Lauren from This Stuff is Golden came up with this idea and I liked it so much I borrowed it! Here’s her 10 Years in 10 Paragraphs post.

It’s almost a new decade. I wasn’t going to do any of the new-decade things going around, as I’m really not that nostalgic, but I realized I have pretty much grown up since 2010. I was very much a child then, and very much am not now. Here are the highlights of how it all went down.

2010

I started my sophomore year of high school. I was playing flute in band, participating in 4H, and starting to learn how to do my own makeup. This was just after the appearance of acne, so my self-esteem was practically non-existent. I spent a lot of time not liking how I looked. But 2010 wasn’t entirely a year of self-loathing. I loved playing in band and made a lot of good friends there, and I enjoyed 4H speech competitions (and was pretty good at them). This may have been the summer I did 4H sewing camp, which would be the catalyst for my blog, and went to Hershey, Pennsylvania with my church choir.

2011

Junior year. More 4H, more band, more choir trips. More acne and the same amount of self-esteem. My high school years honestly kind of blend together in my mind. I had the same group of friends throughout them, and the same extracurriculars. I had taken the ACT at least twice by this point, so I was starting to think about college. Looking back, I thought a lot more about where I wanted to go than what I wanted to study. Although actually, that reminds me – I wanted to study music, but I got braces around this time. Braces killed my flute embouchure and so music was out as a major. (I would have hated teaching, so this is probably for the best.)

2012

This blog was born! Its very first name was Lazy Bones Refashion, as I had discovered sewing and refashion blogs and wanted to create my own. Refashionista and Katherine from Pillows a la Mode were two of my main inspirations. Katherine followed me faithfully here, which encouraged me to keep this up. (Sadly, she died in 2016. I never met her, but I know she impacted many people in the blog community.) This was also the year I got my first job, at a frozen yogurt shop. And though this blog started as Lazy Bones Refashion, it didn’t last long. (The post was written in 2015, but the name changed in 2012.)

2013

This was a big year! I graduated from high school, spent the summer working at an Italian ice place, and started college. I met my group of college friends pretty much immediately upon moving into my dorm, including the man I ended up marrying. I started working as a student assistant in the IT department of the business building at my school, which was a horrible job in the moment but set me up well for the work world. Freshman year was so much fun, and the beginning of building my self-confidence back up once I realized my friends liked me regardless of whether or not I had on makeup. (Crazy how that works, right?) This was also the year I started losing my Christianity, but I didn’t really talk about it for a long time. Here’s a post I wrote about my dorm room. It was written in 2015, but it’s a really nice recap.

2014

I finished up freshman year and started sophomore year. My roommate and I decided over the summer to move into an on-campus apartment instead of the dorms (great decision). Dorm life was nice, but one year was good enough for me. I also started my career in the financial industry during the summer of 2014. Bouncing between bank branches all summer was how I learned my way around my sprawling hometown. I think this is the year I also decided to add a Spanish major to my business degree.

2015

After the spring semester in 2015, I spent a week in Costa Rica in a Spanish immersion program. That one month did more for my Spanish than the years of Spanish classes I already had under my belt. I also learned to be a little more outgoing from that, as I was in the country alone. I ended up spending the last half of my trip with a woman named Francis. I’m not sure what she’s doing now, but I learned a lot from her (and hope she’s doing well). I had my first several drinks in Costa Rica (besides that one sip of champagne freshman year). Don’t tell my parents. This was also the year I had to decide on a concentration within my business major. I chose Marketing, which has honestly worked out pretty well. And I embraced my non-Christianity, writing this post about not praying which is still one of my most popular posts to date.

2016

I took a couple of summer classes in 2016 in order to graduate on time. Because of this, I had to quit my nice bank job I had been doing during the summers and work the dreaded retail. I worked at Sears and I lasted one month. I had originally planned on staying in my college town and working the entire summer, but I could not take it. Once my summer classes ended, I quit my job and went home. (I was honestly close to getting fired anyway, since I wasn’t about to sell anyone a Sears credit card.) When I went back for the fall semester, I started applying for “real” jobs because the career center said it was a good idea to start super early. I don’t know if it was or not, because it was really demoralizing. Half the employers weren’t ready to hire yet, and half I just wasn’t qualified for. I got a lot of practice writing cover letters, though, and got several interviews so it wasn’t a complete waste.

2017

College graduation! Engagement! Marriage! A lot happened in 2017. It was a very stressful year, honestly. I still had not found a job by the time I graduated, so I kept lowering and lowering my standards until I found a job doing the same bank-type work I had been doing as a summer job. I moved in with my then-fiance to a new city (where he had thankfully found a job). Neither of our parents were thrilled with us since we weren’t married yet, so that didn’t help. And I had never planned so much as a birthday party when we started planning the wedding, and we were doing it long distance. But we weren’t doing it alone; both of our families probably did more than we did. And the wedding was beautiful, and then we got to go to San Diego for a week for our honeymoon. This was also the first year I spent Christmas away from my family, which was weird but still good.

2018

I moved from a front-line role into marketing at my job, which came with its own challenges, but ones I’m much more equipped to deal with. This was a settling-in year, unwinding from all the changes that 2017 brought. I didn’t realize how stressful that year had been until I was able to relax into a new routine. My husband and I started cooking like adults. We replaced my first car with a new-to-us one. We saved aggressively for a home and went to dozens of open houses for fun. I also decided to go back to Christianity, and we started going to church again. (This has been an ongoing thing though; maybe I’ll update on that if anyone is interested.) Finally, this blog went through a name change once again.

2019

And here we are. We bought a house and adopted two cats immediately. We spent a lot of this year on house-related activities like getting a new roof, buying new furniture, and cooking in a kitchen that isn’t the size of a closet. I got a real office space at work instead of working at a desk in a hallway (not as bad as it sounds). My sister moved back home due to a job change and my brother graduated high school and went off to Marine boot camp. And I’ve renewed my enthusiasm for blogging after writing mostly about books for about a year.

2020

I’m excited for the future. I’m in a good place emotionally, mentally, financially. I want to continue to do more at work, and I’d like to volunteer or give more than I do. I’d like to get involved in a church, or at least meet a group of friends here where I live. I’d like to brush my Spanish back up, get my flute back out, get my sewing machine going again. I’d like to do some home improvements and take a nice vacation. I’m sure not all of that will happen next year, but I’m so lucky to be where I’m at now, and I’m looking forward to the future.