The idea of a memoir came before the blog.  I had trudged through half of 2013 with nothing fantastic to report.  But the cycle of gut-wrenching crises that put me (literally) flat on my back, in bed, paralyzed with a 2-3 day I-Can’t-Go-On depression…almost became comical.  Almost.  Every time I emerged from the depths of despair, I came out a little stronger.  Sparkly-er.  A little more jaded and cynical.  But a little more fabulous.  And a lot more resilient.

And I knew the minute I owned my “rags to riches” situation (instead of dwelling on how shitty my life was)…  I knew that somehow my struggle might help someone else someday.  I’m not dealing with anything that hundreds, thousands, millions of people haven’t dealt with…with many more hundreds, thousands, millions to come.

The memoir, though.  For years, every time something happened…good or bad, I’d always say, “I’m going to include this in my memoir.”  I laugh now…that sounds so pretentious!  But I’m ballsy and I have the stories to back that claim up.

This one time, when I was 17, I hopped in my car and drove to WCU to meet a dude I met on the internet.  I still remember what I wore.  I got lost on the way home, terribly lost.  I was somewhere with a bunch of one way streets and I was desperate to find my way, so I got out of my car and knocked on a random stranger’s door in the middle of the night.

He pointed me in the right direction, and I was on the way back to Lancaster…it was raining pretty hard.  I stopped at a red light, and a car rear-ended me.  OMG.  I jumped out of my car, ran back to the car behind me, and the guy driving said he would meet me in the parking lot of the Turkey Hill that was to the right of us, at the intersection.

The light turned green, and I pulled into the Turkey Hill….the guy who hit me drove away.  I knew I was BUSTED…my parents didn’t know what I was up to that night and I didn’t know where I was and it was raining and my Passat was banged up!  FUUUUUUUCK….

A woman came out of the Turkey Hill and said she saw what happened…I started crying and told her what I had been through that night and she told me to get in my car and follow her, she was going to get me to Route 30W so I could get home.

And she did, and…..well, my mom was never thrilled with me driving on highways, so I was unfamiliar with the way 30 W turned into 283 W, and next thing I knew, I was seeing signs for Harrisburg… X miles away.  FUUUUUUCK….

But then!!  I saw a sign for the Landisville exit (still wasn’t 100% sure where I was)….I said, “Sophia, if you don’t take this exit, you are an ASSHOLE.”  So I took it….  I was a minute from my house…but totally disoriented.  Ended up finding the high school that I had graduated from a few weeks before.  YESSSS…then I got home.  Finally.

I never told my parents, and I’m counting on my mom not reading my blog, so….shhh.

I went back to WCU a week later.  Hahaha!!

But yeah, I’m livin’.  Falling apart and pulling myself back together.  Doing stupid things and sometimes learning from them…sometimes not.  But savoring every bit of life…the good and the bad.  The sweet and the sour.  Or, for me…the glitter and the bruises.

So back to this past summer…August 2013.  Life wasn’t great, but rest assured, life was never boring.  I was working at an educational supply and specialty toy store, and an order of really awesome books had arrived.  I was asked to put them out on the sales floor and I thought they were so damn awesome, they deserved to be near the front of the store–not hidden in the back where they might not be seen.

I was moving some things around and decided on a wire-spinning rack to display them.  I carried one from the back of the store–with the weight of it resting on my forearm so i didn’t accidentally damage my shirt.

I also must have brushed up against a sparkly greeting card in the card display rack.

As I arranged the books on the spinning rack, I noticed a big bruise on my forearm–where the rack had been pressing against just a few minutes before.  I laughed because I knew Ron was going to ask me how I got another weird, random bruise on me.  (Happens all the time!)

I took a closer look and realized there was glitter on my arm…from the greeting card display.

A bruise on my arm….a big, ugly bruise dusted in glitter.  It stirred something up inside me…  I felt compelled to take a picture of my arm.  If a picture says 1000 words…this one says there is a good in bad, and bad in good.  There is pretty in ugly, and ugly in pretty.  When I Instagrammed my glitter-covered bruise, I said:

#glitter and #bruises … that’s going to be the #title of my #memoir …

And then, the following month….  Glitter & Bruises was born.  I had no idea I would be a stay at home mom again within weeks of taking that photo.  The span of time between the day I took the picture and when I launched my blog was seven weeks.

I had no idea my life was going to take another detour…that day, that picture—it was almost prophetic.

#glitter and #bruises ….that’s going to be the #title of my #memoir … #writer #storyteller #dragqueens #greekgoddess #lancasterpa #makeupjunkie #littleperson #ninja #funsized #glam #fabulous #ambassadoroffun #curvygreek