Grieving Daughter Finds Note In Fossil Purse While Thrifting
Unexpected Thrift Store Find
Photo of a little girl with her father and a black purse.
TikTok/Abrielle Clausing
On January 13, 2021, Abrielle Clausing's world fell apart. Her father unexpectedly passed away from Covid-19. As anyone who has experienced grief knows, the journey isn't a straight one. It ebbs and flows with some days being significantly harder than others.
It was during a "particularly hard grief week" when Abrielle, 24, decided to embark on some retail therapy. She used to love thrifting with her dad, and no one loved a good deal more than he did.
However, she didn't just want to shop for the sake of shopping, she had a very specific item she wanted in mind.
"My sister and I decided to go thrifting and I told her I wanted to find a vintage Fossil brand purse," she explains in a now-viral TikTok video.
And wouldn't you know, Abrielle did indeed end up finding "the cutest vintage Fossil brand purse" - seriously what are the chances?
And as if that wasn't serendipitous enough, it was about to get a whole lot more remarkable.
Inside the purse was a handwritten note:
"When you read this you will be far from me in miles but not in my heart. I'm here. I love you."
Whelp.
She immediately took it as a sign from her beloved dad.
"I knew it was from him," she told People. "I always check the inside of the bag before I buy it to make sure it’s in good condition. When I stuck my hand in it, I felt the piece of paper and when I took it out and found the note, I read it out loud to my sister."
"When I saw the note, it just confirmed that he was with us," she added. "He’s always with us."
Response To The Viral TikTok
TikTok · abrielleclausingAbrielle's heartwarming video has garnered nearly one million views and over 1,000 comments and it's making believers out of every single one of us.
"I'm so afraid that death is final and we just stop existing. But some things can't be explained. There has to be more out there!!"
"This was def him 🥹💙"
"I’m literally crying so hard. Someone would have had to carry me out of the thrift 😭"
"I'm honestly at a loss for words. Wow. Just wow."
Even Fossil weighed in, writing, "What a beautiful note to find. Your dad's love will always be with you. Sending you and your family a big, warm hug."
Her TikTok also opened the floodgates for others to share the signs they've received from lost loved ones.
"My brother passed away & years later I was at a checkout line in the store & at the cash register was a young school photo of him that someone left.... never made sense but I'll never forget it."
"About 30 seconds after bursting in tears thinking about my grandpa a car merged in front of me and the license plate was his name and his age when he died 😭😭"
"When my mom passed, days after I found an email that not me nor my sister had opened or read before. It was an email my mom sent us 4 years before with the message “open it when I’m gone, love, mom”. It had a beautiful letter as an attachment."
Love Lives On
The note Abrielle Clausing found in a Fossil bag while thrifting is now part of a cherished collage.
People.com/Abrielle Clausing
Abrielle has given the note a place of honor, right smack in the middle of a framed collage of her favorite sayings and things.
It's a beautiful reminder that the love she shared with her dad lives on, even though he is gone.
And whether you believe in fate or not, you have to admit the universe had an uncanny way of showing up just when she needed it to.
After all, what are the odds that a stranger penned a note with the exact words she needed to hear, placed it in the exact bag she was looking for, AND that bag ended up in the exact thrift store she was shopping in? Pretty astronomical.
And yet, here we are.
Life is full of unexpected, magical moments that often happen when we least expect it. And sometimes those moments bring us the comfort and connection we need most, reminding us that love...is never truly lost.
The 3 Most Overrated Personal Development Habits
“How to Do Everything You’ve Ever Wanted in Half the Time and with Less Effort”
The personal development sphere is known for its rather sensational claims, even if a lot of it really does work.
However, there are some personal development habits that are pretty overrated, be it something that’s preached to be the perfect productivity vehicle for all or an exercise that isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems.
It’s important to work on yourself but it’s also important to know what the truth is. And, with the advent of digital media, it’s become harder to tell between what’s real and what’s marketing.
Here are the most overrated development habits:
1. Meditation isn’t a panacea
As someone who has taught meditation for several years, I can attest to its power.
Sometimes, that power appears almost mystical in nature. However, images abound of blissed-out 20-somethings sitting serenely on top of a giant freaking hill.
How they get there apparently with full makeup and without breaking a sweat we’ll never know but one thing is for certain: this, often, isn’t what meditation feels like (and, no, I don’t advise you to climb a hill or mountain just to meditate).
Sometimes, meditation is great and truly instills in you a sense of peace and serenity. However, often, it feels like you’re being dragged out of your own skin.
The purpose of meditation is the realization of truth, much in the same way that a scientist studies the connection between basic elements of reality to find out how things work.
First and foremost, the realization of truth requires you get past yourself and that means overcoming years of subconscious programming and an internal dialogue that is often almost villainous in nature. So, when you sit down to meditate you have to deal with a lot of crappy things that rise up from below the surface including past trauma and issues of low self-worth.
But more than just the fact that meditation isn’t this perfectly wonderful experience, it isn’t a panacea.
Do a quick search online and you’ll find pages of articles on the benefits of meditation, the first and most prominent of which have a laundry list of positive effects. But everyone responds differently to meditation itself and each meditation style. While some might find serenity, others find nothing but struggle. Plus, some of the purported benefits, depending on where you read, are outright myth.
The practice is always worthwhile, more worthwhile than almost anything else you can do for your mental well-being, but it’s not always easy and it’s not some perfect cure for all of life’s ailments.
2. Rising early isn’t best for everyone
One of the most popular ideas in modern personal development culture is that of rising early. Early rising, many will tell you, is the meditation of productivity.
Wake up an hour or two earlier and you’ll evolve into a higher lifeform, one which doubles its speed and amplifies its mental faculties several times over. At least, that’s what most articles online make it sound like.
Waking up early is said to not just give us some extra time each morning but offer a perfect kind of solace, the ideal environment for productivity and creative thinking.
And it’s hard to argue against when countless big-thinkers and notable authorities rep the habit and said benefits, from Tony Robbins to Oprah Winfrey and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
However, the problem is the assumption that just because something works for others that you admire or would like to emulate the success of, it will work for you.
But there’s ample anecdotal evidence that, if you take the time to look around, some people just work better as night owls.
I’ve done both and even purposely shifted between the two to study the effects on my body and mind. And I can say from personal experience that both have their benefits and drawbacks.
All you can is test out each and see what feels better for your own body and mind and, most specifically, how they affect your productivity and creative thinking.
3. Making personal development too much about you
Personal development is about improving, well, yourself. In case you didn’t already know that.
However, one of the most prevalent mistakes is to make your own personal development all about making yourself better isolated from the rest of the world.
In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about the habit of making personal development only about yourself and ignoring how effectively you perform with others.
The pursuit of personal excellence isolated from others is a somewhat egotistical fantasy as true progress requires that you work closely with others at almost every stage of your development.
Sure, there are domains and skills which require strictly self-improvement in terms of your own individual productivity (perhaps more than ever), such as focus and maximizing your ability to tune into your creative voice.
However, you can’t accomplish any great goal or dream on your own and the better you work together with others, from your communication to collaboration, the more likely you are to be successful. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you don’t work well together with others and work to improve your ability to do so, you’ll be severely handicapped.