A Life Worth Letting Go

The definition of “adorn” is “to make more beautiful or attractive”. I purchased the domain “mssworntoadorn” nearly three years ago which is the first platform I used to blog. You’re probably thinking, “shouldn’t she know the meaning of adorn?”, although I’m relearning how magical words are. They have layers which unfold, and when the time is right, reveal their newest and best version to me. Perhaps perception is the most magical. Adorn means something different now than it did three years ago. The definition hasn’t changed, but the meaning is different.

I created this blog several years ago when I was pregnant with our second daughter, June. I spent 17 miserable weeks on bedrest while my toddler ran circles and did cartwheels around me. I desperately needed something for myself at the end of the day other than Netflix. Something I could get lost in while maintaining the dutiful horizontal position. I’d likely already spent hours reading and binging. Now I needed a purge. I needed a place I could dump my static energy. A place I could be my creative self. It turned to be more of an act however than an alignment with self when I began writing. I wrote from behind a curtain attempting to fill a void with what I imagined happiness might look like. Turned out, this wasn’t a purge at all. Instead, I filled my void with things. Clutter. Items that crowded my well-being. I searched for happiness in adornment such as clothing and accessories. The superficial. I fueled the addictive flame of vapidity and consequently despised the person I was at the end of the day. I tried, but I didn’t know how to change her. I didn’t know how to give her purpose.

When I started writing I chose a topic I knew many people were interested in: clothes. I liked them plenty enough that it could be fun, right? It turned out to be shallow and meaningless and instead of lifting me up, it weighed me down. The rat race of collecting more things slowly drained my creativity. Something inside of me ached for more. Or maybe the inner ache was my subconscious trying to forewarn me of what was to come.

I won’t delete old posts here because despite them not being me, they are a part of who I am. They denote a different time in my life: the “before” time. Before June got sick. Before our world was turned completely upside-down. The time I was blissfully and naively dripping with adornments and without a care in the world.

What I have learned is that to make life more beautiful one doesn’t have to adorn themselves. In fact, they should do the opposite. Remove the junk. Filter the nonsense. Clean out the closet. Declutter. Adornment may make one’s life more beautiful in the moment, however it’s all a facade. To make one’s life truly more beautiful you have to look within. Adornments are distractions. They’re fun. They’re flashy. They’re fake.

I have made a new oath out of the old words I used to create this blog. My oath is to continue to chisel the beauty away from the pain, so that the beauty, full of meaning and purpose, becomes my core, and the pain, piece by little dying piece can be left behind.

This is my retake. On life. On living. On loving. On surviving. One second at a time.

Taryn