I live in my own fantasy world, and after my nickname which comes from my initials (L.A.), I call it “Lala Land”.

I may only be 24 years old, but I am wise as f*ck.

*Updated June 2017. I have updated this page over a year later. I’m now 25.

*Updated November 9th 2017. I am starting to realise that it’s just assumed that by this age I should be wise. I’ve experienced a lot in these almost 26 years, more than most of my peers, but I am far from making my way through the traditional milestones we associate with being “grown up”.

*Updated July 26th 2019. I’m now 27. I can confidently say that now, especially in the past three months, since officially taking the step to move out with my boyfriend of now almost a year, I’m finally accepting and reaching the milestones of “adulthood” while enjoying the perks of being young.

Slow down people… We are supposed to treasure our 20s. This blog is about finding a balance between taking advantage of the years we have to explore, whilst making the wise choices which will positively affect our future.

Slow down people… We’re supposed to treasure our 20s. This blog is about finding a balance between taking advantage of the years we have to explore, whilst making the wise choices which will positively affect our future.
I’ve proven the Hollywood theory everyone believes that “these things don’t happen in real life” and have had a great deal of movie-like moments occur to me on a regular basis; some small, some funny, and some incredibly serious.
Since I was seventeen and left the nest for university, Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL) was my home base, yet I’ve made an effort to live different places and still plan to continue exploring the world.
I went to a school a few hours away from NOTL, but returned home quite frequently for home-cooked meals and someone else to wash my underpants. Oh and my Mum and Dad are awesome!

Seriously; ever since high school my Mum hosted “dinner parties” with my best girlfriends and me, serving us her famous chilli or spaghetti Bolognese and we’d proceed with games of our own version of Charades.

Side Note: I’m updating this after I just turned 30, and I’m sad to say, I no longer keep in contact with those ‘best girlfriends’. For the past couple of years, I’ve been outside ‘the group’. Although I feel the loss immensely, I am fortunate to still have my best friend since age 15, and a circle of friends I keep in touch with from university, and close friends from around North America.

My Dad remained a perfect father during my bratty, rebellious teen years, when he would drive me anywhere I wanted in the car while I sat there in silence blasting music he didn’t like. Now I talk to him so much in the car he probably wishes I’d shut up.

In the summers of university, I would do internships from 1-3 months in Milwaukee, Wisconsin- the land of big fat party animals who are proud of it. Despite my borderline eating disorder at the time which made me fear bratwurst and my dislike for beer, I belonged there.

During my third year of university I spent a semester in Sacramento, California. I met some great people and got heavily into the Gay Pride scene, flaunting the rainbow as my third favourite colour; the first being sparkles, and the second is pink.

I spent a year living in the British Virgin Islands from 2015-2016; it was a tropical paradise where I did my dream job writing and editing for a luxury property and yacht magazine. Why would I give it up? I guess you’ll have to read my blog and make a guess.

After this event, I spent a couple months back in NOTL, visited friends in the Cayman Islands and Florida, and then I landed this awesome job at a Sports Nutrition and Diet Supplement company. They gave me a contract as a Copywriter which ended sooner than expected. On the last day of the contract, it turned out they had another contract for me where I’d be running around babysitting the production of print advertisements. The experience I gained at this company was incredible, but sadly it came to an end in June, 2017.

I had to decide “What’s my next career move?” and “Where do I want to live?”. My choice was to move back home and desperately figure something out or throw myself to the wild and see where in the world life would take me.  Sometimes no plan is the best plan.

*Updated November, 2017

So I packed my bag for Europe. Instead of for a 2 week vacation to Barcelona and then the UK like I’d planned, I packed my bag for at least two months to see “where the wind would blow me”. This wind blew me to a legendary Party Hostel in Greece called The Pink Palace. This was an AMAZING summer. You can read all about it in my Eurotrip section.

At the end of August, 2017 I returned home and spent a couple months putting around and searching for my next opportunity to escape. It’s complicated and stressful trying to uproot your life and fill out a million forms only to come across complications you didn’t intend.

