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Welcome to this new Gratitude Friday! Feel free to share with me your (partial or full) gratitude moments in the comments; that way I can hold joy for you ✿ (you know that makes me happy to make you happy).

This week has been good. And to me, it says a lot. I want to remember all the things, small and big, that create these feelings of being content. Content with myself. Content with my life. I use to see contentment as a negative feeling. Why? Probably because I associated this with giving up.

I am doing my best to use this push from Effy to blog every day this month.
September is my birthday month and for once, I am tackling it differently.
I really hope you’ll find nuggets of interesting things in my words and in what I share. I love reading your comments.
Thank you for being here.

Yesterday (the 20th) was my birthday (even though I was born in a different timezone, which gives me two birthdays).
Pierre, my brother-in-law, is here for one more week. My husband, Anthony, took this week off from work so we could spend it together.

My type of celebration

For my birthday, I wanted to be close to the ocean and in nature so we drove to Vancouver to have a long nice walk along the Sea Wall. If you are not familiar with Vancouver, the Sea Wall is a road where bikes/rollers/pedestrians can be. It is around Stanley Park and the total loop is about 8.5 km. We did not do it all because it was started to be late for lunch (the girls are out of school at 2:55 pm, and it’s about an hour drive from the city to home) but we walked a good 6km.

You might already know that my favourite food is Japanese cuisine in general. After fighting and arguing, my husband and I settled down on having lunch at Gojiro Ramen, in downtown Vancouver (a full article is coming to my other website, Nova’s Kitchen).
I have been craving tsukemen for a while now. Tsukemen are the same chewy noodles as used for ramen. However, the broth is on the side and you dip them in it. I ordered the tori karaage tsukemen, so it came with fried chicken. Everything was so tasty! It satisfied my craving. Now, I need to find a recipe for the broth so I can make it at home.

Once home, I baked myself my favourite brownies. I am VERY picky when it comes to brownies, so now that I have found a recipe I love, I just use this one and made some variations now and then.

My husband made is cocktails, so delicious! And to close the day, we watched Birds Of Prey. I really love this movie…

Understand me better

This is something that I deeply believe is one of my life mission in this incarnation: figuring out who I am at my core. Not just the surface.
I have a weird passion for personality types… Even though these are general character traits, there is always something I can grab to understand myself better. In the MBTI (aka Myers Briggs Type Indicator), I am an INFJ-T. It stands for Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling and Judging; the T stands for Turbulent). It is said to be the rarest personality trait but I come across so many other INFJ women, it’s a little creepy 😉

I love this Youtube channel above and this specific video could help you understand me a little better.

NOTE: This month, I am browsing through all the draft blog posts I have and found this one below. It was written exactly ten years ago to the day. It feels really (really) weird to read those words I have completely forgotten about for so long.

This is so weird how a decade later, I can still somehow relate to what I wrote then. Back to today: now one week away from turning 36. I can’t believe I am now closer to 40 than to 30. For some reason I am trying to understand, my mind is stuck on me being 18. This December will mark having spent half my life with my husband.
When I talk about it to my husband, he suggests it’s because my life drastically changed at that moment. My best friend Cocotte is sharing this feeling as well so we try to decipher the root and why of it together now and then. That’s a story I should talk about with a new therapist (still working on finding someone here as my former therapist can’t work from one Province to another…).

I have a lot of white hair now and I kind of actually really like it. I see them as a sign of growth instead of a passing of time.  Covid or not, death has been on my mind for a while. Not in a morbid kind of way, but in an “I must be prepared to leave this world eventually” fashion. I do not have the ability to know when or how I will die, so my daughters need to know what I want my final stages to be.

My dreams are both the same and different. I am still grateful that my husband and I still love each other dearly, no matter the crashing waves we have survived: at least we are together. My daughters are their own person and what a ride it is to be their Mom! I did not become a psycho-analyst nor a chef. Working in the entertainment industry is still a dream, but I gained experience both on my own and in my recent college studies. I know what my dream career would be, and I am taking steps towards it. But Fear is so big… it makes me procrastinate. Fear paralyzes my actions, and therefore I stall.

It’s okay to evolve.

I have this obsession with storytelling. I don’t know how come it’s been nagging at me, but I can not deny it. Each of my paintings has a story to tell. Some of them are known before I start, some evolve during the creative process, some are whispers in the dark. I have been thinking of combining this and writing for over a decade but the Gremlins keep yelling that 1) who am I to think I could write a book? 2) nobody would even be interested in it, anyway.
But you know what? Fuck this. Because if there is something I have learned in the past ten years is that I am not a fraud. Do I still suffer from imposter syndrome? fuck yes. Does it stop me? Doing my best to go past it.

So who knows, maybe I will put all these stories and images together eventually. Just for the process of it. For me. And for my daughters who are currently craving to know more about who their mother is.

A song for today:

I am doing my best to use this push from Effy to blog every day this month.
September is my birthday month and for once, I am tackling it differently.
I really hope you’ll find nuggets of interesting things in my words and in what I share. I love reading your comments.
Thank you for being here.

Welcome to this new Gratitude Friday! Feel free to share with me your (partial or full) gratitude moments in the comments; that way I can hold joy for you ✿ (you know that makes me happy to make you happy).

This is the last week before life comes back to its “normal”, meaning: back to school for our two daughters.
We moved back to the same city we lived for four years prior to what I now call “Our Québec experiment” so they knew kids etc. My husband and I decided not to continue with the francophone schoolboard. We picked a school that was the right choice for them. Again, I try to focus on the good instead of all the shit our youngest went through.

For this month of September, I want to do my best to bring back my Gratitude Friday Ritual. I hope this will help you as well. knowing that this is not avoiding the truth but that we can still find beauty.

This week, I am thankful for:

• Halsey new album: If I can’t have love, I want power. The songs are just…. and the film she created to accompany was simply beautiful. I am thankful both my daughters went to the theater to experience it with me.
• My husband.
• The conversations with my best friend of 18 years. How she brings the best of me by asking the right questions.
• New books.
• New friends.
• Creative inspiration is making a come back, but I need to take action to meet it halfway.
• Editing videos, even though this is for a new adventure I am starting (or coming back to would be more accurate). If you’re interested, you can check my second youtube channel, Nova’s Kitchen.
• Herbal help for my anxiety and other shit (yes, I am talking about weed).