When Rory was born my whole world turned upside down. Like many new mothers, I was overwhelmed with every emotion under the sun. And with an intensity that has since been unmatched. I was swimming in a hormonal abyss – I cried all the tears, felt all the feelings, and wrote it all out as a way to process. My little corner of the web was getting more action than an episode of Power Rangers.

I wrote a post about his birth. I wrote about my struggles with breastfeeding. I wrote about how overwhelmed I felt in the first 2 weeks, what it was like to go back to work when my maternity leave was over, reflections on what it was like to grow a human for the first time. There were posts about the challenges of everyday life, the guilt of being a working mom, and the conflicting desire to continue to grow in my career. One of my last posts, in September of 2016, was about my fear of an unknown future. And then I just stopped writing.

In January of the next year I quit my job / left my career and started working on my MBA, which was my backup plan when the job I really wanted didn’t work out. I stopped writing because my life wasn’t going the way I always thought it would and I began to believe that my words no longer had value. To be fair, I’m not entirely sure who was reading them in the first place and if they even made an impact. But the point is, I stopped writing for myself because I lost my sense of purpose and direction. I thought I was hiding all of my shortcomings and insecurities by quieting the voice I once used to navigate the changes in life. Not surprisingly, I ended up even more lost along the way.

So many things have happened since then that I haven’t fully processed, but we’ll save that for another day. After a long talk with a dear friend this weekend, I have decided to start showing up for myself again. Her words called me out of my place of hiding and challenged me to get my emotional shit together so I can pour into my other relationships from the overflow. So this is me. Showing up. Reclaiming my voice. Maybe in my brokenness you can find healing. And I can start to find myself again.