The evolution of Sara Meets World

This blog originally started under the name Live by Ladybugs in 2010 as a way for me to share experiences and reflections of my journey into adulthood. A 25-year-old free spirit at the time, I loved the idea of snapping photos with my new smart phone and sharing stories of my travels, the people I met, and the lessons I was learning along the way.

In 2012, I received a Masters in Social Work and certificate in International Social Work from Tulane University, began working within the U.S criminal justice system, served underprivileged communities, and took an active role in social reform. These experiences paired with my zest for exploring new places and cultures gave me an expanded perspective of the world and my role in it. I developed a new understanding of my strengths, struggles, identity and beliefs. My posts about growing up and traveling the world expanded into reflections of life lessons that I was learning in my own backyard. With this, Live by Ladybugs became Sara Meets World in 2016.

Around the same time that I rebranded my blog to Sara Meets World, I was diagnosed with autoimmune disease and multiple coinfections, which led to waves of debilitating symptoms, months bedridden, and multiple threats to my longterm functioning. I tried to write several times between 2016-2019, but my energy and focus turned predominantly toward surviving and healing. In 2019, I lost my entire blog while in an intense state of chronic brain fog. In short, I forgot to update my billing information at the time of the domain renewal. Every post and all my work in creating the growing blog platform had vanished.

​My health began to stabilize in January of 2020 and, while I knew the symptom management would be lifelong, I had big plans in store for celebrating my improved functioning throughout the year. I was scheduled to be married that April, take my first two trips abroad since my diagnoses, and rebuild the relationship connections that became distant in the years prior. That March, the world shut down to manage the Covid-19 pandemic and my limitations continued. You can read about my transition from my health crisis to the pandemic here.

Despite the new restrictions with the pandemic, I was determined to regain control of my life and continue rebuilding my physical and mental strength that had been suffering. In the late spring of 2020, I began searching for and consolidating posts that I had written as a guest writer on various blogs over the years. I salvaged what I could, created a new website, and started again. Sara Meets World became Sara Lives Well during this time – in part because someone took my domain name and I didn’t want to pay to get it back. Also, living “well” underscores the mission I’ve always had while “meeting” the world and navigating my way through adulthood. I published this platform in June 2020 and officially relaunched the blog in December 2020.

Seven months after launching Sara Lives Well, I couldn’t get Sara Meets World out of my head. I couldn’t get into a rhythm of writing, because the theme wasn’t quite right for me anymore. As a result, I purchased the Sara Meets World domain with the .blog extension, which happened to still be available (since I lost sarameetsworld.com in 2019).

Sara Lives Well lives on as a clean living + wellness business highlighted through Sara Meets World. It shares education, resources and personal stories about mind-body wellness, conscious living, and eliminating toxicity. SLW strives to empower every person to be a conscious consumer, informed thinker, and to take a mindful, intentional approach to the health of themselves + the world. The act of living well encompasses a person’s physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual components.