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I started this blog in 2017 as a LulaRoe blog. I had been an LLR retailer for a year and was trying to grow my reach. Plus something inside of me wanted to get back to writing.
However, from the very beginning I had something else on my mind- my premature daughter.
She was born in late 2016. 14 weeks & 2 days early.
So, along with articles about why leggings are superior to jeans, (a point I have since gone back and forth on- let’s just all agree to not care what other people are wearing, ok?) I was writing about how to deal with a long term hospital stay, NICU terms to help new NICU parents, and how friends & family can help new parents who find themselves in the NICU.
Pretty much, because the blog didn’t have a defined main focus, I just started writing about stuff.
- Things to do in NC in the fall
- recipes I liked
- direct sales tips
- becoming more than “just mom”
- ….. and various other things that came to mind
Eventually, this smoothed out to being a mindset & wellness blog. Two things I’ve been working on in myself for years, that I had plenty to share about. It was great for a bit, but I slowed down and hit a writers block, in early 2019. I forced out a few decent articles after that, but when 2020 came stampeding in, I just stopped.
I focused on being a mom. I tried to distract my children from our reality of being home everyday. All day. Just us. I did a great job of this for a few months, with crafts and birthday parties for stuffies, and various other activities. And then I just crashed.
I crashed and I hid and I ate and I drank and I forgot everything I had worked on in my mindset. I stopped meditating. I ignored all the words I had previously written here, in this blog, about wellness. For both body and mind.
I got into a routine; take care of the kids by day, drink & binge watch tv by night. During this time, my husband had started a job working overnight which made numbing out in front of the tv all night that much easier.
I kept up a small candle business that I had started in late 2019, but barely. I certainly didn’t “grow” it as planned. In fact it was pretty much dormant March- August. I’ve spent the past 6 months as things started opening back up, trying to keep that spark going for the business & going through the motions with my kids back in school. Still not thinking about my wellness or my mindset.
Until my psoriasis became so bad that I had to look at what I was doing to myself. I had been ignoring the signs and symptoms of my auto-immune disease. It flares up based on stress and what I’m eating. When I took a minute to notice how bad my skin was getting, I saw that my body needs to be healed, and my mindset needs to be healed, and I realized I’m ready to do that.
Out of nowhere in the past week, while home sick with my kids, worried we had coronavirus (we didn’t) I decided to start writing again.
The truth is, I just love to write, and when I pigeon-hole myself into one genre because “that’s what will get you found on Google”, I freeze up after awhile. Because that’s not how I live my life.
I never finished college because I couldn’t decide what to major in. Not because I didn’t like anything, but because I wanted to do it all.
I have been a part of 5 different direct sales companies. Not because they weren’t working, but because I liked them all, and wanted to share them.
I have taken Mini-Me Yoga classes to teach yoga & meditation to kids, taught myself candle-making, taken herbalism classes, learned to macrame, become a reiki practitioner, studied feng-shui, studied nutrition, and a multitude of other things over the past several years.
Not because one or another didn’t interest me enough to stick to it, but because I want to know and do it all.
This quote popped up in my Facebook feed recently:
When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break & he asked those kind of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not good at ANY of them.’
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before. ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you have all of these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement- oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.
Kurt Vonnegut
When I saw it, a lightbulb went on in my head.
This is me. I enjoy things & I don’t have to ‘win’ to enjoy them. But still, somewhere deep down I always consider myself a failure if I don’t master it. I’m a “failure” because I didn’t pick a major and finish college, I’m a “failure” because I keep changing my blog’s focus and never narrow it down. Then when I tried, I fell into a writer’s block.
Except not anymore.
Now, I’m a person interested in learning & trying a bunch of things. And since I love writing, and I love sharing- that’s exactly what I will be doing on this blog. Writing about the things I have learned, or will learn. The things I do, the things I use, and of course, the things I love. Or don’t love. And I will be sharing all of that with you.
Enjoy, the NEW Owl Be Me.
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