Here’s to Knowing Yourself, and to New Beginnings

I was shocked when I pulled up this blog and realized how long it’s been since I last wrote something here. I never intended to take such a long break. There were many times, early on, when I thought of something I wanted to post about here, but I just didn’t have the energy. And then I realized how much I needed the extra white space that not blogging added to my life, so I decided to leave it be, and that turned out to be a much-needed decision.

This has been a crazy year, to be sure. Here’s a quick recap of the highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be):

• In January my mom had a stroke. She spent a little over a week in the hospital and then they sent her home sick with a stomach bug, so my husband and I had a pretty intense first week of being her full time caregivers. Thankfully, things got easier for all of us once she got over that bug, and she made such great strides in her recovery that within a month she was able to mostly do for herself.
• A lot of drama ensued in the aftermath of the stroke which I’m not getting into here for the sake of other people’s privacy. I’ll simply say that it was eye-opening.
• For a multitude of reasons, my husband and I moved again toward the end of February, into a travel trailer in the middle of the country. God met my desire to try living tiny and to get a do-over at trailer life (following a stint living in an Airstream during my college years that didn’t go so well) in a way that demonstrated both His amazing grace and provision and his sense of humor.
• It turns out that, while living tiny is quite cozy and has many advantages, it’s sometimes a little too cozy for two introverts and also has a number of disadvantages. After nearly six months of this experiment, we’re both feeling ready for a house-sized home, and we’re currently in the process of looking for one.
• In the space of that six months I’ve managed to finish editing and eventually launch one novel, revise another, and get yet another a little more than half-way written.

But mostly, I’ve spent the last six months or so healing from a not insignificant amount of emotional trauma inflicted during that first drama-filled month of the year, and working to figure some stuff out. Mostly, I’ve been working to figure myself out. It’s been a journey that has included a lot of praying, a lot of reading–both the Bible and other helpful books–a lot of journaling, a lot of crying–both to God and to my husband (who has been the best friend and partner I could ask for in the midst of all of this, despite working through his own hurts) and silently to myself–and a lot of learning to just sit with my feelings and let them be, neither denying them nor trying to force myself to get over them too quickly.

And along the way I’ve discovered some very important things about myself, including lies I’ve been believing and allowing to shape my life, unhealthy behaviors and areas in my own soul that I needed to work on, and what is actually true about me and about my life.

One of the things I figured out, with help from the book Reading People by Anne Bogel (Disclaimer: that’s an Amazon affiliate link, and I’m required to tell you what you already know, which is that if you use that link to buy something I’ll get a tiny commission and you won’t get charged anything extra), is that as a certified INFP I tend to have boundary issues that sometimes make it hard for me to know where I end and other people begin. This can make me easy to influence and it means I have to be very careful about the influences I allow into my life. But it can also mean that sometimes I unconsciously latch onto other people’s dreams or visions and mistake them for my own, and also unconsciously mimic what other people are doing. Sometimes I catch myself imitating someone else’s mannerisms, or their voice or writing style, and it can be hard to figure out how much of what I produce is them and how much is actually me.

I bring this up because it bears on why I ended up taking such a long break from this blog. That little epiphany led to another one, which is that that’s what was happening with this blog and why I was so unsatisfied and exhausted by it. I had surrounded myself by these awesome lady bloggers and even though I really had no ambitions of my own to be a Capital-B Professional Blogger, I realized that I was mimicking what they were doing and pushing myself after a goal that wasn’t actually mine to go after, and I needed to just stop.

So I did.

And I took a long time, and I prayed a lot about it, and figured out exactly who I am, what I want, whether I actually want to be blogging, what I actually want to get out of it and, more importantly, what I hope to give by doing it.

So here I am, ready to get back in the saddle, armed with a lot more clarity and a much stronger sense of self and of purpose.

Don’t expect a regular or consistent post schedule. That was the deal I made with myself when deciding whether I missed this enough to take it up again: that I would post when I have time, if I feel like it, and if not in either case, I will have zero guilt about it, because this is not my job. I’m here for the joy of it, and because I want to share what I’ve been learning and what God has been doing in my life so that you might be ministered to, and because we were all made for fellowship and sharing and sharpening each other, not for tucking all of our thoughts quietly into the pages of a journal. Not that there’s not a place for that — I have a newfound love of journaling. Journaling has absolutely been giving me life during this season — but the wisdom I’ve gained deserves to be shared.

I’m not the same person I was the last time I posted here.

I look forward to letting you all get to know the new me.

And I hope you’ll stick around for it.

♥

PS – The pics are all from around the farm where we’ve been staying. Isn’t it beautiful here? It helps that I finally upgraded my phone to one with a decent camera. Here’s one more before I go: