Everything Happens For A Reason

sometimes life being derailed puts your where your supposed to be

It's been a while since I posted here.  I had good intentions, but it took a while to stabilize my new life as a 24 hour caregiver.  It's a big adjustment.  I broke the seal when I felt compelled to write a diatribe on my cheese business blog about LABELS + VALUES.  I suddenly felt compelled to get this out of my system.  And after writing it and hearing from people in my community I hadn't heard from in while, I realized why.  Because everything happens for a reason.

Sometimes things happen in life that feel like a massive derailment.  The plans you had suddenly get thrown off course due to an unexpected calamity.  This happened to me after my father passed away in 2020.  My mom who requires 24 hour care needed to be looked after.  I honestly hadn't planned for this, but I just happened to be the one who showed up.  And so began an epic journey.

In the beginning, I'll admit it felt like I got swallowed whole by a whale.  It felt like I was completely disconnected from the world and my community.  But as time went on, I realized that I was not alone.  This was actually happening to a lot of people on a global scale.

Given my own history with health challenges, it seemed like a natural thing to help my mom.  I was just doing what needed to be done.  But over time, I started to notice something.  I started hearing from people who had been through the same thing or were going still through it, and I realized that actually my mom was doing really well.  She was exceeding people's expectations.  She was thriving!

When the situation presented, I'll admit I had a huge inner conflict about taking this on.  I had a career that seemed like it was really going somewhere.  That I was on the cusp of something big!  For years, I tried to somehow reconcile the great divide.  Trying to find a way to make it all work.  It didn't.  At least not in the way that could be appreciated by anyone in the business community.  It was like I had to make a choice between my mom and my career.

At the time I was a vegan/plant based cheesemaker.  A category that had grown a lot.  It felt like I had laid a foundation for something and walked away right when it was gaining momentum.  It was honestly kind of gut wrenching.  But there's something I've started to realize since.

All the time that I had my original cheese business, I was kind of an outlier.  It was a vegan cheese, but it had actually been born out of a wellness intention.  It was born out of me being really sick and trying to heal myself (a longer story).  So it was always a little different.  The audience was different from the other plant based/vegan cheeses on the market.  And the way we approached making it was different.  And honestly, that was why we survived.  We were competing with lots of other businesses with way more funding and support.  We survived because we had a loyal customer base.

Long story short, having to drop everything to take care of my mom was very much a deja voux moment.  I started making the cheese after a similar thing happened to me (when I got hit by a car).  It was really full.

At the end of the day, when I finally got over myself and all my plans and ambitions I realized that really I was coming home to my roots.  That maybe this all happened to remind me of why I was doing all of this in the first place.  That my purpose was born out of an intention to support wellness.  To make the world healthier.  To help people thrive.  And that when I looked around me, I was doing exactly that.  Already.

So maybe I hadn't lost my way after all.  Maybe this all happened so that I would find it again.  And maybe I was exactly where I was supposed to be all along.

Everything happens for a reason.