Long story, but I decided I’d stick around NOTL and not be in a hurry to leave again, if and when the time is right. For now, I am picking up work as a Freelance Writer and can pick and choose the writing projects I want to work on which will help develop my writing career.

I have yet to find a boyfriend who I can actually call a boyfriend and not just “this guy I was seeing” since my year-and-a-half relationship in high school… and that was just nuts- sorry Mike, you know our friendship is forever.

*Updated May 22nd 2018

Scratch the last thing I said about a boyfriend. At the time I last updated this, I was casually seeing a guy, but was still dreaming of my next adventure.

I decided to stay in my hometown, Niagara, when he brought home a puppy just after Christmas. I moved into his house and got a good, full-time job in March, 2018, after searching for two months. I gave up on my idea of travelling at the start of 2018 for a new kind of happiness. Sometimes I was scared because my heart was warm- a feeling I never felt before.

Side Note added December 30, 2021: I later came to realize that the ‘warm’ feeling in my heart was the desire for stability and a partnership. I was looking to fill an emotional void from years of being single. Once you find out what true love is, you realize you’ve never been in love before.

Things changed, things ended, and now I’m back to where I was in November 2017, at home in the house I grew up in. I’m single, although my heart still belonged to a gorgeous dog and the life I wanted with her owner. My job didn’t work out, and although I feel I have nothing left here, I’ve decided not to run away, focus on my writing, and who knows where the future will take me.

Things seem to repeatedly not work out, and I’d love to find some stability. But life is a journey, and rather than seeing an opportunity which has failed as a bad thing, the only way to get by is to think of all the possibilities your future holds.

*Updated November 24th 2018

I learned the lesson of sharing too much too soon, as I became familiar with the pattern of things not working out, so I waited to update my ‘About Me’ until I felt confident that something good has happened for a reason. Summer 2018 was hard, as I began to lose contact with my ex, saw less of our dog, and our friends. Of course, I still had “custody” of the pup whenever I wanted, and would take her to the beach, for walks, or back to my parents’ house, but it was obvious the relationship with her true owner was dead.

On the first long weekend in August 2018 when I was just about to give up, I went on a camping trip with some friends I met through my past living situation. My two girlfriends and I went on a slightly intoxicated walk after a potluck by the lake on the Saturday night of that weekend, and they said to me “things will get better”. They tried to reassure me, as I was still hurt from the damage I’d experienced.

The next day, we drove from my one friend’s cottage in a secluded area up North to his girlfriend’s cottage at a campground in Midland. I ended up meeting some beautiful eye candy who seemed to be just as confused with “adulting” as I was. We spent the night exploring the campground like two mischievous teenagers.

[Spoiler alert: That’s us in September 2018 at his cottage]

I was upset when I didn’t hear from him in the morning, and figured I’d just been ghosted after a night of Rum & Cokes with this guy who looked like he walked off a poster from Abercrombie & Fitch. Before I left the campground to go home, I went on a search for my missing sweater and saw him by his cottage; he said he’d lost his phone the night before, but had seen a pink sweater at the park, so my friend and I rode off in her golf cart to go find it. After I found my sweater, I realised if he lost his phone, he wouldn’t have my number….so I walked back and gave him a piece of scrap paper with my name and phone number on it (he says he still has it in the drawer in his bedroom).

Long story as short as I can make it, turned out he lived 50 min from where I live with my parents, so we went on our first official date on August 9th 2018. September long weekend, Labour Day, I went to his parents’ cottage where we met, and we’ve spent every weekend together since.

This guy is amazing, although it seems we’ve both met each other at times where we are both dealing with a lot of personal challenges. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been worth it. It’s like when I’d fallen down for the very last time and couldn’t pick myself back up, he pulled me up with his gigantic biceps, kissed me on the lips, and then ran into “The Labyrinth” and got lost, and David Bowie is now testing just how far I’ll go to make it to the castle and find him.

Oh my god I’m insane….. But if I had to describe this guy now I’d say, “He’s something between the rebellious brother of Prince Charming, and a scandalous Greek God. He’s that stereotypical Alpha-Make kind of dreamy, yet rough around the edges enough to relate to me.

