ABOUT ME
My name is Erin, and I'm so glad you're here! I'm a recovering perfectionist and a lifelong people pleaser. In my four-plus decades, I have constantly chased happiness and contentment for myself, but whenever I have found them, I haven't kept them long, frequently because I tend to put my own needs and wants secondary to those of others.
With the stressors of the pandemic and U.S. politics looming while dealing with a difficult baby who turned out to be on the autism spectrum, I lost control of my life. My kids' old clothes and toys cluttered our basement, receipts and paperwork piled up in the filing cabinet, and digital files littered multiple hard drives attached to my computer. Life became very stressful, and I no longer looked forward to waking up each day.
I started to resent motherhood, and sometimes I even regretted marrying my husband. At night after my kids went to bed, I binge watched shows from my teens and twenties like "Friends," missing my young adulthood and wishing life were different. I used Benadryl to sleep and chugged Mountain Dew to stay awake the next day. I even started wondering how peaceful death--what I temporarily saw as the ultimate rest--might be. I was desperately unhappy despite being exceedingly blessed.
I needed a place to write down and process my thoughts and also to see small steps become big results. At age 46, I knew I likely had more years behind me than ahead, and I wanted a different existence. One day, after another stressful encounter with a family member and while homeschooling through a Benadryl hangover, I started this blog as an offline journal to help me change my life.
Here, you will see the rough sketch of my plan to stop wasting my "one wild and precious life." (Hat tip to the lovely Mary Oliver for these inspirational words from "The Summer Day." That's an external link that opens in a new page, by the way.) I opted to take a page from the Thoreau playbook and simplify everything. What you see here are my thoughts and the steps--two forward, one backward--I took to enjoy my life again.
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