Coming to Life Again

It’s almost four years to the day since my life crashed.

I hid in my bathroom, smothered with anxiety, trying to ugly cry as quietly as possible so as not to worry my boys (who were doing schoolwork on the kitchen table, thanks to COVID), and dialed my husband. When he picked up, I sobbed, “I think I’m losing my mind.”

I didn’t mean it figuratively. I didn’t know what it felt like to go insane, but I thought I might be starting. My grip on my life, and my ability to cope with reality, had all but disappeared.

Despite the timing, the stresses of the pandemic were only incidental to this breakdown. Yes, they may have indirectly exacerbated the issue, but they weren’t what sent me over the tipping point. My business had just had the most financially lucrative year in my life—it was actually profitable—but I had been going non-stop in order to make that happen. To the tune of sixty- to eighty-hour work weeks. The burnout was hardcore. (The arts are hard, y’all.)

But burnout doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of a collection of choices that create a system lacking any resilience to things going wrong. And, yes, the pandemic definitely counted as “things going wrong,” but it was part of a bundle, not the final straw.

The roots of the problem were physiological (thank you, perimenopause), A-type personality-related (thank you, trauma), and—this just in—a result of the breakdown of my lifelong coping strategies to handle undiagnosed severe ADHD. (More about that shortly.) All of this created a perfect storm that led to that fateful day where I was sobbing all over my phone.

And I knew that not only did things need to change—I actually had no choice. My overburdened life system had crashed into shards around me. I could either try to continue on until they’d been ground irreparably into sand (though I don’t think I could have)… or start figuring out how to piece them back together.

I’d had a great fall, and I didn’t even know if all the king’s horses and men could put me back together again.

The Road Back to Me

The last four years have been a hard trek through exhaustion, health issues, and a complete resetting of everything I thought to be true about myself—plus some more trauma thrown in for good measure.

But they’ve also been a period of growth and becoming self-aware in ways I’ve never experienced before.

I’ve become more aware of my own blind spots, and how I’ve let my traumas hold me back in both my personal and professional life. I’ve become more aware of what matters to me. I’ve learned how to set boundaries for myself around work, how I let others treat me, and how I treat myself.

“People don’t change until they’re forced to. That episode in the bathroom was a wake-up call, and one I sorely needed.”

I wish I hadn’t had to crash and burn to start this journey of rebuilding. But if there’s one thing I know as an author, it’s that people don’t change until they’re forced to. That episode in the bathroom was a wake-up call, and one I sorely needed.

And the personal journey that Black Moment started me on has been fruitful.

I’ve learned what drives me and how to lean into my strengths while minimizing the damage my weaknesses cause to myself and others. (This is an ongoing effort, believe me, and I still fail pretty often.) I’ve been able to work through and heal from some of the trauma that shaped me. Unhealthy relationships are finding new, more balanced footing.

And then in late 2024, I discovered that I have pretty severe ADHD, combined type. I’d been doing research because we suspected our second son had it. (He just got his diagnosis last week. Our suspicions were right.) And we also think another one of our kids has it. (It’s highly heritable, apparently, which is what prompted Jason and I to question if one or both of us have it. Just me, as far as we can tell.)

That epiphany only happened in November-ish, and I’ve been processing all the ways ADHD has shown up in my life ever since. (Spoiler: It’s literally shaped everything I am or do. And until a few months ago, I knew almost nothing about it.) I haven’t yet gone for an official diagnosis, but even unofficially, this awareness has been lifechanging, in a good way.

On the health front, I’ve been working closely with a naturopath to help me navigate the symptoms of perimenopause. I’ve eliminated several foods from my diet—namely gluten and dairy—that seemed bent on destroying me. (I miss cheese and bread, but not more than I enjoy having clarity of thought, energy, and pain-free days.)

This year, I was able to renew a walking habit that had disappeared into the manic activity of young motherhood nearly twenty years ago. And since starting Hormone Replacement Therapy a couple months ago, my emotions have started to stabilize for the first time in almost five years.

While I’d seen improvements in many areas due to these lifestyle changes, my iron was still perpetually low and continued to fall, despite having supplemented since January 2021. So, this past Monday, I had an iron infusion.

I had been nervous about doing this, as there are risks associated with having iron infusions. However, my infusion went off without a hitch. And, even though the nurse said I probably wouldn’t notice the effect for seven to ten days, it only took three for me to start to feel the heavy blanket of exhaustion start to thin. I’ve had incrementally less brain fog and more energy since Thursday. I can’t wait to see how I feel a week from now.

Watch out, world. I will be unstoppable!

