I woke up the other morning and did the first thing I always do, checked my phone.  I was looking on Snapchat and saw that little red dot that means "you have memories to look back on", so I clicked to see what funny or sad things I had thought were valuable to save on December 1st from the past few years.  To my surprise, I saw a memory from four years ago today of a whiteboard with a list written on it.  This wasn't your average list though, it was my life plan.  To a tee.  Ages, dates, places, and names (yes my CHILDREN'S NAMES) all listed out exactly how I thought my future would lay out.  For your own amusement, here it is: 

I woke up this morning with a message on my phone that read "Hey queen! You are light and a joy.  Good morning, I hope you have a wonderful day!"  I don't think ever in my life have I gotten a message like that.  It took me by surprise, that someone to go out of their way to say that to me.  So I decided, it was going to be a wonderful day.  It was the 1st day of a new month (my last month at home!), but it was cloudy, no sun to be seen, and a high of a crisp 40 degrees.  I had work at both my jobs and the only thing to look forward to was getting a haircut (I LOVE haircuts!!!), there was nothing particularly "wonderful" coming my way.  

I remember the first time I visited you, as a young and naive almost 7th grader.  I was miserable.  My phone broke a day before the 2 week trip to come see you, a remote place with no beaches and only treacherous hikes.  Turns out the day I got home from my first time seeing you,  I got my first period so no wonder I was so moody the entire trip.  But everyone says you aren’t really best friends if you didn’t hate each other at first, so looks like we’re really best friends now.  I remember looking back on that first trip and being so mad at myself for not taking more of you in.  I knew you had so much to offer but I let my young, phone-obsessed self, first period nearing self get in the way.  So I knew I had to go back. 

Around this time last year, my sister sent me a Tik Tok with the caption "this is your sign to work at a National Park with your best friends", with my sister's attached caption as "GG!!!! Look into this!!!".  We were deep into the pandemic, I had just taken a semester to travel the east coast, and I had no idea what next week had in store for me, let alone next summer.  I remember thinking "I have nothing better to do, might as well look into it", so that night I got on coolworks.com (my favorite social media, please sponsor me) and scrolled for hours making a list of all the jobs I was interested in applying to. By the next week I had applied to more than five National Parks, and by the next month, I had been offered a job at Yellowstone.  Once I was offered the job, I had three days to accept.  This was mid-January 2021 and again, I had always been the person to do things last minute so I was in a panic that I had to decide what to do with my life five months in advance, but I guess that's how the real world works or something?? So I decided, I was going to go.