About a year and half ago I was desperately unhappy. I hated my life- I didn’t like where we lived, I felt like I was failing as a stay-at-home-mom, I hated my body. I felt lost. I was bored and overwhelmed at the same time. I was so unhappy I thought that something must be wrong with me, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just buck up and be grateful for all the blessings I had, why I couldn’t just be happy.  Maybe part of it was my marriage, which at the time wasn’t that great either. I felt really down about life and myself and no matter what I did or how hard I tried I couldn’t pull myself out of it.

So I started seeing a therapist. One thing I learned about myself (or re-learned, because I think I was already aware of this on some level) was that I need intellectual stimulation to thrive. I need to be reading and learning and engaged with the world around me to feel happy and fulfilled. Another thing that came up a lot was writing. I’m a slow thinker, but writing helps me understand myself as I sort through my thoughts and put them down on paper. And so I started this blog, both to help me work through my thoughts and to give me something that exercised my brain a little more than reading “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” over and over again. Writing here on and off for the past year has filled both of those needs for me. The writing itself has served as a sort of therapy for me.

When I wrote Mom Guilt I had to confront some of my own parenting insecurities, and posting it made me feel both lighter and exhilarated. Writing This Is What Survival Looks Like helped me feel like a strong and capable mother even when John was working out of town and I was holding down the fort by myself. A Little Bit of Marriage Advice was written as John and I were going through marriage therapy and pulling our relationship out of a rut. My post on my diaper bag and one called And the Stars Began to Burn are my most popular posts that haven’t been shared on Facebook- which means that strangers who stumbled upon my blog actually read them (and liked them!). Knowing that people- strangers- are reading what I’m writing opened up the world a little more, it made me feel a little more important and powerful. This was a timely lesson for me, as my previously mentioned post was all about my struggle to find and own my voice.  Where Am I At Home in the World was the result of something close to my heart that I had been thinking about for a long time, it was another post that made me feel a little lighter after hitting that publish button. Both my Thrive List and Things I Thought I’d Know by Now served as self-reflection, and my growing collection of homeschooling posts are a way for me to organized my own thoughts on how we approach home education. Probably of my favorite things to write were my monthly reads and kid lit posts because it gave me an excuse to talk about something I really loved that I don’t really talk about too much in my day to day life.

But ever since this summer I find myself wanting (or needing) to write less and less. I’ve been sporadic because I just haven’t felt the pressing need to write through anything. Which I think is a good thing, because it means that mentally I’m in a healthier space. And I am. Moving into a house I love triggered something in me, and that followed by marriage counseling served as a sort of snowball effect, spilling over into the other areas of my life. I still have days where I’m really unhappy, where I struggle with feelings of doubt and insecurity. I still really struggle with body image and weight loss. But none of these things are crippling. I can handle them now, I’m better able to pull myself up after a bad day or week.

All this is just to say: I’m not sure what direction my blog will take in the future. I feel like its sort of fulfilled the purpose for which it was created. What I need to determine now is whether or not I still want to write for the pure enjoyment of it. Because I do really like writing. I’ll never be a published author like I thought I would when I was a child, but writing will always serve an important role in my life. I’m just not sure how much of that writing will be done publicly on my blog.

I’m taking a little break from blogging, and from the expectation of blogging (so that I don’t feel guilty when it doesn’t happen), while I figure it out. I need to take some time to figure out if I want to write, how often, and about what.

If you’ve read a few of my posts, thank you so much for stopping by. If you’ve commented or liked any of my posts I can’t even express how much it means to me. 

I’ll probably be back in the new year. Meanwhile, I wish you a very merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years.

*I accidentally deleted some of the photos I attached to my older posts, so if you follow the links above and happen to come across some where the photos are still missing, I apologize! I have every intention of fixing that… eventually.