life of haleigh

To my mom on Mother’s Day, There’s a lot of days that I like to celebrate you. Your birthday, spoiling you on Christmas, when you got the promotion you wanted so badly. I like to think we do our best to celebrate you every day. Some days are different. Some days don’t feel like a celebration for you. But today, on top of all others, I want to take this time to say a few words of celebration, to honour the incredible woman you are. You are so many things. You are the strongest, most courageous woman in the world. You would walk to the ends of the earth for everyone you know. You would defend anyone’s honour. You have an amazing knack for making everyone in your life feel like the most important person to you. I don’t know if you know this, but dad tells me all the time how I “should try to be more like mom,” and to me, that means I should be more welcoming to people, let them in with open arms. I should always, ALWAYS find the good in someone. I should learn to cook l...

Someone called me sunshine. And I think (just maybe) it might be the best compliment I’ve ever received, and here’s why. I remember one day specifically, I was driving with my dad in his truck, and I put the visor down to block the sun. He reached over and put it back up, and said, “you need a little sun on your skin.” I don’t think I’ve put it down since. It’s just the feeling of absolute radiance. Warmth, and safety, good weather and happiness, laughing kids, basketballs bouncing in the driveway, and now it feels so good I can’t bring myself to ever try and block it out. My dad taught me that sometimes all you need is a little vitamin D. A dose of sunshine works wonders on an aching body and an aching soul. It heals. It brings a healthy glow onto your precious, winter skin, and it burns so so so slow. All day long it burns away. Even if you get a sunburn you know? After a long day, you come inside and you see the marks it left on you. You put on cold Aloe Vera, sleep on your...

I thought my last post was a little angry. (True, but aggressive). And I know better than that. I pride myself in being pretty good at turning anger into something lighter. So I found a reason to thank you.  When I came to terms with the fact that I couldn’t do this anymore (and by ‘do this’ I mean suffocate from our friendship) I was distraught. Like I just wasted such a big part of my life on you. I felt empty. Because you drained every last feeling I had out of me. I was no longer sad, or tired, or lonely, just empty. But all that's changed. And I felt like that for a long time. I looked at old pictures of us and I missed you and I wanted to call you and ask you to hang out again. I spent even more wasted time on wondering if it was my fault, if I drove you to act the way you did to me, and wondering why you just left me here to think about these things with no explanations. Finally, though, I can say there’s a lot that I learned from you. Here is ten entire reasons wh...

WARNING: you might feel attacked by this post. So like I said, it’s okay to follow a trend. You can read about it in one of my older posts if you don’t know what I’m talking about (shameless plug). H O W E V E R Doing exactly something that someone else is doing is not only weird but quite frankly annoying. I was stalking my own Instagram the other day (shut up you do it too) and I had a few realizations. The first was: DAMN I post way too much. The second was that one of my ‘friends’ stopped liking my pictures after I posted my blog called Bad People. I would be offended but I’m honestly pretty sure they’re just kinda butt hurt that I decided to call them on their sh— Nevermind. Well boo-hoo, meanie. Because I had another realization too. Every time I post, they post. And every time I do something different, they do too. When I would make new friends, they told those new friends “good luck.” They even got their significant other to unfollow! Oh no! I’m devastated! ...

My entire life, I have been SO scared of eating. That’s just the way it’s been. I was so scared of getting fat (again, because little baby me “came out like a ten pound killer chicken” as my family refers lol). But I remember offering to let someone borrow my shirt, and they responded “no way your clothes are way too big for me.” And I felt stupid being the only kid who wanted seconds. I would go to bed thinking about what I wanted for breakfast and just be mad that I couldn’t think about anything else. But when I finally started getting taller and my belly started slimming out I felt proud, of all things. And I was surrounded by people who told me I should be proud. Later in life still, I got scared all over again. I always knew about the freshman 15 lbs. My sister went to university first and that’s pretty much all she talked about, how she was scared of gaining weight. I began to think there wasn’t anything else she was learning about in school. So when I came to univ...

Today in class when I should have been paying attention (I’m sorry it’s just that I can’t listen to another rendition of the importance of geographical plotting), I was scrolling through Amazon wondering which camera I was going to buy to start my YouTube channel. That’s right. I said it. She started a blog and now she’s gonna start a YouTube channel. Hi, millennials, how are ya?! I turned the brightness down on my screen because I was like “I swear to god if anyone sees what I’m looking for I’m gonna end up as the next viral twitter photo captioned “how to be a white girl: step 3.” I get it okay. All I do is talk about puppies and love and the Kardashians and how I want to “travel one day just to get away” and how I love babies and spaghetti and everything. Yes I own Jordan’s and a fuzzy coat (two of them, of course), I am obsessed with LUSH and makeup, I watch Friends on Netflix religiously, I tweet about useless nonsense, I am the epitome of everything everyone thinks is wron...

