Giving Myself A Much Needed Break From Following Routines And Setting Goals Is One Of The Best Things I Did For My Happiness

Hello, friends. It’s been a while.

I haven’t written a blog post in almost two months! I miss writing and connecting with you — my audience — so I thought we could catch up over a personal update.

These past few weeks I have thoroughly been enjoying being a normal, non-milk producing, member of the human race. With my baby sleeping longer stretches and weaning, I am doing all the normal things I couldn’t before like staying up late to watch TV, drinking oodles of wine (!!!!), feeling lazy to workout and more. I’m finally feeling normal again and I love it. I feel free, I feel happy, I feel at peace.

Getting to this point has been quite a journey. I shared how I was feeling three months postpartum in this post Emerging From My ‘Fourth Trimester’ After My Second Baby With A Lot Of Mixed Feelings. And, even at that point, I had lots of mixed feelings and thoughts about what life with two kids will be like. And how to fit in all the things I want to do, too?

If you know me, then you know waiting and patience are not my strong suits. I like having answers right away, knowing what’s next, and working towards set goals. But with a toddler who may or not be in school due to the pandemic and a growing baby who is still very attached to me, all ideas of setting a routine, getting some answers and finding consolidated ‘me-time’ went out the window. I found this all this uncertainty hard to deal with because of the way I am wired. So I had to do some rewiring and recalibrating to figure out how to be happy living in this — for lack of a better word — ‘daily chaos’.

I decided to throw my natural instincts out the window, too. Instead of seeking a defined path and pace for what life should be like at three, four, five (whatever the number) postpartum, I decided to try simplifying and slowing down for a few months and see where it led me.

What I mean by that is that I let go of the idea that I have to do certain things each day or set goals to achieve. For example, if a workout wasn’t in the cards for the day then so be it. Let it go and be okay with it. Or if writing for the blog seemed too stressful then so be it. Let it go. Move on. Baby is not napping when she’s “supposed” to. Doesn’t matter. Move on. Nervous about jumping back into work. Don’t dwell.

In the process of letting go and emptying my mind of unnecessary pressures, I feel like I made space for my ambiguous feelings and unanswered questions about the future to marinate subconsciously until I was ready to sort them out. In the meanwhile, I focused my energies on what I could control: learning to be patient, finding joy in being surrounded by the muppets and their daily antics, and, of course, not being able to hear my own thoughts. I learned to be at peace with all of this.

I also took the time to do things I don’t usually do like network (and what resulted from that was the opportunity to jump back into work unexpectedly and collaborate on a creative brand project that is perfect for me at this moment in my life [more on this later!]); make phone calls *gasp* just because; go on long walks; talk to my neighbors; listen to podcasts more regularly; discover new genres of TV (hello K-drama addiction!); play and have conversations with my son; take OOTDs of my baby girl; plan healthy meals for my family etc.

After a few months of recalibration, I feel like my ambiguous feelings and unanswered questions automatically started disappearing while tangible goals and a clearer direction for my life began appearing. It’s a sign that I am close to being ready to figuring my life out but I’m in no rush to have all the answers right this minute. I am enjoying the slow and, arguably, simpler version of my life, especially with two young kids at different stages of development and a pandemic as a backdrop, I think it’s the pace and path that makes the most sense right now. And I am happy to be at peace with it, finally.

That’s my little update for now.

Btw, I totally skipped a workout today to write this post just because I felt like it. 🙂