Courtesy of Hillie Chan via Unsplash.

The Same, but Different

With my returning energy, I’ve been pondering what I could do with it and how I want to show up in the world now that getting through every day isn’t such a slog on its own. I want to ensure that the lessons of the past few years stay with me.

I’m still fairly restricted in what I can accomplish—both by simply being a human bound by time (an awareness I’ve always struggled with, which is an ADHD thing, apparently) and by the continuing limitations of my body (I’m feeling better, but I’ll never be in my twenties or thirties again).

But, if I’m not careful, it would be far too easy to push myself back into burnout, either through distraction from my own needs or because I’m trying to “catch up” on all the ground I feel I lost in the last few years in my career and in my life.

Honestly, it’s a miracle that I got any writing done at all. Somehow, I managed to do quite a lot, despite my health issues. (This is something I don’t often reflect on or acknowledge, so allow me this moment of self-congratulatory praise.)

My 2025 Intentions

Some of my greatest growth in the past few years has been because of discovering the personal growth tool of the enneagram. This tool can be a little hard on a person when they’re first introduced, especially for specific personality types.

I think Threes like me tend to have a hard time, because our blind spot is self-deceit or vanity. In other words, we literally spend our lives trying to manage the image of ourselves that we show not only others, but ourselves, and the enneagram strips that charade away. Other people may have seen beneath our presentation all along, but the enneagram finally allows us to see ourselves the way others do. And that drills right into the shame that inspired this coping mechanism in the first place.

For me, learning about myself via the enneagram began a journey towards authenticity like I’ve never experienced before… and I was authentically tired from my health crises, but also from dealing with so much shame and guilt and sorrow as I processed everything.

One of the hard parts has been “failing” in my business, over and over again. I won’t go into specifics, but it’s just logical that someone who has suddenly experienced a drastic loss of energy and vitality can no longer accomplish the same things they could before.

For me, I wanted to help others more and be a bigger blessing to you, dear reader, but I had to spend so much time focused on my own healing that all I could do was scrape by.

But now, stepping into 2025 and (hopefully) a new lease on life, I’m armed with tools I never had before. But honestly, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to use them. I’ve decided to try a few things for a while to see how they feel and fit with this new skin I’m growing.

And I’m sharing these plans here because, well, blogging more regularly is one of the things I plan to try.

Intention 1: More Writing, Less Social Media

I’ve always preferred long-form writing and reading. But when my systems shattered, so did my focus—aided and abetted by social media.

And as an enneagram Three, who has a particular susceptibility to the voices and opinions of others, my growing social media addiction (and the loud, angry voices that often populate those platforms, especially in the last few years) caused me to retreat further. Speaking up and using my voice seemed too costly energetically, but my social media usage had another, more insidious cost that took me a long time to recognize—being able to think clearly about what I believed to be true.

So, a week ago, I decided to take a break.

I started with Facebook, the platform that’s caused me the most distress. I’ve been enjoying it less and less, thanks to the increasing number of ads and the way the algorithm has changed over time, but I had a firmly entrenched habit of checking it way more times in a day than I even want to think about—to the point that I wasn’t sure my “break” would last a day.

But it did. I didn’t log on until last night, a week later, to intentionally see if I’d missed anything I would have valued seeing earlier.

I didn’t.

So, Facebook is out. And I’ve barely checked Instagram either. And I haven’t missed them.

It’s been a slow decline to get to this point. I’ve barely used social media as a creator for the last several years—and the few concerted efforts I made to experiment with its value as an organic marketing method reinforced my belief that it wasn’t worth my time. However, over the past year, the platforms I used most as a consumer (Facebook and Instagram) have also become less and less pleasant for me. Over the past month, I realized that I would like to break the addiction and find more life-giving ways to connect with my readers, friends, and peers.

Will I eliminate social media from my life completely? I don’t know. Not yet. But even though it’s only been a week, I’m already feeling more centred, my focus is coming back, and my ideas are starting to flow again.

Yes, this coincides with the iron IV and the beginning of a new year following a long break, but I would say these factors are multipliers of good things working together, not something that could be attributed to any of these benefits in isolation.

In a case of divine timing, a few days ago, I listened to the most recent episode of the Wish I’d Known Then.. for Writers podcast, in which they interviewed the creators of the amazing podcast (and community) Writing Off Social. Since then, I have literally binged about fifteen hours of the podcast. It’s reminded me of a ton of things I knew (once upon a time before social media existed) about more sustainable and enjoyable ways of being present online. They got my juices flowing about ways I can still build my platform and connect with readers without using social media at all.

