Today is my 30th Birthday, which feels pretty scary, how did I close my eyes at 21, blink and suddenly turn 30?  But then I guess its just number and it doesn’t matter too much. In some ways, it feels like nothing has changed.  But in other ways it feels so significant, I want to use it as an opportunity to makes some changes and for some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to tell the world. 

For numerous reasons this last year has been pretty difficult, but it has also been unbelievably amazing - It’s been the year I became Mrs Stroud. It’s been the year I decided to change my life.  It’s been a rollercoaster.

On my Journey, I’ve realised a few things:

- My life has been amazing so far...

- I am lucky enough to have the most wonderful people in my life.

- We create the life we want, if we wake up one day and things have veered off track, we are the only ones who can change it.

- Everything is moving so quickly, if we don’t stop and appreciate things, we will never be happy. If we don’t stop and write things down, we’ll forget all these wonderful moments that make up our life.

- Life is difficult.

- I have big dreams and I want to live my on my own terms and the only way to do this is through hard work.

- I want to tell better stories with my life

For a birthday present, I wrote myself a list - “30 things in my 30th year”.  A promise to myself, a set of goals and a bucket list of things I want to work on over the next 12 months.  I’ll be sharing these with you next week - but today is the start of one of those things - to release my blog - Stories from a backpack…

Every Monday I will be realised a new post, if you want to read and engage with me, I would be so happy to have you along. Stories from backpack is all about:

Stories and travel.  Adventure, writing and all the lessons along the way. It's about trying new things and being grateful. 

Its going to be great.

“Here’s the truth about telling stories with your life. It’s going to sound like a great idea, and you are going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you’re not going to want to do. It’s like that with writing books, and it’s like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people life the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.”  - Donald Miller (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years).

Let’s get to work

#StoriesFromABackpack