Month: May 2020

The key to figuring it out !!!

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I have been going through a lot of stress with my YouTube channel lately. I have not been happy with how it was going and just was ready to give up . I was having issues with lighting , and staying in frame, and just finding time to make my long videos.

After spending time talking to our youngest son and pouring my heart out to him, I really let it all go. It is funny how that works. Once you let it all go, you free up space that those thoughts were taking up in your head. I found I could think again and actually come up with a solution to  my problems. Just letting it all out, talking it out, that was the key. I had been holding it all in for a while.

I was making way too long of videos. Way. Too . Long. My average watch time is less than three minutes and yet my videos were up to an hour, and at least a half hour. In other words, way too long.

But how do I do what I do in less time ? I use my blog. My crafty blog. I do a post there with pictures of either what I am listing , or step by step for the tutorials and then do a short video ten minutes or less doing a quick run through.  I can link them to each other and problem solved. People can watch a short video, and can see what is going on, and no more rambling videos. Well, I can still ramble a bit if I am not careful , but I am watching it  !!

I feel like a huge weight is off of me. I can still have fun with my channel. I am writing again, which I needed. And when I am ready in the next day or two, I can  start doing tutorials that people can actually see. Not out of frame, not bad lighting. That will be so beyond awesome.

I am very excited about it !!!

I plan to do some gardening in the next few days, I will make sure to share it here, I am really late getting started, but I will do what I can !!

I hope everyone is having a good week !!

Thanks for stopping by !!

Stephie

 

The journey is longer than I thought

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Wow, I just spent the better part of the day going through this blog, deleting drafts and posts that were just links . I am shocked that the journey I am on, has been ongoing for a very long time. I started writing in this blog in 2012. Funny how we think something we are going through is new, but it is a situation we have been dealing with for many years.

Distractions work. They honestly do. I was baby sitting our youngest grand daughter for two years. It kept me busy four to five days a week. It is funny how that simple change in my life took me away from my self searching so that when the baby sitting went away, I thought this was something new.

I started this blog to find myself but learned when  started I could still dream, and dream big. What happened to stop those dreams ? What in my life caused me to shut down such an important part of me ?

In the blog history I talked about moving up closer to my husbands work , our daughter renting our house when we left so we purchased another home when we moved home, so we would not have to rent. Since then, in March of 2014 we switched houses and have been back in our home six years now. That daughter went through a divorce , found love again and is remarried and they just had a second baby. She is still in our other house, which makes us happy. She now has kids from 19 to newborn. 2 from the new marriage , three from the first. She is the one that I mentioned above that I baby sat for . She left her job to have the new baby and I was permanently retired from baby sitting . Due to the covid situation we have not really gotten to spend much time with them and certainly not the new baby which is very hard. But safety for a young family is more important and we do get to see them on occasion.

But the thing that amazed me reading all those up to eight year old blog posts, is I am on the same damn journey I started the blog and the only thing that has changed drasticly in our life, thought I am not sure I said much about it, is other than a car payment we are out of debt. I use my Best Buy card and pay it off over a few months, but no other debt in our lives. That is a huge change and a good one.

Eight years of trying to lose weight. Over and over trying low carb , does not work for us, vegan a few times and now back on a plant based diet, will not use vegan because it is a very charged word. We are not perfect and I will never offend anyone. So, plant based is a safe term.

Our almost one hundred year old house is finally getting some much needed updates very soon, so at least those issues, not sure I wrote about them, but they have  been a big problem for me for almost two decades. I know this is something that will help me a lot, seeing things in order, having a beautiful space again .

My eternal search for myself. Who am I ? What do I want ? Why am I doing the same stupid things over and over, isn’t that supposed to be crazy behavior ? But yet, here I am doing it.

Buying more stuff for my craft room. More than I need and frankly even want. Time to sell , sell, sell. Many ways to do that now. I need to pare down to the stuff I really love and enjoy and let the rest go. I know I will be much happier.

It is all a distraction. I think I just had an aha moment.

Until the stay at home, we were always going. When my husband was off work we would going to flea markets, estate sales, yard sales, thrift store, antique shops. I was keeping busy and distracted. Bringing in more stuff then I needed which is a way many people distract themselves. We cannot do that right now, the shops are slowly opening but many things are still closed down. Now I do not have that distraction and my feelings are starting to come up. That could be why I was able to stuff those feelings down for so long. I was out having fun. Not feeling those feelings. But now there is no buffer. No fun going out and shopping. No treasure hunts, so I am faced with myself and my feelings in a big way. My husband is on a new schedule so that  has changed our lives, he used to be off every other weekend, then every weekend, now only Sunday and Monday. Which means no more yard sales or estate sales at all even when they start up again . I will not go by myself. That is no fun at all. I like the fun of finding treasures together, laughing at absurd things you find.

