My Last Christmas Here
Yes, my Jeep is decked out!!! I have a couple of events I will be showing up at with my Jeep like this and with the Lucky!!! So much fun!!!! Anyway…
A lot has happened to me the last year. Actually, a lot has happened to all of us this passed year and a half and for some the things are still happening. Lots of tragedies, heartaches, and losses. My loss and tragedy that you all know about has reset my entire life and this may be my last Christmas here. Here is why…
When I had my miscarriage, I went through a couple of months of numbness. The loss was so tremendous and painful that my brain had cut off my emotions. I felt like the walking dead. I became so desperate to FEEL something and that was when Lucky the BYRD came to exist and Lucky had been what helped me get my feelings back and I was able to work through my pain.
The joy Lucky brought into my life, somehow made me feel isolated in my job. Mind you, I have never felt '“trapped” in my profession as a massage therapist. I love my job and I love my clients. However, I found myself longing to be outside, to feel the sun on my face and feel the breeze. I longed to not be in a room… so what can I do? Once I wrote my book, The Birth of Lucky the BYRD Through a Miscarriage, I felt like I was doing what I have always wanted to do… Write. Which was so weird, because I have always feared writing. I had always wanted to write a book about my dark days and publish it, but it was just going to be that one… But now… I felt like this is what I was meant to do.
On top of that, the time I lived in Denver, Montana, and now here in New Mexico, I have never felt at home. I have created a life in these three locations during the time I lived there, but I never felt home. I don’t exactly have anything holding me here either. Josh has family, but there is really nothing in New Mexico holding him here either. His dad and stepmother were here, but they moved to Romania earlier this year.
I have lived a total of 18 years since I moved to the United States…
Crazy, how much time has passed!
If I were not married to Josh, I probably would have moved to Japan a long time ago, or just stayed in the military, where I may have traveled more if I didn’t leave… Now that I think about it, The Air Force didn’t move me out of Montana fast enough (I was there for 6 entire years) so I moved myself by getting out of the AF and came here with Josh… I am kind of doing the same thing now! How funny!! A just had a bit of an Ah ha! moment as I am typing my story! I am clearly typing as I think… hahahahaha.
Anyhow! Some of you have heard me talk about moving abroad. Just because I don’t feel like I am home and Josh was down to travel. I didn’t really think about going to Japan, because there are tons of veteran expat communities around the world and there is no reason why Josh has to learn a whole other language. So that was what we started talking about.
However, as I was getting out of my postnatal depression, I felt the desperate need to make the change to whatever it was we were going to do. I wanted to feel the sun on my face now, I want to feel that breeze now… I wanted to be in a position where I could have all of this now. Right at that time frame I reconnected with a friend I met in Japan on Facebook. He is half Japanese and half Samoan, but he looks almost completely Japanese. He had lived in Hawaii for about 30 years and it is getting too expensive so he had been thinking about going to Okinawa, Japan. I told him I would LOVE to go back to Japan, but I didn’t expect Josh to want to learn the language. It is a complicated language to learn for an English speaker, after all. However, he said Josh would fit right in because the island is practically full of Americans because of the American bases.
I mentioned this to Josh and he said he wouldn’t mind going to Okinawa, it’s tropical and it’ll make sense since Tokyo is right there where my brother lives, and Taiwan is even closer which is where my mother is from. I looked at him and said “Don’t you fuck with me… Cuz it’s gonna happen if you mean that…!” He told me he was serious and that just makes most sense. I was like DONE!!!! We are fucking going to Okinawa!!!!!
From there everything fell into place so quickly. We talked about what needed to happen for us to go ASAP. Long story short here is what we have decided to do:
Sell CHI Massage Therapy by June 2025 (Lease ends in July)
After it is sold, I will be ramping up my new website which will be where I share what I learned as a massage therapist and help people understand their bodies better, by understanding how the brain, nervous system, and energies work together. So lots of writing for my website and for my books. I have 3 books in my head I would like to get out… Possibly 4…
Ramp up Josh’s Real Estate gig for the year 2025
When the time comes we will sell everything in our house then put the house on the market. We will only be taking our clothes.
Somewhere in there, Maya will be trained. She will be the very least of our problems when we are ready to go.
Where does that put you, my clients? Well, you are on your own now!
JUST KIDDING!!!!
First and foremost, I will hire and train one or two of them to do what I do. Obviously, they will not have my amazing personality so you may or may not want to go somewhere else. There is a chance I will not be able to sell my business, but I don’t want to leave you with the daunting challenge of finding another massage therapist. If you do decide to leave CHI or CHI closes, I will have a list of places you can go to and try out. I will try to have this list as soon as I possibly can.
My first priority is to get CHI Massage Therapy to a spot where it will be easier to sell and fast. However, you are a very close second in my priority list. I will do my best to provide options and, hopefully, at least one of the options will work for you.
If you want to follow me and do not have Facebook, you can email me at vigorfullife@gmail.com. Or you can go to vigorfullife.com and sign up for emails there. I am not doing any emails through that yet, but I will as soon as I get that officially launched. When I do, it’ll be similar to what I have been doing here, where I tell stories of what I have been up to and my thoughts.
On another note:
April is CHI’s birthday!
It will be 9 years since I started CHI Massage Therapy and I would like to have a party to celebrate the relationships I have created with you guys. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate every single one of you. Whether or not you still see me today, or you had bought from me in the past, it doesn’t matter. Every visit, every purchase, every connection made brought me and my business up this far. It has been an amazing journey and it is time to move on to my next calling. I love you guys and hope I can see you all at this party.
For now, please save the date for April 26th. I will have more details on that as we get closer to the date.
