My Decade in Review: 2010 to 2019

Hi. I’m Whitney.

Here’s a picture of me so you can put a face to the story of my last decade.

Well 2020 is here and with it a brand new decade! I thought I would share a few highlights of the last ten years. Get ready for a bit of a roller coaster!

2010 - Graduated high school in Alberta, Canada and left my small hometown of 18 years (and my friends who I’d known for about the same length of time) to go to college in the U.S. where I didn’t know anyone. Started my first year of chemical engineering. It was a big transition, to say the least.

2011 - Met my future husband for the first time in class! Overall I did a lot of math and a lot of chemistry. And I mean a lot of math and chemistry.

2012 - Became good friends with my future husband. Went to Jerusalem for the summer on study abroad. Started dating my future husband! Learned a lot of things about fluids and thermodynamics and spent a lot of time in a windowless computer lab.

2013 - Kept getting through school, heat and mass transfer or process control anyone? Traveled to Peru on an engineering outreach trip. Worked at my first engineering internship. Got engaged and married that summer! Took on our final year of chemical engineering together. 

2014 - Graduated as chemical engineers! Traveled to Iceland. Moved to a very small town in west Texas where I knew absolutely no one except my husband. Started working in the oil fields. 

2015 - My husband got transferred to Houston and we moved. I left my job to move with him, oil prices tanked, and I was unemployed. Decided to try to make the most of it and learned about creative things I’d never had time to learn about before. Picked up a paintbrush for the first time. Learned to sew. Thought I was going to go to law school. Ended up not doing that. End of the year we got transferred back to west Texas.

2016 - Really got into painting, even though I still wasn’t that great at it. Experimented with a lot of different mediums and crafts. Also learned a lot about coding (I’m a strange mix, I know!). Bought our first house. Discovered the world of interior design and DIY. All the exploring felt random and frustrating sometimes but I knew deep down it was important. Found out I was pregnant with our first baby!

2017 - Created lots of art while I was pregnant and my skill level grew, slowly but surely. Had my first child! In addition to taking on the enormous challenge of motherhood, my husband very unexpectedly had an opportunity to move to Alabama for a new job. We decided to go. Sold our first house, bought our second house. Once again, we did not know a single person in our new town.

2018 - Finally had a full year in one home! Did a lot of work to try and make our home feel like ours. Started to get the hang of being a mom. Kept on painting and creating consistently, despite often feeling frustrated by my inadequacies. Made art whenever I could, nap time was a huge blessing. Finally started to feel like I was gaining my own artistic style. Did my first local art show and realized that lots of other people actually liked my art (not just my husband haha). Had the smallest glimpse that maybe my dream of being an artist really was possible.

2019 - Had a second full year in the same home! And kept on working to make it feel more like our home. Tried to balance being a stay at home mom and working very hard during nap or any other pockets of free time to keep building my painting skills and also start trying to market and sell my art. Learned the basics of Photoshop and Procreate. Made over 70 repeating patterns during my 100 Day Challenge. Designed my cousin/best friend’s wedding invitation. Designed and produced my first collection of tea towels. Opened my print shop on Etsy and gained a lot of confidence creating and selling. Also realized that I have so much (times a million) still to learn.

Isn’t that incredible!? The last 10 years kind of felt like a blur when I tried to quickly glance over them in my mind. But when I really sat down and considered all the big moments of the last 10 years, so much has happened! And obviously this a very broad overview that leaves out tons of things that happened. Nonetheless, I think it’s pretty incredible that in 10 years I was able to completely pivot my life in a totally different direction, several times over. I think it speaks to the resilience of the human spirit. And I think it also speaks to our ability to always be learning and growing. 

What I didn’t really cover in the overview was the incredibly painful disappointment of not being able to see out my career as an engineer. And also all the time I spent second guessing myself, feeling less than my best, feeling isolated from all the moving, and feeling totally and completely lost. At the time, all this art and creativity and exploring felt totally random and sometimes pointless. But I’m so happy that I kept on sticking with it. It’s honestly only in the last year or so that I’ve started to see some parts of my life make sense again. 

I hope that me owning this part of my story and sharing it with you will help you to own your story too, whatever it is. Nothing is out of reach, but everything takes an incredible amount of time, patience and persistence. But maybe most of all, it takes a willingness to pivot, embrace new opportunities, and find joy in the growth along the way. 

This is only the beginning for me. I absolutely can’t wait to take on the next 10 years and see where they lead.