Dear Badass + Healthy Readers,
This is the maternity shoot photo that I was planning to use in a newsletter or blog about my pregnancy if I had written one. Fail.
Confession: I am a perfectionist, and sometimes the overthinking that comes with it gets in the way of doing. It's also responsible for some annoying in-my-head chatter that at times is so loud it can keep me up at night. Can you relate?
I had a baby girl in December, just before Christmas.
While I did manage to complete my holiday shopping and wrap and ship all those presents by Dec. 1 (pat on the back, perfectionist diva), I also had BIG plans to prepare blogs and newsletters for you in advance of my maternity leave. Just like I had BIG plans to post on social throughout my pregnancy about ALLLL the badass and healthy tidbits I learned and researched along the way, but I was too busy juggling baby prep and Message Sprout projects to get it done perfectly. And for the last four months that I've been entrenched in babydom, I've had BIG plans to write about ALLLL the new mom badass and healthy things to know, among other topics.
But I failed. And failed hard. Instead, I have done nothing of the sort.
I went on maternity leave two weeks before the baby arrived and in place of blogging and finalizing my content calendar, I took naps and binge-watched every episode of "Call the Midwife" (obvi, the best thing to watch while you're preparing for a natural birth! LOL). I went and got mani-pedis, my eyelashes extended, highlights...oh yes, I looked as damn good as I could at 10 months pregs before nails became perma-cracked, highlights threw some major shade and my lash extensions fell out one by one. HOT.
And post-baby, I reluctantly embraced the fact that there was no way in hell that I was going to spend the two literal only free minutes I had in the day writing blogs (instead of a. showering, b. eating or c. napping).
All the while, my inner perfectionist plopped herself like a tick on my shoulder and kept sinking her pint-sized talons deeper, exclaiming, "Failure! What about all the great ideas you had on your LIST?!", which has in turn produced mounds of unnecessary, self-inflicted anxiety.
You’d think that the Navy Seal training that is caring for a newborn would have drowned her out by now. I mean, being a new mom means being a total badass. There is a new list, and it's called survival.
Wellness is an ongoing journey and a lot of it has to do with what we tell ourselves. I still have to remind myself of that on the regular.
Cut yourself some slack today for whatever it is that has you feeling like you're not good enough. You are.
Love and Light,
Karina