My Year of Writing (Part 2): What I Learned

So, I wrote for a whole year (read part 1 here). This is what happened and everything I learned.

I challenged myself.

You’re never too old to challenge yourself or dust off a dormant passion of yours. One of the toughest things about being a parent to a young child is that there are no sick days, weekends, or vacations from your job as a parent. Even when you have a ‘day away,’ you’re never really disconnected. Your mind wanders, you plan ahead, you think about all the things that still have to get done and what needs to be sacrificed in order to get said things done. For instance, you could have a

No Harm No Fowl

“No, thanks.” I said, avoiding eye contact.

“But, why not?” My sister asked incredulously. We were mat-leaving it together. Charlotte was around seven or eight months at the time and my new niece was a couple months younger. My sister had been following a new workout program and she was trying to convince me to join in. 

I was quite monotonous and not feeling particularly myself at that point. My sister really had wholesome intentions. Basically, she was on a

You Got It: The Turning Point Series

This is the Turning Point Series where I recall events in my life that changed the course of my journey in some significant, impactful way. I almost entitled it the TP Series but then thought better of it. Given the state of our world with covid and everything, I didn’t want people to wrongly assume this was the central spot to find the best toilet paper sales in the north (it’s not, btw).

In my late 20s, I found myself sitting in my ratty, old Toyota Corolla in the parking lot of an amusement park with ‘my Little’ waiting for the call. I had been volunteering as a ‘Big Sister’ for the organization Big Brother, Big Sister of Toronto for a couple years and this

Let It Shine

Ever get the feeling that time is slipping through your fingers and all you can do is watch in motionless horror? It’s the second week into 2019 and already I’m in a panic thinking about all the things I still have to do before I return to work in October- after my luscious 18-month maternity leave. If I looked up studies on mood levels around this time of year, I get the feeling they’d likely note that this is the week when all the excitement of the New Year dips low and all the goals we made for ourselves start to go by the wayside. We start to get suffocated by the clouds rolling in and instead of the New Year “I can totally do this” attitude, we might slowly transition into the “but can I really?” phase.

When I feel these negative feelings creeping in I try to be proactive in recognizing it, calling myself out on it and doing what I can to practice gratitude in order to stay positive. This is, of course, easier said than done. Here are some ways I have found helpful to combat these impulses from dragging me under.

Unstick Me

Here we are, it’s 2019 and the new year is already in progress. No joke, a couple days ago I did what I feel only a senile person would do- I was in the process of deciding how I wanted to spend our NYE and mid-sentence turned to my husband to ask him what year we were in. I guess I could have taken a moment to calculate the answer myself (or google it… my, how times have changed), but it was the act of even having to ask; the fact that I had forgotten what year we were in, despite having been fully immersed in it for 365 days, was hard to reconcile.