It’s been a summer of change around here. Not the kind of change that whacks you over the head and drags you off to a new life but the kind that subtly seeps in, pushes and pulls and tugs at your insides for a while, leaving you to wonder if you’re losing your mind. Insecurity seeps in. Clarity seeps out. Moments of overwhelm come fast and furious and you wonder how you ever thought you had a grip on anything solid in the first place.
And then, one day, you wake up and it’s different. The shift has occurred. You remember you can chose your perspective aand the perspective you chose actually feels right. And honest.
I’ve spent the last 10+ weeks running my first ever Finding Your Muchness After Babyloss online program. Together with psychologist Julie Bindeman and 12 incredible women, I found myself engrossed emotionally in these journeys.
I thought the journeys would belong to the women in the course. I planned to accomplish a whole host of other things while the course was in progress, but then, I accomplished almost none of them. For months I told myself I was lazy. Unfocussed, overwhelmed… all nonsense, I’m now giving myself permission to admit. That course had me on an emotional journey as well and my lack of engagement in too much else was just my way of honoring that journey. Geez. Not so complicated in retrospect but last week it sure had my feathers in a pinch.
Anyhoooo, I was so caught in a dysfunctional headspace and poor perspective that I told my husband I need medication to manage my self-diagnosed and never tested nor treated ADD. I even went to a shrink and asked her to give me some pills. She told me I had to have therapy first. So I went. Twice. And what I walked away with was a reminder to get off my ass do the shit that needs to get done. And also, that blogging is great therapy. It got me through the worst time of my life. – Well, that’s not 1000% true. I didn’t blog right after the loss, nor in the depths of my grief. At those times I just spent every waking minute in online chat rooms for loss moms, learning how to feel.
But then after that I blogged. And lord, when I’m doing that on a regular basis- it might be better than therapy…. though it might also create a need for therapy… but only when I overthink. And worry about what people are thinking of my writing. Man, that’s such a major buzz-kill.
A few years back I took an online business course and the first thing it pounded into our heads was to get inside the heads of our readers. There was a 15 page assignment designed to help us get into the heads of our readers. And I attempted to do it- I did…. many times, but I could never finish it. And the more I tried to get into the head of my reader, the more outside my own head I felt. The more I started writing for other people- Imaginary people I was supposed to be creating – instead of for myself and the actual people who seemed to be reading my ramblings even when they made no real sense and had no ALL IMPORTANT CALL TO ACTION!!! (The golden goose of online business, in case your wondering…. You must ALWAYS have a CALL TO ACTION…. see yours at the bottom of this post…. if you make it that far…. I know… I’m rambling….)
Last week I went to a little group blog-planning session and with 8 other women we talked about blog subjects and how our blogs can help us build our businesses and after listening to me explain my blogging conundrum (who am I blogging for? Who is my reader? blah blah blah….) the group basically set me straight. They said “You blog about Muchness. Your Muchness. Other people’s muchness. Just go with that. And have fun”
This Blog Posts OFFICIAL CALL TO ACTION:
Please, comment below and let all 6 readers of this blog know how you proactively switch gears to get out of a bad cycle of self-doubt, overwhelm or overthinking.
