Reclaiming

When I last posted in this space, almost three years ago, the Bearded One and I had just bought a house (and moved into it), I was halfway through a two-year master’s program, and I was in my second year of a school librarian job, where I was just starting to understand what my job could (and should) be.

And then I fell out of the blogosphere. I was intensely overwhelmed with everything that was going on, and something had to give. I felt like I should prioritize work and grad school over a writing project that I was mainly doing for myself. For the record, it was the right choice at the time, but I missed my writing. Of course, I was doing a fair bit of writing in grad school, but that’s wasn’t always as much fun. The Argumentation part of my Information & Inquiry class was a blast, though!

Anyway, I missed the routine of writing (and sharing my writing) regularly, but more than that I realized that I wasn’t always approaching life with the same lens I had developed when I was writing often. Instead of collecting quotes that inspired me and looking for lessons in everyday life, I was kind of floating through life with blinders on because that was what my burned out brain could handle. At times I felt guilty that I had abandoned my writing. I logged into this site a few times, and reacquainted myself with how it worked, and I even drafted most of this post about a year ago, but I never managed to get it posted. I think I was afraid to start again, because then I would feel pressure to keep going. But nothing ever gets done if it doesn’t get started.

So now, after two whole school years AND two summers without grad school, I feel like I’m recovered. I’m about to start year five in my current position with more excitement, optimism, and confidence than I’ve ever had in a job. My master’s program really did prepare me to deal with a lot of what I’m doing now (Thanks, University of Iowa!), and I have a great team to work with. But I’ve also gained a lot of knowledge, and have started learning to believe in my own abilities in the last few years. A supervisor at a previous job told me I had good instincts and that I needed to trust myself more, and I’ve been working on that for years–growing that moxie.

I’ve used some of the energy I’ve gotten back in my two years of healing from burnout to reclaim things that I used to see as parts of my…self-care? I started another Run Streak on August 7th, 2023 is two years old as of today!

I also started nurturing other parts of me–I’m playing rec league volleyball again, I’ve joined a pretty incredible community choir, and I’m on the Board for a local Farmers Market. And just under three weeks ago I decided to become a vendor at that Farmers Market, spent a week doing things like registering my “Doing Business As” name with my county and getting a sales tax ID from my state, and debuted my baked goods the following Saturday. Last weekend I added homemade magnets and a few pinback buttons to my offerings. And now I’m here, getting some of my thoughts down, and trying to retrain myself to be an observer–a commentator on life. I’m not sure what this site will look like going forward. I may not try to stick to a strict posting schedule like I did before. I’ll probably add a business page to it. I might try sharing some of my thoughts, observations, lessons in other formats (I’ve been wanting to try podcasting for ages!). But, for tonight, I’m going to see if I remember how to post.