When Life Happens – Where Have I Been?

I realise it’s been too long since I’ve posted here, so here I am, sitting writing this at 12:50am UK time – a time I’m usually wandering around dreamland.

It’s my second night of being wide awake because it’s becoming almost impossible to get comfy now that I feel like a beached whale at almost 34 weeks pregnant. People tell me it’s a small bump for a second child, but try telling me that as I gasp from the exertion of using the stairs, and of trying to roll over in bed like a flipped over turtle.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, there’s a chance you’re wondering where my usual minimalism posts all are, or if this blog itself had become some long forgotten internet clutter, dusty and abandoned.

It hasn’t, and I’ve made more huge strides in minimising and simplifying my life – even more so now that I am mere weeks away from having my second child.

The truth is, I had forgotten just how exhausting pregnancy is, and along the way my mind has filled with emotional and mental clutter which has made it almost impossible to write.

First of all, I got worn down by the Coronavirus lockdown and adjusting to all of the uncertainty and the new strange ways of life. I’m quite the extrovert so it took more of a toll on me than I thought.

Secondly, I finished my level 2 Counselling course, but while I was ecstatic about being one step closer to becoming a counsellor, I was also incredibly sad that it was all over. Due to the nature of the course, me and my course buddies got to know each other on a far deeper and personal level, and it made the ending particularly poignant.

Suddenly, I found myself feeling lost on the days I’d usually be doing my course, and despite having a plan for the future, I lost more motivation to write and do the things I love.

Enter the final stretch of my pregnancy, and I find myself obsessing (more than usual) about everything being perfect. Logically, I know that there is no such thing as perfect, but that hasn’t stopped me from driving my husband crazy with my ‘everything has to be done and be perfect right NOW’ attitude.

Unfortunately, this attitude has also spilled over into other areas of my life and I have to admit I slipped into spending a lot of money and used a lot of energy on having to have the perfect writing device, the perfect footrest, and the perfect sized workstation for me in the living room (since the gaming room is very slowly transforming into a future nursery).

I thought, how can I possibly teach and share about minimalism at the moment when my mind is like a hurricane has ripped through it? I felt like a fraud.

I even feared for a while that I had fallen out of love with writing, but I realised how ridiculous that was because not writing was making me grouchy, and I’ve not stopped journalling. In fact, the sudden random urge to blog is another thing which was preventing me from sleeping tonight.

One more thing – to be completely honest, I’m also terrified because everything went wrong after my first pregnancy and I almost died from blood loss due to Plancenta Accreta where the placenta basically sticks to the lining of the womb and won’t come out. It’s not so easy to declutter those kind of worries.

For now, my plan is to take life as easy as possible and perhaps share more of my everyday life and musings on here.

Huge changes will be happening so I’ll be kinder to myself as I mentally take myself back to basics and rediscover my joys -something that we all need to do every now and then.

In the meantime, stay safe, stay healthy, stay simple.