Reflection . . . Reinvention . . . Recovery . . . Anne Takes A Pause

Greetings to AOC friends and readers. I am taking this time to reflect on my own personal priorities and the relevance of my actions on a daily basis. Last Saturday I lost my best friend for three decades and my former business partner — Robert Rothschild — to a particularly aggressive fight with cancer. I became his daily caregiver and patient advocate in a battle that bordered on the absurd in the scope of its complications.

My GlamTribale business is flourishing. We will next open at The Marketplace @ Teaberry in Cape May County on April 1, taking a space of about 200 sq. ft. The time required to maintain AOC has prevented me from fully developing the GlamTribale online business. This is now a priority.

For the last four years I’ve worked through a very serious gym injury, complicated by a terrible fall. I’m in the home stretch of a full recovery, if I just spend 1-2 hrs. a day in the gym. Over the past two years, I’ve lost 35 pounds of weight gained with this sedentary existence — walking on a cane for 18 months in 2010/11 doesn’t burn a whole lot of calories. I have 15 pounds to go to be back where I am happiest with my physical self. In Anne speak, I will have reachieved babe status — a physical state that is important to my own well-being. Like Jane Fonda and Helen Mirren, I believe women can be sexy at every age.

Lastly, I want my love life to again become a high priority in my daily existence. For multiple reasons, I’ve had to shelve the importance of my private life to deal with all these other issues.Those days are over.

My life and identity had become far too digital, and I seek to rectify that reality. My relevance as a woman is about far more than how many FB friends I have, how many Pinterest followers, etc. I’ve always rebelled against those statistics — refusing to cultivate them — but now I’m in a state of complete and total rejection of these statistics as validators of anything important about myself.

I haven’t yet decided where AOC fits into this list of priorities. Most likely, it will return to being a smaller, more personal journal as it was from 2007-2009. Those articles and reflections continue to be read, so many years later.

For right now, I’m taking time to process the death of my dear friend, the importance of good health in our lives, my firm commitment to positive sexuality and women’s rights, the development of GlamTribale and reconnecting with old friends while making new ones.

Sending love. ~ Anne