Is it possible to be both incredibly overwhelmed, but also enoying the season? I think it is in the fall in the Northeast.
Originally this week, I was supposed to be at She Podcasts Live, but the conference was postponed until June of 2023. But my husband still took the week off so I have a bit more breathing room than I’ve had in a while to hopefully catch up (as I say every week).
We’ll be getting to know one another over the course of this podcast I hope, and in doing so let me give you a bit of a heads up as to what you can expect. Since this blog and podcast is all about following my own creative whims, I don’t always know what type of blog post or episode I’ll want to write, but I can tell you there will be some recurring themes, topics, and even names mentioned. So before we go further, I’d like to introduce you to a few supporting characters you’ll hear about probably pretty frequently.
Greetings from burnout! Well, hopefully not burnout yet, but I’m in a particularly stressful chapter and I wanted to give a quick update within this tiny pocket of time I have.
I’m knee-deep in week 3 of no camp, school, or babysitting. It’s summer with some heat waves and it’s really draining day to day right now. I put up an out-of-office post on Instagram, though I’m still doing my client work and answering emails. But that’s the bare minimum I can do.
It’s been about 3 weeks since writing my post about some recent weight gain and my feelings about it and here’s an update.
I got on the scale for the 2nd time since that post and found I was down 4 pounds! After coming off a particularly uncomfortable period that included a lot of water retention, it was a relief to wake up today feeling better and well enough to get on the scale.
Ghosting — The tactic of just disappearing and never talking to someone again, most often used in romantic situations but can really apply to any abrupt end to communication with another in order to get away.
Microdosing — Taking in small amounts of a drug in order to sample the benefits without too many adverse effects.
I'm personally not a fan of one and the other, well, that's up to you and your doctor. But can I make a case for this ADHD reset I made up called Micro-Ghosting?
This post is written from the perspective of my personal ADHD experience and should not be taken as medical advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
Ever since being diagnosed with ADHD at 30, I've spent the last 9 years learning how my brain works. The more I learn about the traits associated with ADHD, such as executive dysfunction and trouble starting overwhelming projects, the more I began finding ways of coping. In the beginning it was medication and I think that gave me a good handle on what my brain was capable of without all the extra noise.
CW: DIETING, WEIGHT-LOSS
It’s been about 3 weeks since writing my post about some recent weight gain and my feelings about it and here’s an update.
I got on the scale for the 2nd time since that post and found I was down 4 pounds! After coming off a particularly uncomfortable period that included a lot of water retention, it was a relief to wake up today feeling better and well enough to get on the scale.
CW: DIETING, WEIGHT-LOSS
This post is an excerpt from my journal. I got on the scale to see a higher number than I was used to and I found myself spiraling a bit and letting the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee in my head run amok before finally deciding to journal it out and see if there was a logical explanation and get curious about it.
Some Background: I hosted a weight-loss comedy podcast called Hate to Weight where I lost 100 pounds while working with an eating coach and becoming familiar with intermittent fasting and intuitive eating. The show went on indefinite hiatus a few months into the pandemic because my cohost and I decided to go into maintenance mode, plus our time became more and more limited to work on our own podcast.
Excerpt:
For most of the pandemic, I stayed within a certain weight range and even lost an additional 10 pounds in 2021 without really changing much.
Fast forward to June of 2022 and I found myself this morning on the scale looking at a number about 20 pounds higher than this same time last year.
I'm not reacting very body-positive or body-neutral, which is what I've been trying to shift more toward. But I'm not exactly happy to see a much higher number than I’ve been used to since 2020 either. This is the highest my weight has been in 2 years and I'm having some big feelings I'm working through.
First off, thank you to Anuj Agarwal for including Emily: Out Loud in Feedspot’s list of the Top 20 Introverted Mom Blogs!
Secondly, seeing that inspired me to write a quick update (Note: I thought it would be a “quick” update when I began writing it. My writing brain had other plans.)
After a long March spent grieving and healing from a friend’s passing, on April 1st, I woke up feeling a bit lighter than I had in weeks.
