one of the fun things about having a blog is that it’s an electronic archive of your soul. on any given day you can type a word or phrase into your website’s search engine and find all of your previous thoughts and feelings on said topic in a particular moment in time. it’s a time capsule of you. shawna from april of 2012. from april of 2013. and now april of this year. sometimes the yours truly of today is light years ahead of the version of me from two years ago. and yet, sometimes (most times), she’s exactly the same. she still struggles with the concepts of grace and self-love. of patience and faith. she just has better hair.

on sunday i had breakfast with BL -a girl who has captured my heart in so many ways over the course of our nearly two-year tenure as friends. as i was getting ready, i decided to slip on a bracelet she had given me last year for christmas. most days, i’m fairly simple with my accessorizing -my giant pearl earrings and my marc jacobs watch are usually all i need for my outfit to feel complete. but something told me to add the touch of copper to my right wrist. it was probably the fact that i was going to be seeing the gift-giver in person that day, but i couldn’t help but feel that in this particular juncture, its stamped sentiments were also apropos. you see, this isn’t just any bracelet. it’s a tristan prettyman original.

from tristan’s personal tumblr account (which is kind of amazing, p.s. she’s an exquisite writer):

What started out as an idea, that was only supposed to be 25 bracelets, turned into well over 1,000.

 

“Maybe The Best Hasn’t Happened Yet” was my mantra for so long. It came from my song Never Say Never. A song that wrote itself when I thought I had nothing more to say. Over the last 2 years, I have watched this mantra take off. Its become more than my mantra, its become yours. Your source of strength, and hope. That the best has yet to come, that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

 

My bracelet was the 1st copper bracelet we ever made. It went all around the world with me, from stage to stage. It was my hope. If I was having a bad day, when a guy I liked wouldn’t return my call, when I was tired, frustrated, lonely, and confused, I could always look down at my wrist and be reminded…Maybe the best hasn’t happened yet.

 

I got engaged Dec 4th, and shortly after that, I realized I had lost my bracelet.

 

Leah and I have made every single one of these bracelets from scratch, by hand and even I can’t believe that we have made over 1,000. I’m surprised our hands haven’t fallen off! Ha! But, when I meet someone at a show, when I get the chance to talk to someone who has a bracelet, it is ALL WORTH IT.

i am among the 1,000 recipients of tristan and leah’s “side project.” after learning of my borderline stalker obsession with TP, BL put in an order for me sometime last year. with the backlog, i didn’t receive it until christmas, but it was more than worth the wait.

“maybe the best hasn’t happened yet” has become one of my (many) mantras over the last year or so. when life has inevitably not always gone my way, and when the road has zigged when i had hoped it would zag, i’ve kept heart that my better days lie before me, not behind me. funnily enough, i wrote about this same topic a little over a year ago. and sitting on the other side of these last 16 months, i can say that there were more definitely better days ahead for that 27-year old -new friendships, auntiehood, trips to austin and nashville (twice!), and of course, lest i forget, that little jaunt to australia. and those are just the parts i’ve blogged about.

most noteworthy has been the growth of my relationship with my father. it has hit a level of effortlessness i honestly never believed it could achieve and i feel so incredibly lucky and grateful i get to do life with him again. gah, i get misty eyed just thinking about it!

just when i think i have life figured out, God throws me a curve ball. sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a not so good way. but right now, things are really spectacular. i am happy. truly happy. and the fact that i’ve arrived at this place of contentment only corroborates the fact that i believe my best days are still coming up over the horizon line.

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