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Photos by Brandon Hill

Over the past week and a half, I’ve experienced a whirlwind of emotions. When Austin proposed I felt complete joy and excitement, on my birthday I felt loved and well-fed, and I felt immense sadness when my mom called last week to tell me that my grandpa had passed away.

In addition to all of that, just a couple of days ago someone left a derogatory comment about my engagement ring on a photo I posted on Instagram. Having never experienced any kind of hate before, I panicked and quickly deleted it; I was afraid that it would start some social media fight that I didn’t want to deal with.

While all of these separate events are completely different and seemingly unrelated, they each reminded me of the truly important things in this life. I blog about things that help make life pretty and fun. These things (fashion, makeup, etc) are a way for us to feel confident and creative, but they are extras. The things that bring happiness and meaning to our lives are not things at all—they’re the people we love and nothing more.

Even though these things are actually the extras, it’s easy to get caught up in them. Small things that shouldn’t truly matter, like the size of an engagement ring, cloud our vision and cause us to forget this simple fact. Perhaps the old saying “you don’t marry the ring, you marry the man” can be applied to our lives in more ways than one.

P.S. I know this isn’t the type of thing that I normally post about, but all of these recent happenings really struck me and I had to write about them. Thanks so much for all of the sweet messages about my engagement, and thank you for following along!

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