Hi, Me Again!  What happened? 

Hi friends! 

It has been quite some time since I have been on the blog. Since August to be exact. We’ve got some catching up to do! The plan is to get back to it and I’m so excited, but I figure, today, I’ll just give you an update/snapshot of the last several months of my life and maybe a little explanation as to why I’ve been MIA.

Rewind back to August of 2022 when I went to New York. I had the time of my life, came home, contracted COVID from my husband who got it from work, and was then stuck quarantining for ten days. At that point in time, I realized I had been in go go go mode basically all year long. Between working about 90 hours a pay-period and travelling in-between along with all other things life, I hadn’t really sat down by myself and reflected on much. So, I took advantage of the quarantine and decided to do so. In the process of sitting on my back porch one morning with a cup of coffee and my thoughts, I had a pretty huge mental breakdown. There were some feelings that had been piling up in me over the course of the year that I had been ignoring and suddenly, those feelings came rushing to the surface. I felt like a big gaping wound open to a lot of dirt and grime. It was nasty, painful, and very deep; I had no idea how to navigate any of it. After opening up to my husband about said emotions, we decided therapy was the best option. So, I started therapy, and everything else went on pause. I dropped down in hours at work, I stopped travelling so much, I quit committing to things that were stealing energy from me and cut back on anything that was causing me anxiety. At that time, I started doing really hard work on the woman inside.

Yall are probably wondering what these said emotions that I am talking about are. It was a compilation of a lot of things and truly I think it started with the blog. You see, since graduating nursing school in 2021, for the first time in my life, I had nothing huge to focus on. Nothing was distracting me. I had graduated with my bachelors degree, I was married, I had my “big girl” job, I was no longer responsible for raising my sister as she’s a grown adult, my husband and I bought a house, and financially I was stable for the first time ever. It felt like life was the best it had ever been. The problem is though that I couldn’t keep hiding from or running from the things that should have been affecting me all along, many years prior to now. I’m not sure if I ran from my past as much as I just didn’t ever devote time to really think about it, but boy did I start thinking about it when I launched The Libbing Room. This blog has always been my dream. My life story is one I’ve told countless times whether it be to others at church camp as a kid, to my college friends, or in small groups at church as an adult, sharing with my husband over the years when we were dating, or just to the random friend that wanted to get to know me. It rolled off my tongue with no real gravity. I knew deep down I was and am meant to share my story and specifically some of the deepest darkest parts of my story because as most of you have read in previous posts, I am very passionate about sharing our stories, the things we don’t talk about, so that others and ourselves don’t feel so alone. To me, our stories are what make us human and connect humanity. What I learned though when writing my story out in chapters for my blog and for an audience is that the process was much harder and way more intimate than a conversation said out loud between me and a few people. As I was writing chapter by chapter, I had to devote a significant amount of time to remember the things I just truly hadn’t given much thought to…. ever. There were details I ended up writing that I had never said out loud to anyone. There were flashbacks I had that surfaced out of nowhere when sitting down to write chapters One through Five. There were memories I began remembering for the first time since I was a child. Each chapter took no shorter than ten hours to compile and I was processing through many of those memories for the first time as I was writing them and before fully processing anything, I would hit “publish” and my 150 subscribers were reading my memories alongside me all while I had just remembered those deep memories the day before. That was daunting and with each chapter I wrote, the more daunting it became until I started having full blown panic attacks. On the flip side of things, there were other emotions that came along with this. I remember when I wrote the post about being a Christian, I had SO MUCH anxiety. There’s a lot to unpack here and I probably won’t get into all of it today but basically, announcing to a group of people that I am a specific label, a label that doesn’t have a great reputation in this day and age, was incredibly debilitating. That launched a whole new side to my anxiety that I had never in my life dealt with. Why am I a Christian? Why do I believe what I believe? Why am I so nervous to tell the world this is what I am? Why do I have so many negative feelings about it? I feel myself even now having anxiety typing this out because half of my subscribers are people I have previously gone to church with or family and friends that are deeply connected to me due to a bond over our faith. I don’t want to give anyone the opportunity to jump to any conclusions just because I stated that I questioned my faith. Personally speaking, questioning my faith at the age of 29 was one of the most freeing things I have ever done for myself. It is also the hardest thing I have ever done. These two things combined sent me into a very lonely spiral of soul searching for months. Anxiety and depression were very real, and therapy is what it took for me to breathe. I knew at that time, the blog had to be put on the back burner for a bit.

That was a hard decision. I felt like I showcased my dream to the world and had failed epically. I felt like people probably mocked how I was so gung-ho and then all of a sudden, I was silent. I had to fight those thoughts like you wouldn’t believe, but in the end, it didn’t matter. I had to take care of me, and I knew The Libbing Room would be here when I was ready for it. Secretly, despite the insecurity, I knew you all would be too. I still can’t thank you all enough for the amount of support you have given me.

Fast forward to now and I am in a much better place. Therapy has done wonders and my husband has been an incredible partner through it all. I am ready to jump right back into The Libbing Room but with a few variations from when I initially launched. I don’t have a lot of goals this time around- I am basically choosing to take the pressure off. I love to write, and I do it for fun and as a form of release, but I learned that these posts take way more time than I ever realized they would so instead of promising you six posts a month, I am going to post when I feel like it. (which is often! But I no longer want to slap a number on it.) I also still intend to keep my life story on pause. I have some more therapy to work through before I dive into that again. I realized though, that that doesn’t mean I can’t post at all! There are other things I would love to share and write about!

As for other updates, I’M PREGNANT. Brad and I are so excited to be welcoming a little baby girl into this world come early October! Her name is Evelynn Pearl, which we have had picked out since 2017! We both thought it was for sure going to be a boy so when the powder cannons popped pink, we were shocked and also SO excited to finally get to have our sweet Evelynn Pearl that we have been dreaming about since year one of our relationship! 

Thank you all for still being here on this journey with me and reading along. I’m so excited to be back and I hope you all are excited for me to be back as well!! Stay tuned for more to come!