Better late than never, they say.

Today I am 31 years, 10 months, 2 weeks, and 1 day old.

I rang in the New Year, and was determined to avoid any and all "resolutions".

I don't really believe in them. Or so I told myself. Resolutions were silly things that people made in the beginning of the year, and forgot about entirely by February. (Or in my case in the past, by January 3rd.)

Yet in the last 11 days, quite a few things have changed. Little thoughts or stirrings in my heart have suddenly bubbled to the surface.

I no longer wish to be the person that I am.

I'm not a criminal. I've never touched an illegal drug in my life. I'm a wife. I'm a mother. I'm a daughter, a sister, a friend. So, why, then, do I want to change?

9 years, 11 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days ago, I was given a gift. A gift that, at the time, I resented at the same time that I welcomed it. I was given a second chance at life. Not something everyone can say. And in those 9 years, 11 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days, my life has changed drastically. I got my first "real job," I graduated from college, I moved 3000 miles across the country to a place where I only knew one person, I got engaged, I got married, I became the mother of two children, I got my first "real" full-time job, I paid off debt, etc. Major life moments. A whole cluster of them. All pretty much within the last 10 years.

Many people will say, "Well, that's your 20s for you." And pretty much, yeah, that was all in my 20s (and some in my early 30s). When I look at that time line, though (and there are so many "smaller" details missing from it), all I can think is, I almost didn't have the chance to live any of it. I almost WASN'T HERE for any of it.

I'm not making light of the last almost-10 years. They were big. They were monumental. I'm proud of my accomplishments and of what I have done.

But the impending 10-year anniversary of that "second chance" and the recent death of someone who was standing before me so full of life only 2 weeks prior, has really prompted me to take a look at the life I'm living, and to take inventory of who I am now and who I truly want to be.

So this blog is going to be about just that--my journey from Point A (where I am now) to Point B (where I want to be). But first, Point B must be defined.