Three years ago, today, Find Joy in Food was born and I published my first post on this blog. For me, that is hard to believe. It was three years ago that I decided I wanted to write, for other people to read. Starting as a food blog, my first posts, probably for the first year, maybe even two years, had titles such as “Cocoa Crisis” or “Pancake Pandemonium”. I thought I wanted to be a food blogger. I thought food was what I would center my life around, maybe forever. I thought I would write about my own food problems, that other people could relate to. I thought I would blog with recipes and pictures. I went through phases of vegetarian, vegan, giving up alcohol, gluten free. I did all of that, and slowly I began transforming my passion from food, to writing for inspiration. Posts took a turn from “Good Morning, Oatmeal” to “My Future, Lost in Translation”. I started seeing life through a larger lens. My viewfinder went from how to live healthy through a black and white vision of nutrition and what to and what not to put in my body, to a larger image of reflecting colors, all shapes and sizes. I realized I wanted to embrace life in a different way, and I wanted to bring people with me, and carry them through a positive light. I began to learn what my passions were. Food, traveling, photographs and writing were personal, but not as personal as my growing desire to change people lives for the better. I realized that I wanted to relate and I wanted people to relate to me. I realized that in this crazy big world, we are actually so simple and tiny too. We all have differences but they all melt down to be very similar, and we are all so relatable. If we take off the black and white lens, and we let our eyes envision all of the color and all of the differences, in time we can truly find all of the similarities, and we can relate.
I took random breaks from writing, trying to figure out myself I suppose. Being a college student was enough work in itself, and finding the time to write, while finding yourself, and pleasing your peers and all of the other extremely malleable emotions and concepts that go along with being in your early twenties, it was tough to understand what exactly it was I was constantly trying to say. It was not until after I graduated, in December 2013, that I finally began making sense of my words, my theories and my intuition. I can clearly remember which post I wrote that completely swayed the way my blog would start to go. The post was called “Self-hate isn’t Worth the Battle”, and the picture I posted with it was one of myself wearing glasses and a blue sweater. My favorite line read: “Sometimes we learn to love somebody else before we love ourselves, and sometimes the courage to love ourselves comes before we love another, but the stem of acceptance is a trigger for a beautiful life”. This was the first post I can remember being truly a little nervous about posting, because it was so honest. Writing has always been a natural thing for me, almost as natural as feeling self-conscious. I know how to be confident and I know how to put on a face that makes me look stronger than I am, but in all reality that can be easy. Much easier than accepting true feelings, nerves and opinions of ones self.
Over the past years, from writing, I have not only learned about myself and begun to trust my own thoughts, but I have learned to be open to the words of others and to be proud of my constant change and desire for change. I will continue to write what feels natural and in time this will all become something.
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