Four, almost five months ago, my life changed. I would say it changed forever but I still don’t know if it’s changed forever or just for now. For the people that know me, this story is probably boring, sad, and over-told. I get that. It’s probably annoying to hear about the worst day of someone’s life over and over and over again. And I can see how the feelings that come from someone who is suffering can become a burden on those around them. They just want to help. I know that. They feel defeated when they can’t. My whole life, everything has been almost laid out perfectly, like an outfit on my bed, or paint swatches for the spare bedroom. I have made easy choices, had complete control, had complete understanding of yesterday and tomorrow and the future. Then I crashed my car. Pretty badly. In the moments after the crash, hanging upside down, suspended by my seatbelt with my legs squished underneath the dash, I felt myself change. The airbags were slowly deflating, and the l...

To the person I loved and lost, I couldn’t figure out how to tell you this with my words so I’m gonna do it the way I know best: writing. I want to ask you how you are. How you really are. I wanna tell your mom happy belated birthday, and pet your dogs. I want to give you back the shirt I borrowed that day after we came home from the lake, but I don’t because it’s my favourite and it reminds me of you. I want to hear what your friend from home has to say about last weekend, and I want to tell you about the crazy thing I saw on my drive home from school. I wish I could still rush home to tell you this kind of stuff. I want to sing to Taylor Swift in the car with you. I want to laugh about the fact that her one song sounds like it's saying "gotta lonely Starbucks lover." I want to tell you why it scares me to sing in the car these days . I want you to at least pretend to understand like you used to. I want to tell you that I ripped my favourite jeans and I got a...

I remember the day I realized that everyone grows up. My sister (who is substantially older than me and also the best person in the world) and I used to play dolls. Like Bratz, and Barbie’s, Polly Pockets (we chewed on their rubber clothes, lol), and Pet Shops. All of it. And we didn’t just play a little bit. We built mansions, cities even. We made names, had characters, left the houses up for days behind the couch and annoyed my mom, it was the kind of thing that any 6-year-old would only dream about. When she got a bit older, and realized that I worshiped the ground she walked on, she made up games for me like “maid” where I would do all her chores while she watched MTV Cribs. And “spa” where I would paint her nails and run a bath with candles lit. We also played “school” where she was my teacher and she made up awesome little projects for me to work on. She was nothing short of amazing and creative. I loved it. And older still, she started to do my hair and makeup. This w...

Those people. You know the ones. They're bad. They don’t call you unless they need something, they are socially unaware, they spend their days in self-absorbed harmony with themselves and those around them.  It’s the ones who are constantly raining on your parade. Forgetting to acknowledge your existence. Talking bad behind your back to mutual friends. Bad people. You know the ones. If you’ve begun to get a person in mind of who this may be for you, I’m sorry. But I have good news. I’m here to tell you it gets better. Growing up, that person for me was a lot of different people. And l’ll deny it if you tell anyone, but at one point, the bad person was me. But at other points in my life, I spent a lot of time wondering if, maybe I was the common denominator. Maybe I was the person who was the bad person to those around me. Well, my friends, I’ve realized a lot since then. For a long time, until maybe last year in fact, I was caught up in wondering, “why didn’t I ge...

I almost spoke my own death into existence. I won’t go into details (still suffering and it kinda hurts to talk about it!! Really good, all love!!) BUT, I’ve developed a theory. And in true scientist style, I’ve tested it over and over again. I’m positive this is science. So when you say things, like “I’ve never had that happen to me” and then you voraciously knock on a piece of wood, that’s kind of your way of speaking things into the universe and then stopping them from blossoming into existence. For example, one time I told my friend after she crashed her bike, “wow! I’ve never crashed my bike before.” And you can guess what happened the. Next. Day. So anyways as I laid in bed, bandages on my knees and an ice pack over my black eye, I thought, “it’s because I didn’t knock on wood.” Foolish, young me. Knocking on wood wouldn’t have changed a thing. It’s because I said it. Out loud. I. Spoke. It. Into. Existence. Now that I’m older, I look back and think about all th...

There is a conversation that plays in my head from time to time and although it was significant to me, I didn’t realize its power at the time. It goes like this: Me: “dad, if there is one thing you could go back and change in your life what would it be?” Dad: “I wouldn’t change anything.” Me: “okay but if you could do something different.” Long pause. Me: “dad?” Dad: “I would tell young me to stop caring what everyone thinks of me.” And he turned the TV on. The conversation was over for him. He said maybe the first thing that came to his mind so he could put the hockey game back on. For me, I replayed his words over and over and over. I had so much more to ask. But I thought to myself.... "but you don’t care what people think of you though” and that’s when it hit me.  I cared so much. Did I smile and say thank you? Did she like my picture? Do I look like I’m having fun? Is this outfit too much? Can I sit beside this stranger in class? Can I raise m...