I’ve always loved April. It’s my birthday month and it usually signals the end of our long, cold winter and the beginnings of Spring. It’s only the first week and it’s been such a change to hear birds loudly chirping in the mornings again and little buds start appearing on the gray, bare trees we’ve been staring at for months on our drives.
I didn’t really write that much in March. I found out a few days into the months aththat a good friend had passed away. She was part of a years’-long group text with 6 or 7 friends from my hometown. It’s been absolutely earth shattering for all of us. In the weeks that followed, we saw one another at the funeral and have been staying in touch with one another to check in and support one another as we heal. It hasn’t been easy.
I learned one thing about writing, whether it’s for a blog post, social media post, or in general — don’t write from the pain. It’s messy, it’s raw, it’s reactive, and nine times out of 10, I want to delete it and never show it to the world. I think we all have those parts of ourselves, especially when going through something heartbreaking like losing a friend.
No one prepares you for when a close friend dies suddenly. I didn't need to search hard for what gave me Courage in March — my fear of losing someone close was realized and it threw me into a tailspin. Courage was what helped me find self-compassion to sit with the big heavy feelings and know I could make it through.
February’s focus was Decluttering — check out my past posts if you missed the start of the challenge and how I turned the challenge into a game 😉
I knew going into it that it wouldn’t be easy and it would most likely stretch into March. I wasn’t wrong. We had high hopes of decluttering and painting my daughter’s room for her birthday, but we underestimated just how tough it would be to do that, given our busy schedules and energy.
Seriously considering going to grad school and opening up to my partner about this little daydream.
It’s been an inkling of a thought ever since graduating college, but I had a hard enough time finally deciding on a major in college that making a commitment to even higher education would mean finding something that I truly, truly wanted to go into tons of debt and give my precious time to.
Even writing that, I am amazed folks do this. I’m pretty sure ADHD is why I was never able to give a consistent answer to the question, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
For a while, I told myself that I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up because back in the 1980s, no one had ever heard of a podcast. And maybe that’s true. But also, I’ve started questioning if I wanted to be in podcasting for the long haul and what that would look like.
This Month's focus has been decluttering and I'm so excited to see folks who follow me on Instagram getting inspired and motivated by my one-task-a-day approach!
When I decided to tackle decluttering as my February Focus, I knew my house was in need of some cleaning and I didn't want to wait until Spring. February seemed like a great month to get going — we're over the holidays and now just trudging along until Spring. We've been in our house for so long and, I'll be honest, it's been incredibly hard to motivate myself to clean during the pandemic. I'm already so exhausted from working, childcare and the regular maintenance of the house that doing anything more is like pulling teeth for me.
This has been a long-time coming. Two years, really.
I’ll be honest, when we went into the pandemic, I was determined to get rid of excess everything to save my energy. Survival Mode felt temporary at that point and things like decluttering became something that turned from a regular thing to something I would do when everything was over and done with.
As you can imagine, that strategy didn’t work out too well. It’s not two years later and what started as small piles have become near-avalanches. It’s nowhere near what you’d see on shows about Hoarding Disorder, but every time I watch those shows, I can see that if I don’t stop and pay attention, those piles-turned-avalanches will meld together to form walls of just STUFF!
I wasn’t expecting to have an easy January, especially doing a challenge that’s really not in my wheelhouse.
Oh sure, I can eat. And you may even be surprised that I took a few semesters of home ec in high school and can follow a recipe. Unlike Moira and David Rose, I actually know what “fold in the cheese” means!
But I really, really don’t like to cook. It’s not my favorite way to spend time. This has been such a weird phenomenon for me because I really do enjoy delicious food with lots of variety. But unless I can find it in the freezer section or it doesn’t involve a whole lot of prep and juggling multiple preparations at once, I’m not interested.
Taking my podcast off Spotify and posting about it.
Yes, this was scary for me. I knew how some folks in my life felt about Joe Rogan and even though I didn’t have the time nor energy to fight with people on the internet, my hyperfocus this weekend ended up being preparing for a fight, just in case.
Actually, all that preparation came in handy when I was in my DMs a lot more than usual over the weekend talking to other indie podcasters who were thinking about doing the same thing. Many of them ended up doing it, too!