Last Day at 31

There's about ten minutes left of my most awesome year so far. I have to be very honest here, I feel like I made comparable leaps and bounds the last 12 months than the last 10 years. I actually felt myself stretch and get uncomfortable until I got used to it, and suddenly, I grew, noticeably, incrementally.

I am feeling a bit sad leaving 31. I have a fear that I will never be able to top this year. But another side of me is also saying, no, this is where it starts. This is where you woke up, and this is you stretching your limbs. Yet far to go, Liv.

I just want to be able to look back, 5 or 10 years from now and remind myself that for better or worse, I was alive the last night I was 31 years old. And I was also grateful and hopeful and I can feel my core stabilizing again.

And to wrap up my year of awesome adventures, I listed a few accomplishments I want to remember. To remind myself I am not a sell-out. To affirm that though I still daydream, I am also living my life as well.

Liv's Top 15 Awesome Memories the year she was 31:

1. Built my first snowman in negative degrees Birmingham.
2. That godawful leg cramp i got in the middle of Harrod's and people started looking at me funny and I started thinking how embarassing it would be if I try to walk and fell down. So I whipped out my cellphone and pretended to be debating with someone about which souvenir to get. For a full ten minutes til i recovered. Gimme that Oscar.
3. Took to the London Underground like a duck to water.
4. Climbed a mountain-sized hill in the Mongolian countryside. In freezing weather.
5. Trekked barefoot to a sacred spring in a hidden valley in Mongolia.
6. Lived in a ger for a week without taking a full bath.
7. Closed my eyes and sent a prayer to heaven before opening my mouth while a strange man put ceremonial pan (sweets wrapped in nganga leaves)in Islamabad.
8. Saw the Gobi desert with my own eyes (from the plane, but still). There's something very satisfying about seeing something you've only read in your textbooks in grade school.
9. Survived the chaos of a particular country's strange airport. Di ba, Jay Ancheta?
10. Learned smatterings of 2 languages (Mongolian and Pakistani)
11. Wrote 2 children's book which came out in HaloHalo Books.
12. Illustrated 2 children's books for other people.
13. Saw a wolf, a tapir, a marmot, a falcon and real elephants. God's strange creatures strewn across 3 continents.
14. Had less severe depressive episodes.
15. And the hardest achievement yet --- kept the Faith.

Lord, I wish I could surgically incise my heart, just so I could hold it up to you as proof of how filled with gratitude and joy it is over your so many blessings. And You are also the reason why I leave my fear of never having this much fun in any age again. Because I trust, that with You, the best is always yet to come.

Goodnight one and all!