I was sitting at the kitchen table on a sunny late-summer afternoon, feeding my son lunch, when I was overcome with an amazing feeling of contentment. As Sebastian peeled the turkey and cheese off his sandwich and shoved them into his mouth, dropping some turkey onto the floor in the process, he looked up at me and grinned.  And I realized that this, right here, is exactly where I want to be. It’s really all I need in life. A loving partner, an adventurous kid, a goofy dog, a cozy home, and some fun experiences are what truly make me happy.

This isn’t turkey, but you get the idea!

Thinking about now, I’m not as surprised as I would have been a few years ago.

I’ve been trying really hard for some time to clean out my closet. At the beginning of the year, I went through a minimalist phase — which I would still like to continue to do but have admittedly fallen off the wagon — and got rid of so. much. stuff. It felt good and I couldn’t wait to get rid of more. But then life happens, as usual, and I haven’t kept up with it as well as I would have liked. Each day I take a long, hard look at my closet and try to grab at least one thing that I know I can part with. It’s hard because I like my clothes, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought them, but some of them just don’t excite me anymore.

This is as boho as I get. This skirt is about 4 years old and a tad too big.

Then I read this blog post by the amazing Alissa of The Adored Life about how she got rid of half the stuff in her closet. She describes how the woman her closet reflected wasn’t the woman she sees in herself because her clothes were from a different point in her life. This resonated with me SO. HARD.

It’s been raining a lot in North Carolina these last few weeks. Sometimes it’s a short summer storm but other times we’ve gotten it all: thunder, lightning, heavy rain, and even hail. Our local meteorologist made the comment one evening during his weather forecast that the purpose of a thunderstorm is to regulate the Earth’s temperature throughout the levels of the atmosphere so that the temps even out, achieving greater balance. This little nugget of information is really resonating with me lately.

I grew up in a small southern town so it’s probably not hard to imagine little, adolescent me dreamily scribbling the last name of some boy next to my first name inside the cover of a 3-ring binder. At one point I was convinced I was going to become Mrs. Nikki Samuel. Fast forward almost 10 years later when I had an actual ring on my finger (not by Mr. Samuel, of course) and I was struggling with that whole concept. I’ve come a long way since those adolescent days and had researched the origins of marriage and didn’t like what I’d found (business dealings where daughters were “property”, religious institutions with strict rules that included discrimination, etc.) and, quite frankly, I wasn’t having any of that. But I digress.

From the moment we got engaged, I knew I didn’t want to change my name completely. My final decision came down to hyphenating it or keeping it just the same.  In the end I chose not to change at all, for a number of reasons, although part of me still thinks hyphenating would have been a fine idea because, in that way, I would have been adding to my identity, not changing it entirely.