a re-introduction

I think sometimes my social media may seem confusing 🤪 so many times I’ve been told to set up business accounts – but y’all wouldn’t get the full picture.  So instead, my profile is a mishmash of my life and my 2 careers! I feel like it works but I don’t know everyone on my social media so I figured I’d take a second to tell y’all a little bit of my story. When I started writing this I remembered I started a blog in 2018 that I only posted to once and never shared. SO if you want to take a peak into the old Emily who got me to where I am now, go back to my first ever blog. She’s so different and I’m so grateful for her struggles.

For the purposes of this post we’re going to go back to 2019 because the events of that year drastically shaped the person I am today. There was a very clear moment – actually there were 2 moments –  in 2019 when I knew it was past time for my marriage to end. I won’t go into the details, because it’s not fair, but we both played a part in its unraveling. On the day I made my decision, I was so scared. I knew I didn’t have a way OUT financially. While my house was in my name only, and it didn’t have a mortgage, I had become a stay at home mom, which meant…. NO INCOME. I could not even borrow money from my own house which was a gift from my father who passed in 2014. When I tried to get a loan and realized I couldn’t without having my husband co-sign I became very aware how messed up our system is and how many women must get trapped in a marriage they don’t want to be in anymore. In my case, I’d given literally everything I had to my husband and children, and I didn’t have anything left for myself. When you find yourself in this situation, it’s easy to feel defeated and I’m sure many women will stay in this place forever.

But, I was desperate and I knew I didn’t want this to be how my story went down in the books, so I think I blacked out and just started putting one foot in front of the other and for the first time “just did the next right thing” I didn’t have a full picture of what I wanted my life to look like or what my plan was but something inside of me got busy. If I had tried to see the whole picture of what it was going to take to change my circumstances, I would have been too overwhelmed, so I just took it one baby step at a time. I don’t know where I found the strength or energy with a 2 year old and a 4 year old at home, but I enrolled in real estate night school and I just put my head down and focused. Within a couple months I had my license and it was time to start building an income so I could find a new life. And that’s how my real estate career was born.

Now to paint you a picture… somewhere in my late 20s my weight started creeping up, I can blame this on many things, I’ll save for later posts, but I have all the excuses – and they are valid. Life happens, I put myself on the back burner and slowly I had faded into the background of my own life. By 2021 I found myself well over 200 pounds. It felt like it happened overnight, but it also felt like I hadn’t been able to look at myself in the mirror in years. I hid in pictures, and when I’d have to see a picture of me I was truly shocked, I can’t look like that – that’s got to just be a bad angle. But when every angle became bad, I knew.  I made every attempt to jump on the latest fad diet and when it failed, I just shifted my attention to my sweet babies who were the picture of perfection in my eyes and I flooded all of my social media with pictures of them. It was easy to hide myself in a sea of beautiful baby and toddler pics.

But eventually you have to see people, I wasn’t able to hide in person. There was not a flowy shirt magical enough to hide the weight I had put on, maybe I could have gone everywhere in a face mask then people wouldn’t notice – and guess what Y’ALL – in 2020 I got my chance to hide behind a mask for a while and I even felt better posting that way. WHAT? What a crazy thing to write. Luckily for Instagram we also now had filters we could use to make you look “better”. Take a second and look back through my old posts and you’ll see… its all my kids and then a select few filtered pics of me and then a few masked selfies and then there is a shift.

A shift when I met the right person at the right time. A time when I was so desperate that I had just spent $3k on red light therapy that was supposed to melt the fat away. This was supposed to be the something magical – totally worth the money if it worked. Welp, when it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And it was. I didn’t lose a single pound with red light therapy. Then, I met my coach at a preschool brunch. I remember it like it was yesterday. I showed up and I was full of personality and funny things to say to distract from just being an overweight, self-conscious and uncomfortable messy mom trapped in an unhappy marriage at home. I was DESPERATE. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, everyone, who was really looking, must have seen through the wall I put up all around me to keep me safe. That wall wasn’t keeping me safe, it was crumbling all around me and I was suffocating under the weight of everything I was trying to hide.

So luckily, this health coach, who’s now one of my dearest friends, called me after the brunch and signed me up for a mystery program that she promised me would work. She said it with such conviction, and after hearing the cost it was chum change compared to what I was willing to pay to get this weight off. And y’all, it wasn’t just the exterior of the weight – I was pre-diabetic and had gestational diabetes with both of my pregnancies – I WAS NOT HEALTHY. I was slowly dying. Well, just as my new coach had promised, the program worked, thus Emily – a health coach was born.

So now we have the realtor and the health coach portion of what I share. I started taking care of other parts of my life again. I saw myself start to shine again. There was in fact some sparkle left in this Diamond. I wasn’t done. I had more to my story. I had watched myself work my ass off for the last few years and I became aware of my worth – probably for the first time in my life. I was worth more than what I had going on in my house. I deserved to be treated better than anyone had ever treated me and it was time to stop fighting for my marriage. And no matter what anyone says, I fought hard. I can lay my head down at night and know I tried my best. At the end of the day, we weren’t happy and we both deserve to be happy. We weren’t helping each other to be our best selves and we were bringing out the worst in each other. I’m making this seem like it was a simple as asking for the marriage to end and that was it, but it was way more complicated than that. Somewhere in the midst of me fighting like hell for the life I deserved – I found myself again. I remembered who I was and I was reborn into what I believe to be the best version of myself so far. And I know there is even better versions of me coming.

So here we are. Maybe I’ll be the only one to ever read what I write, but if you’re still reading, thanks! Thank you for being a part of letting me break down my walls and live again. And if you’re still reading because you are in a dark place and you can’t see the light, let me be a little glimmer of hope for you. If I can do it, I know you can too.