And last night, it occurred to me that most of my real-life friends and family hardly use social media anymore, anyway.

So do I miss it? Not really. And I’m excited about exploring ways to develop community in other, more fulfilling ways.

That’s why my first intention for the year is to focus on creating content for my own readers through channels I control.

In practice, I intend to create one piece of content for my website per week (either here on this blog or on the Fireside Lounge blog in my Books and Tea League reader community). I’ll also continue to write my bi-weekly Books and Inspiration Newsletter, but to make it better.

Miraculously, I somehow managed to develop and maintain a bi-weekly publishing schedule for the B&I newsletter over the past few years, and I never missed sending it out—but for the past year, my creativity with it was gone. I was spinning my wheels. It’s time to re-infuse it with the type of content my readers look forward to have landing in their inboxes.

I’m rusty, I can tell. If you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking around through my rambling post above. But I want to get back in the habit of thinking in long-form posts—to take the time to explore topics deeply and create meaningful content that my readers will enjoy. And by publishing on my blog instead of social media, my readers can also find it again and again, if necessary.

I’m putting a boundary around my focus and attention… and I’m excited to see where this choice takes me.

Will I force myself to write new content every week? No. I take a quarterly break, for one thing, and those will be weeks off. And there will be weeks when my health or schedule don’t allow it, and I won’t publish at the sacrifice of my health. But I’m making this intention a priority.

And secretly, I would love to look back at this year and say, “You know what? I managed to stick to my publishing goals.”

Intention 2: Produce More Fiction (and Knitting Patterns)

When you’re in the midst of chronic fatigue and health setbacks, everything is harder, including being creative. This has made producing new work a challenge.

As long as my health allows, I hope to produce one to two chapters a week.

I’ve got two fiction projects I’ll be working on this year, but though I’m developing them simultaneously, the writing likely won’t be produced in equal measure on both projects. (My brain doesn’t really work that way.)

However, once I start drafting (hopefully in the next week), I’ll be publishing early access chapters of whatever I’m working on at the moment in the Books and Tea League.

My admittedly lofty goal is to write and finish the next book in the Peace Country Romance series this year (to be published later this year or possibly January 2026), and to finish the first draft of Book 3 in the Rise of the Grigori series by the end of the year too.

I also hope to publish or republish several knitting patterns over at My Secret Wish Knitting.

This is ambitious, and may only be possible in a best-case scenario, which life so seldom gives us. But I’m going to shoot for this. And if I miss?

I’ll have come closer than if I hadn’t ever tried. And that’s enough.

Word of the Year

For the last several years, I’ve employed the practice of choosing a word or phrase of the year to help guide my decisions and intentions. I put it on a little marquis sign I keep on a shelf above my desk, where I see it every day.

Last year, my phrase was Choose Wisely. This served me well, and I definitely feel like it helped keep me more focused on things that would serve me better. But, in the depths of my exhaustion pre-IV, I’d been struggling to find the phrase for this year.

I thought about using the same one. Then I thought I would use two words, Simplify and Focus, which I even put on the marquis, but these weren’t sitting quite right.

Then, this morning, my word came to me: life-giving.

That’s how I want my business to feel, and that’s what I want my work to do for others.

Courtesy of Andre Taissin via Unsplash.

“This morning, my word came to me: life-giving. That’s how I want my business to feel, and that’s what I want my work to do for others.”

It reminds of this verse from the gospel of John:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
(John 10:10 ESV)

For too long, the thief has had his way with my life and my business. He’s stolen my health, he’s stolen my hope, and he’s stolen my voice.

This year, I am leaning into the life that Jesus brought to us. I’m choosing hope. I’m seeking out joy.

I want to lean into the purpose God has for me without pushing myself so hard that I end up sobbing in the bathroom while my life crumbles around me.

He’s promised His way is life-giving. And I’m determined to sift through the noise to see what that looks like for me.

I’m excited to see what this next year brings. I hope you’ll join me on this adventure.

End Note

Do you like the idea of breaking your dependency on social media, but you’re not sure where to start? I encourage you to check out the Writing Off Social podcast and their 7-day Challenge.

The key is to think about all the things social media does for you and think of how to fill those gaps in other ways.

For me, I’m looking at a few different options, and I’ll be sharing about them in upcoming posts as I explore them further. If you want to follow along on my adventures, you can subscribe to my blog to get an email notification about new posts, or you could subscribe to my feed through a blogging app like Feedly.

What are your intentions for the year, friend? How do you hope to move forward in this fresh new year we’ve been granted, so your future self thanks you for your efforts? Let me know in the comments!