How Did I Get Here?

Okay, I admit that i am coming in from a few cocktails at my favorite show on the planet - Ryan Landry's "Showgirls" in Provincetown. I admit, as well, that you will likely hear more of this place called "Provincetown" through this blog, The Powder Group and On Makeup Magazine, than you ever thought you could hear of a place you barely have heard of before. But as i rode my $30 brown, beat up, twenty year old bike home from the Crown and Anchor tonight, to my dream studio on the beach, I looked up at a zillion stars in a pitch black sky, looked forward to walking my gorgeous dog Buddy, thought back on the amazing weekend I just had with my new boyfriend Brad, and thought to myself - damn I'm happy - how did I even get here? How did I arrive at a place in my life that I thought was a dream away and an impossibility for "someone like me."

The truth is I have been preparing for this moment my entire life - always knowing what it was going to take to make me feel complete and satisfied. Having just come off of the most exciting and successful editions of The Makeup Show NYC we could ever have imagined, having just spent five days with 20 artists who trusted us - little ol' us - to take them on a journey to a more insightful and successful career at Evolution - having just begun the process of putting together the Summer issue of On Makeup Magazine - the core of all of my personal creative goals and of my being - and having just finished the proposals for launching two new brands within my business - I thought to myself with a level of happiness in my soul that i didn't know existed - seriously how did i even get here?

Its one thing to say that hard work and perseverance got me to this place - wherever this "place" truly is, which is something I am still sorting out. But it is an entirely different thing to look at every aspect and angle of your life and say to yourself - this is what i have been waiting for, this is the place I have always wanted to be, this is the place I have always needed to get to, and to acknowledge that hard work was only a stepping stone to this place.

I had to know what i wanted. I had to know what i needed. I had to work hard to get to this place - yes - but more than that I had to put myself out there, ask for what i needed, insist on my own success and somehow find a way to be generous, open to learning and maintain my integrity along the way. Sometimes it was, or rather is, hard. Most often, the time and effort and cost of what makes me feel that my business and life are a success, would not seem worthwhile to a person who looks only at numbers, profits and credit scores to gauge success.

But when i wake up tomorrow morning - having had a good night sleep with Buddy by my side and Brad on my mind. I will know that this place I am at is beyond success for me. I will be happy in knowing that Mom and Dad are blushingly proud of what their first born is doing with his life. I will be hopeful in thinking that somewhere there is a makeup artist who has been given the faith in himself and has felt empowerment in the idea that he can be whatever and whoever he wants to be by something he experienced through one of my projects. I will be excited by the idea that a small business somewhere will start up today and begin the same path as i did nearly five years ago, and I will be hopeful that they are prepared for the turbulent road they are about to journey down, and they have a clear understanding of what success is for them.

Then, as i text a morning ILU to Brad, and harness up Buddy for a walk down the beach to get a coffee to shake off one too many Sapphire Tonics, the answer to last night's question of "how did i get here?" will be answered by the morning's even more important one - "and now where?"