WHO I WANT TO BE

I’ve recently been making a concerted effort to really be who I want to be. I think between years of the pandemic and simultaneously becoming a mom during that time, I kind of fell off the tracks. Especially now that I’m pregnant again, I realized I had been cutting corners in so many places in my personal life. I do believe sometimes you need a season or two where you’re not 100% your best– that’s normal and even necessary.

But… I swear I woke up one day and I was like, wait, this is just not who I want to be. I’ve always been pretty disciplined and I know I have it in me, but for whatever reason, I had been taking shortcuts at first for the sake of survival and then that became the habit, even when survival wasn’t the goal anymore. It’s been a long and slow process, but I think I’m– at the very least– getting back on track.

It started with this situation with laundry. I have historically been totally fine with laundry. It’s a chore that I didn’t think twice about before. And I had no problem doing it… yet the time it was taking me to fold the laundry kept going up and up. My system before would be to do all the laundry on one day, bring it all back upstairs at once at night, and fold everything while watching a Youtube video, listening to a podcast, or watching an episode of TV. I actually looked forward to it! Now I was waiting a day… or longer… to fold the laundry and knowing the pile of it was waiting for me was just this huge daunting task that grew and grew. It got to a point where last week’s laundry was still down there (I was just pulling things out as needed?!!?) when I went to do the next week’s laundry. That is not who I am and it’s not who I want to be.

From there I started taking this inventory of all the things, big and small, that I had fallen into the habit of that weren’t in line with the personal values I want to uphold. I have been slowly working on addressing the various things that were bothering me, like the laundry situation, and honestly after a couple of months, I feel like I’m more on track and more aligned with the person I want to be.

To be clear, I am still far from perfect and I’m giving myself a lot of grace during this season of life, but I’m really trying to look at myself in the mirror so to speak. This past weekend I felt like I had such a good balance of being who I wanted to be, while being okay with dropping a ball or two when I really was too tired. The biggest realization I had was that I felt significantly less guilt when I was genuinely unable to certain things, but knew I had put in my best effort where I could. I think this has contributed to an underlying current of not feeling myself. When I’m pregnant, I already don’t feel physically myself, so getting on top of things I can control has felt quite productive and positive!!