Life as Planned

Oh man. Life as planned. Such a funny concept. We all have so many plans and there’s got to be someone out there reading this who is like me in that you like to plan every. single. detail and sometimes, I think life throws our plans right back in our face and laughs at us and says, “HAHAHA You thought!!!” Well my friends, that’s been my life ever since launching this blog. To be honest, I found myself getting so incredibly frustrated this afternoon at this blog. Not the blog itself, I LOVE having this space. But man, everything that can go wrong since launching, has. That’s probably dramatic and not true at all. There are much worse things that could have happened but it sure feels like every little thing has gone wrong. So in the midst of my frustration I just started laughing and thought to myself, “This right here would make a good blog post.” Because who on earth can’t relate to feeling like every piece of your well thought out plan goes wrong? I’m pretty sure not a single person can say they have never experienced that. 

The day I launched The Libbing Room, I woke up sick as a dog. I called into work and went to the doctor. Tested negative for all the things but felt just downright awful. It was a blessing to be home while I launched though, so there was the silver lining. That sickness then turned into 14 days of not feeling well. From headaches and chest congestion to coughing and nose blowing, I was unwell. Finally got on an antibiotic and truly, it didn’t help much either but life goes on. I released Chapter One and it felt great but I had plans to post again, the week after Chapter One was released.  I knew the website would be down for a day when switching the domain from .org to .com but I didn’t know that it would be down for an entire weekend so my plan to post went out the window. Then, when the blog was back up and running I posted on social media letting everyone know and asking people to subscribe and telling everyone a new post would be here on Monday. All to be met with dear friends and family letting me know that the subscription button was not working and as of right now, as I am typing this, it is still not working. I won’t go into all the details because the behind the scenes of website building may bore some of you but yall. IT IS A FIASCO. People who do it have to be so so smart. I am not one of them. I hired someone. lol It is all so intricate and there are many layers to a website. It has blown me away. 

Tonight, I truly put in the work myself to try and figure out why the subscription portion of my blog is not working and after a few hours of research I was quite literally at a loss and so incredibly frustrated. So then came the decision- “Do I still release a post tomorrow while an aspect (a very important aspect of that) of my website is down? Or do I push back yet another post until it’s figured out?” That thought process led me here, writing this post. 

Sure, I could push it back and  I could get on socials and announce to everyone why I am not keeping my end of the deal by releasing a post on Monday like I said I would. Sure, I could wait until everything is perfect and there are no glitches and to be honest, the perfectionist in me wants to do just that but also, the insecure thoughts entered my brain as well. “I’ve already had to announce that the website is down this last week, I’ve only released one post since launch day, and now my subscription button isn’t working. What If i get on socials and announce why I’m not posting and get judged? Or what If I still post but more people notice that the subscription button is down? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. What the heck do I do??” I mean I could go on and on about the rhetoric that was racing through my brain which only brought frustration and disappointment.  

So here I am, deciding to post anyway. Why? Because my entire goal with this blog is to be real all the time and this is real. My website has a pretty big glitch and I am not going to wait until it’s perfect to release another writing. Judged or not judged, it doesn’t matter. Life isn’t perfect and it never ever goes as planned. I want all of my readers to hear me loud and clear when I say, “AND THAT’S OKAY”. (speaking this to myself as well) Whether it’s the timeline you had about graduating college, getting married, having kids, or something simpler like not being able to wash your car when you planned because it’s supposed to rain. Or maybe there’s a different crowd reading this. Maybe your kiddo isn’t picking up on reading as fast as you planned for them to, or maybe your graduating senior doesn’t want to go to college the way you had always planned for them. Maybe your savings account doesn’t look as built as you had hoped by this time or maybe your marriage isn’t always as lovely as you had once dreamed about when you were little. I could list so many examples and I’m sure you could think of some yourself.  I am here to say that everything works out in the end. I am not trying to dismiss heartache in the areas of where some people have had to wait a really long time for their “plans” to come to fruition but what I am saying is that so many of my disappointments in life- the disappointments that had me devastated, heartbroken, or downright stressed at the time- have all worked out up until this point. Not all of them have worked out the way that I envisioned they would and not all of them worked out with a pretty little bow tied on top, but they sure did work out and I imagine this hiccup with my subscription button will work out too.

 I hope you hear me when I say that plans are just that. They are plans and they are good to have but let’s work on loosening up our tight grip that we have on all the marvelous plans we have set out before ourselves. Sure, plan away, make goals, and try to obtain them but when they fall through or don’t look exactly how you always envisioned, I know that having a looser grip will make the let down a little softer. I am having to learn that myself, dear friends. Lets learn it together. 

PS: When deciding to write this post, I inserted the title and my next step is to insert a picture. I kid you not when I say that I could not get a single picture to upload. I got an error warning on every single picture I tried for various different reasons. That has never happened before with any of my pictures on this website. This is what I mean by every. little. thing. going wrong and it just feeling like you can’t get anywhere. So finally I said, “Who cares? No one needs a picture anyway”. So, if by the time you’re reading this, there still is no picture it is because I could not figure it out and I still decided to post anyway and if there is a picture, well then you know that life decided to be on my side for a second. 🙂