The Next Chapter

Hello Everyone!

Our 30 Days of Self-Care have always been a life altering experience for us. It changed our lives for the better last summer, and this is what we were hoping for once again when we embarked on this endeavor on April 1, 2020. With this pandemic happening, we felt that we had to take control of our lives.

As we embraced the 30 Days of Self-Care, we listened to our feelings and our body. We made sure we ate our raw foods, worked out everyday and got plenty of rest. Let’s not forget that we made sure to hydrate as well, because that is super important. During this time, we had so many feelings arise and so many things sitting in front of us that we felt overwhelmed and not sure how to embrace everything. Granted it has only been two weeks, but these self-care journeys always help us to see clearly. The first two weeks were challenging. Like we mentioned before, we never argue, but we were snippy at each other and felt the weight of the world on both of our shoulders. One day last week we sat down and threw all our cards on the table and chose to deal with them one by one. We weren’t happy with how things were going, and we felt on edge.

When we first started our blog, we wanted to share with the world how we are surviving with grief and share our story. Although we are happy with our blog, we felt it was going in too many different directions and we couldn’t keep up with what we really wanted to do. For the last three years we have been talking about writing a book. We both feel very passionate about writing this book, but we kept coming up with excuses. These included: school, the fear people wouldn’t want to read it, thinking we should do it after we finish our education etc. However, during these 30 Days of Self-Care, it came out that we both feel really passionate about the book and that now is the time to start. With the world “shutdown” there really is no better time than the present to sit down as co-authors and write a book that means the world to us. Once we discovered this, we realized that we needed to take a step back re-evaluate our blog and social media and make changes. We are happy to announce that we have made the decision to write our book, share our journey and focus on our path with grief.

Writing this book is a huge decision for us! It is exciting and exhilarating, but it is also going to stir up a lot of old memories and emotions. We know that the overall experience is going to be healing, but there will be hard days during this adventure too. We’re going to share the good and bad experiences of writing our book as we embark on this new writing quest, and our hope is that chronicling our healing will help other grieving people to heal as well.

We believe we have successfully learned how to live life after loss, and we want to share this with others. Our hope is that people will see that life after loss is possible and that we can help people to not feel so alone in their grief. We also believe there is no better time to do this than right now so we can help the drastic numbers of people who are losing their loved ones during this pandemic. This is a time where we can step in and hopefully help others with their grief during these hard times. We will still be doing our 30 days of self-care through all of this. We are dedicated to working out and eating our raw foods. Right now, our focus has changed to four top priorities:

1)     Running

2)     Working out

3)     Eating Raw vegan foods

4) Writing our book and enhancing our blog

We both still have school and it will get done, but it is no longer a priority in our life. Sharing our grief in the hopes of helping even just one grieving person out there is our priority, along with taking care of ourselves during this pandemic. During our dedicated time of writing our book we will be writing on our blog about this journey and sharing bits and pieces on our social media accounts on Instagram (@jayandshellsjourney), Facebook (Jay and Shells Journey) and Pinterest (Jay and Shell’s Journey). As time goes on, we will open up a twitter account and a YouTube account as well. We are taking on this journey one step at a time. We will still occasionally post our plant-based food and of course we’ll have to post when Disneyland reopens, but for now our main focus is going to be on our book and sharing our grief with you.

We live our lives daily to honor Art and our main goal has always been to keep his memory alive. We never want his memory to die. We miss him daily, but he is the reason we keep going everyday and he is the reason we have come so far on our journey. He deserves to be honored through it all.

We hope you bear with us as we transition our blog and social media accounts, and we hope you continue to support and encourage us along the way. Our goal is to have the book completed no later than September 2020, hopefully sooner. We have a great story to share and we know you will enjoy the journey we are embarking upon as we dedicate our time to our first book.

Remember, always be kind to yourself!

Aloha and gratitude,

Jay and Shell