It’s been a transformative year! Now that the school year has started and I have emerged from the new baby fog, I’ve been taking stock of all the changes I’ve made since last September.
It was about a year ago when I started to feel discontent. Unhappy. Overwhelmed. There was so much chatter in my brain. I was unsettled after having my second child and I felt like I was drowning.
I go further in this blog post, but one of the greatest changes I made was getting off of all social media. Besides the obvious “not comparing myself to others”, I was no longer being exposed to countless reels feeding me ideas for crafts I would never make, recipes for meals I would never cook, or hacks for problems I never had to begin with.
This got me hours of my week back. This began a journey of aggressively needing being myself all the time.
I took one step further and got rid of all phone notifications that weren’t a text or a phone call. Then I unsubscribed from just about every email list. Then I started decluttering all the toys and clothes that didn’t feel like “me”. Then I lost 20lbs by mindfully eating and walking. Then I stopped doing pick-up orders and started going into stores, just to get some social interaction. I relentlessly conversed with strangers.
Last week, I stopped watching the news. “Someone will tell you if there’s a hurricane coming,” I was told. I don’t even live in hurricane country. I’m no longer exposed to images of suffering that I cannot help. I vote in every election, I engage with my community, I donate clothes and pick up trash. I help in the ways that I can.
When I think about the things that I want in life, when I list them out and break them down into their parts and I connect lines between them, what I’m searching for is peace. I’ve been on a journey to get there, and I think I’m getting weirdly close.
I look at my long-term goal list and Pinterest boards and I still feel like I have a long way to go as far as being where I want to be. I haven’t written as much as I have in past years, and that’s definitely left a vacuum in my life. I think the HCU and rise of AI has led to me retreating from posting here because of the drastic changes in SEO and the internet as a whole. When I remember that this blog started as an outlet and not a (small) source of income, I feel ready to write again.
I’m hoping to find my way back to posting here more consistently
O.
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