So, basically I cannot bury my feelings in going out and having fun. No more eating out, Chinese buffet, its all gone for now. My life is all laid open and raw now, I have to feel the feelings, they are not longer safely buried.  Now I need to take each of those thoughts and feelings out and deal with them. Insecurities , fears, sadness, confusion, uncertainty , and maybe some sadness  they are there, all exposed in the light of this new world I find myself in where nothing is the same. We are all going through some form of that right now, and for someone like me who used being busy and being out to avoid dealing with deeper issues, there is no where to hide anymore.

I wonder how I can at once be happy in the life I have. The choices I have made that are good, marriage , kids, our home, but be so miserable with myself. I want more for myself. I want to contribute more to the world and to my family. I want to feel fulfilled and have a passion about some purpose in life.  So, now that I have exposed why it has gone on for so long ,and how  I was able to avoid the pain of it, I can now start the painful yet beautiful process of figuring out what it is I want from myself and from life. What I want for myself .  This is my challenge, and my goal. Find a way to break out of this place I am in and learn to dream again, and to dream big. I used to do that. I can again .

Like they say, whoever they are, one step at a time, one day at a time…. my favorite, how do you eat an elephant ? One bite at a time. Consider this the first bite !

 

 

I am back and determined

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I last posted on this blog three years ago. A lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same. I am still overweight, still seeking who and what I want to be, and still frustrated with where I am at this point.

I am still very happily  married to the same man, going on 39 years later this year. We have four kids but now have three more grand kids. We have a good life, full of love and family. We are still in our old house and planning on working on that as soon as the contractor finishes another job. After 18 years things are going to finally get done around here.

I have been in a weird place lately. The stay at home order has not helped that a bit. I am out of sorts with myself right now. I have been struggling for so many years to figure out who I am and who I want to be. But it finally got unbearable. Weeks and months of watching YouTube videos, and not being productive at all , basicly just doing what I have to do and not much else. I am done with that stage, it is time to move on. Start working toward a goal. Like the ferris wheel in the featured picture, I feel I am going around and around but not really going anywhere.

As a kid I loved to draw, as I got older I wrote a lot of poems and some short stories. I have always loved to write. However over the years I wrote and drew less and less and finally got to the point where I was not doing either at all anymore. I look at the art I created as a young adult and kid and it makes me sad to think where I might have been with my art , and writing had I kept up with it. I just could not figure out how to be a wife, mom, homemaker and writer/ artist.

I will be sixty years old in a couple of weeks and enough is enough. I have filled a craft room full of stuff to distract myself, to the point it is way too much. I just am not even enjoying it right now because deep inside me I know it is not my true calling. I am planning on purging by selling many of the items I have and get it down to stuff I really want to work with, and truely love. Nothing wrong  having a craft room, but I cannot even craft as I cannot store it all.

I do believe the jewelry and crafting was a distraction. Kept me from digging too deep into myself. But you can only bury something for so long and it starts to come back up. We have that situation in our backyard. Our house is almost a hundred years old, we have a ton of broken glass and other objects that were buried many decades ago, and are now coming up through the dirt almost like a crop. You can walk around and find them just sitting on top of the ground. That is where I am right now. The emotions and feelings I have been stuffing down are coming up. I need more than stuff to distract me. I need to get deeper. Those feelings are not going to stay buried and it is not healthy or productive to shove them back down and try to bury them again.

I plan to do a vision board, along with this journaling . I was going to do a traditional journal. Just a book. But I have started and stopped so many of them and I think it is good to look back where you were so you can see your progress. By coming here and journaling, I can do exactly that. They will all be here in chronological order.  If anyone finds this journal and it helps them, makes it even better. I look forward in time to comments and hearing what other people are going through.  I do think we can learn from each other as many of us are going through the same thing.

So, I will be posting a lot, sometimes many times a day, sometimes once a day, and I am hoping not much less than that. I really want to start posting every single day. I will be digging down deep into what I want. Not really sure what I will be writing, but it is just for me. Only I have to really get it. I started this for me, if anyone joins me they are welcome, but I will not change what I am doing , this is about my search for me.