Let’s hope this one works out. For now, I’m working, living at home in my childhood house with my parents… and well… I’ll take it day by day.

I recall over Christmas of 2019, entering 2020, we had a lot of those rough patches as I dealt with stress and controlling emotions.  Brendan had been working full time since the July and was supporting me both emotionally, and for the most part financially, as I continued to earn minimum wage at the tanning salon.

I received a spot on for a therapy program at one of Hamilton’s best hospitals. Knowing the program would be very intense, time consuming, and take a lot of commitment, I decided to decline the spot and postpone the program until after we went on a vacation… More than anything, I needed to get away and go on vacation.

We booked a trip to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, a place we’d both never been, at the adult’s only beachfront resort, RIU Republica. We booked the trip on February 8th 2020, to leave less than a month later on March 6th.

Somehow, despite all the challenges we been dealing with, we made a HUGE decision: the commitment to be together til ‘death do us part’. The night after we booked the trip, we decided the check out the resort’s website and I jokingly pulled up the ‘Weddings’ tab and said “hint, hint”.

We eloped, just the two of us, and planned it all in less than a month. I think one of the main reasons for why we chose to get married after only a year and a half of dating, and after all we’d been through together, can be captured in this line in the vows I wrote for Brendan:

“From the start of our relationship, we’ve held each other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”. We made a commitment to the vows of a traditional marriage long before we considered it an option. Therefore, I am confident we are meant to be married “til death do us part” – Lauren Charley, now ‘Lauren Long’.

On March 11th 2020, Brendan and I had a symbolic ceremony by a Minister on the beach at the RIU Republica. March 11th 2020 also just happens to be the day that the World Heath Organisation declared a global pandemic. When we returned to Canada, COVID-19 had swept it’s way into the country, and the world as we knew it changed forever.

Brendan and I both lost our jobs due to COVID within days of returning to Canada., Although financially we were set back for over a year, for the first three months after returning from our trip, we spent every day, all day together during the first lockdown. What was the ultimate test for couples and their relationships was a breeze for Brendan and I. We managed to create a schedule which involved waking up early and incorporated two to three daily walks where we discovered some beautiful places and waterfalls around Hamilton.

If COVID had happened during my single years, there is no way I’d have survived. With bars and nightclubs closed and restrictions on indoor gatherings, ‘single me’ would have not stood a chance, but newly married me couldn’t care less. Brendan and I are best friends, so he’s the only person I needed during those long months of quarantine.

Losing my tan was hard to deal with, same with what became of my hair-do, and of course, the gym would have been way better than my home-workouts and Brendan lifting weights in his uncle’s garage. However, all things considered, lockdowns weren’t as terrible for us as for a lot of people.

When salons reopened, I went back to work and I continued to work there between every one of the three lockdowns until July 2021. Brendan really suffered as the lack of work in his union kept him off for over a year, and he finally got back at the job he was waiting for in June 2021. His final part of electrical trade school was also postponed until the start of 2022.

I got a job as a minute-taker for board meetings in September, and another part-time job for a logistics company in October. Perhaps my proudest accomplishment was being able to write a property tour article for Our Homes magazine in the Winter 2022 issue.

Other than a trip in July 2021 to a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes, attending Brendan’s boss’s wedding in September, and of course, celebrating the milestone of my 30th birthday, 2021 was a fairly quiet year for us with the difference that we were ending the year with our goals back on track, unlike in 2020.

Despite all of the bad luck and challenges we experienced at the start of our relationship, after moving out, and of course, as a result of the pandemic, I remind myself daily that the universe has meant for us to be together, since we got our destination wedding literally the day the world changed forever.

Look out for more posts to fill in the stories and sections on Stuckinyourtwenties Blog, as well as my new blog site, Figuring out your Thirties.

My purpose of this blog is to address both serious and silly real-life situations with a humorous approach that makes us not all want to go and listen to Adel and drink mystery kook-aid at Charles Manson’s tea party after.

So have a laugh at my expense, and walk away with a lesson- it’s on me.

I wish you a pleasant day and a magical lifetime.

L.A Amelia (Lala)