’t let you or myself down.

I’m very excited to see what 2020 will bring since this past year felt like a literal rollercoaster. All of the seasons were so different that it almost felt like two completely separate years. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one to experience such a drastic turn of events between the first and second half of the year.

My year started off on a high, everything was perfect and I was over the moon. I had everything I needed and wanted, and I felt very fortunate. Soon enough though things started going awry in my professional life, which quickly started affecting all of the other aspects of my existence. It was a downward spiral and it was going quickly in the direction of crash and burn. I thought: “I need a change, and I need it NOW.”

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I decided that the best option would be to take a sabbatical year away from home (I know my REAL home is in Puerto Rico, but I have now realised that London is my second HOME) to go work for a different company. I thought that a different city with a different atmosphere and a different company would be just what the doctor ordered to make me find my love and passion for my job again. Even though I knew it would be difficult because my relationship would now be long-distance, I thought I’d give change a try. So here I am, a girl from the little island of Puerto Rico in the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, making history but feeling anything but legendary. It has proven to be an extraordinary experience, but it has helped me learn what I truly value most in life.

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What I have realised is that being away from HOME meant being away from everything that I love and care about…I left behind my boyfriend, dogs, friends, and house to have a new life experience. I quickly learned that happiness is where and who you make it with, and that although I’m passionate about what I do for a living I shouldn’t ever sacrifice my joy for it.

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We’re all just trying to do our best, forever reaching for that next goal and that next boost of self-confidence that comes with the feeling of accomplishment, but sometimes we have to stop in our race to what we have envisioned as so called “success” and be grateful. Grateful to be healthy, to have people by our side who love and support us unconditionally, a home, a job (that not only pays the rent, but that we enjoy and are good at), and realise that the joy we’ve been trying so hard to find and have worked so hard for has been there staring at us right in the face all along…we were just too blind to see it.

I leave you with the most important lesson I learned this past year, because it has taken me 29 years to realise it: When you’re fortunate enough to have even some of the things I listed above, you have happiness, you have joy, you are successful. So in this new year promise me you’ll stop looking for what’s already in front of you, and just take life in fully and passionately.

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Until next time,

Adriana xx