My journey into letting go of who I *should* be to blossom into who I am

Good morning, friends!

It’s a beautiful and bright Sunday morning here in WA. I've got my homemade sourdough bread in the oven and i’m currently sipping on a matcha latte and thought I would start writing this post i’ve been thinking about for awhile. The last few weeks have been so joy filled here in WA as we’ve been settling in and making Tacoma home. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on why exactly the move and transition has gone so smooth and easy and I think it has a lot to do with the pressure and expectations i’ve taken off of myself.

For the past 3-4 years, i’ve put immense pressure on myself to be a certain way. For some reason I had It in my head that I needed to be this ‘susie homemaker’ type of woman that cooked and cleaned all day and wore an apron, maintained a spotless house and hot dinner on the table when her husband got home. I also put a ton of pressure on myself to be constantly growing my businesses. I never took breaks. I had it in my head that I needed to be able to thrive in business, be a perfect mother, spend time with my friends, take care of my health, and be this ‘perfect’ housewife all at the same time. I didn’t realize for years how this impacted my perception of myself and my self worth. I would constantly complain about never having enough time or enough energy to go all the things i felt that I needed to accomplish in a day. Looking back on it, I realize that It was physically impossible to do EVERYTHING I wanted to accomplish in any given day. I was setting myself up for failure day in and day out and was constantly frustrated with myself.

I want to quickly address that my husband truly had no part in the pressure I was putting on myself. He could care less if he ate frozen pizza every night. I was putting pressure on myself because I was constantly comparing myself to others. In an effort to learn how to be a better ‘wife’, I would observe people around me, books, mentors, etc and I would combine everything they were doing and put the pressure on myself to do all of that and more.

The truth that I was afraid to address in all of this is that being a ‘housewife’ or traditional ‘stay at home mom’ does not come easy to me and it doesn’t necessarily fit in with my personality. I’m not a homebody. I like to be out and about. I am a social butterfly and like to spend time with friends or be around people. Staying home all day ‘tending to the house’ sounds like my worst nightmare when I think about it. My ideal day includes gym classes and coffee dates and working in a public place. For years though, I suppressed who I was for this idea of who I felt I needed to be. I lost myself.

It may seem like a silly thing. but this idea of who I felt I needed to be, took me down a spiral quickly and my mental health really suffered. All of this got so much worse when I had my daughter because I was forced to stay home much more that I was used to. Since I was home with a baby all day, I tried to busy myself with all the tasks I felt like I needed to be doing but I lived in constant chaos. Believe it or not, trying so hard to be the perfect housewife and stay-at-home mom actually made me more disorganized, messy, and dissastisfied. I was also completely overwhelmed and let that paralyze me from moving forward in any area of my life. I was endlessly dissapointed in myself which led to being dissatisfied in pretty much every aspect of my life.

Since I was so dissatisfied in my own circumstances, I began to project that out on others around me. I started projecting my self-hatred and constant comparison onto my husband and became very critical of him as well. I’m so grateful for his immense patience for me during this season while I had to figure out my, excuse my language, shit. haha... Looking back on all of this, it’s so easy to see what was truly going on at the time but as they say, hindsight is 20/20.

the constant comparison I had going on inside my head just further fed a self-hated for myself. to say I was lost is truly an understatement. I was completely oblivious to my problem and how to find a way out of it until I started meeting with a therapist twice a week. in therapy, we went deep. like real deep. slowly but surely, layers of my self-hatred and all the pressures and expectations I had put on myself started to rise to the surface. I realized that I had put myself in a prison and hid the key. I was in a constant state of comparison, measuring my success to others, and running on a hamster wheel which completely depleted me of energy and I never actually got anywhere.

During one particular counseling session, I had a major breakthrough. It was as though the blinders came off and I was finally able to see the prison walls around me. I saw how enslaved I was living in these fears, expectations, and pressures and how they were all completely self-fabricated and not in alignment with my personality. I began asking questions like, ‘why am I trying to act in a way that is not in alignment with my personality? Why am I trying to force myself to be introverted when I am very much extroverted? Why am I so bothered by this person’s success? Why do I feel like there is only one ‘right’ way to do motherhood and i’m always doing it wrong?’ ‘Why do I feel like i’ll never be good enough to meet my own standards?’ These important questions allowed me to view the mental perspective I had been seeing everything in. I learned quickly that this was not the mindset I wanted to live my life in and I began to pivot immediately.

Through lots of prayer, counseling, journaling, and sharing with loved ones, I began to find my footing again. I began to learn who I was again and silenced the nagging voice of who I thought I should be. I began to do things that brought me joy and peace. I took a long break from work, creating content, and ‘being productive’ to simply find myself again. I deleted the Instagram app from my phone many times and took long breaks to spend time in the real world. I let my world get really small and simply focused on my mental health and my family. i’ve learned so much about myself through this season of a lot of hardship and pain. I feel like i’ve shed off my old skin and am growing a new one. Through this journey i’ve really learned who I am and who I am meant to be. And i’m meant to be, simply me.

They say comparison is the thief of joy and that couldn’t be more true. Comparison stole my joy for too many precious days and even years. I’m sharing my story with the hope that it may resonate with someone who is also going through a similar experience. It’s so easy to look at how someone portrays their life online and think that they have it all together. Well, this is me publicly announcing that I definitely don’t have it all together and i’ve gone through some really tough seasons recently. I want this blog and my instagram to be a place where you can come as your true authentic self and get real life stories, experiences, and maybe even some advice or encouragement for your own journey.

& in case you need to hear this today, you are perfect just the way you are. Keep being yourself and shining your own unique light. The world needs YOU to be exactly who you are.