Caretaking

As I look back over this past year (yes, I am one of those that starts thinking about New Year’s Resolutions annoyingly early) how I have handled the goals I set for myself for 2018 and how I can improve the goals for 2019 begin to come into focus.

Ultimately my goal this year was to create a lot of really good content that would give me the opportunity to be introspective and help others. The season of life that I’m in is especially challenging and I know I’m not the only one down in the trenches. I also wanted to make this year slightly more lucrative by posting regularly on Steemit and creating a course. While that income has been helpful over the course of the year, it’s not exactly where I would have liked it.

The volume of creation ultimately became unsustainable after Michael was born. Sleep deprivation (although not as bad as with my other two children) and struggles with some depressive symptoms made self-care and care for my family in the most basic way a higher priority than creating content. Sometimes that’s just the way that it rolls.

I had slotted the theme of this month as “caretaking”. I think this is an apt topic for this month as my own caretaking responsibilities come into sharper focus (and I have fluoxetine to thank for that). Indeed, it is top of mind right at this very moment as I write this post with Michael strapped to my chest. As we come to the close of another year and anticipate the results of another election, thinking about what caretaking looks like seems like the best thing to think about.

I hope you’ll enjoy joining me this month in thinking and talking about caretaking, hopefully, three times a week, but possibly not. After all, taking care of yourself is a big part of this topic and, as we've seen, content creation at breakneck speed is sometimes not possible.

And here we see 7 weeks of adorableness contrasted with 7 weeks of exhaustion