Thanks to my ever present “type A” internal dialogue telling me things need to be done in a certain order, or have the perfect timing, or that they must make the most logical sense, I posted my first piece 2 days ago and then immediately wondered if the next thing I should write should be something funny, or serious, or a post about some random complaint about getting stuck behind 37 busses at a train track while driving on a school morning. But here’s the thing…when I get too wrapped up in my “type A”-ness, I actually tend to paralyze myself from getting anything done. If I let myself sit here and think there has to be a flow from one topic to the next, we aren’t going anywhere here because there is absolutely no rhyme or reason between what moves me one day and what moves me the next.
So. I’m just going to start by reintroducing myself to my own blog. Almost my own way of giving myself the grace to accept the fact that tomorrow I might feel like writing about what it is like to work from home with a very glittery four year old or I might feel like writing about how grief is a nasty beast and that a really good cup of coffee is legitimately my savior.
So here we go. A little bit about me, and probably a little bit about things you might just read more about in the future if you stick along on this ride with me for a bit.
1. I am the most Type B, Type A person I have ever met. I LOVE order. I love lists, doing things in order, when things are organized, and I genuinely love the idea of a plan. But when I have a plan or a list, and the first thing on that list feels heavy, I cannot move on from that thing and skip to the next thing and so I do none of the things. It is a mess. Intentions? 10 out of 10. Execution? Needs work. Anxiety? Pretty much the norm.
2. If there is a car problem to be had, I have either have had it, or will have it. No matter the car. No matter the problem.Nobody even takes me seriously anymore when it comes to a phone call or a text to tell them the next chapter of my car saga and I sound like I am making up excuses 100% of the time when it comes to my car. Door handle that comes off in your hand when you are simply trying to get into the car? Yes. Passenger door happens to fly open while driving to work? Absolutely. Dead battery on the morning of my mom’s funeral? Car with so little giddy up that we get stranded eerily close to the edge of a very narrow road on the side of a mountain in TN in the dead of night while it is raining? Engine that overheats, gets repaired to the tune of $2500 and then overheats again 2 weeks later? An average of 4 flat tires per year? Check, check, all of the checks. At this point, I am pretty sure my family assumes when I text or call, that I am doing so to tell them what happened to my car today.
3. I firmly believe there are way too many apps and forms of communication. And I am ok with how old and potentially bitchy that makes me sound. But for real. What is even happening here and can we please reel it in? When it comes to kids. When it comes to work. When it comes to just communicating with family and friends. I cannot be the only one constantly overwhelmed by spending every minute not knowing if I was supposed to look at my texts, FB messenger, Instagram messages, Teams messages, e-mails, group chats on GroupMe, group chats on GameChanger, group chats on TeamSnap, e-mails about the text messages, voicemails to find out if we saw the text message about the e-mail that had the link to the group chat telling us where we were supposed to be today... I cannot. I cannot handle it. I used to care if I had little red circles of anxiety notifying me that I have unread messages or e-mails on my phone. Now I look right through them. The only thing I am good at consistently checking is my work e-mail and that is absolutely because I a no a complete idiot and they actually pay me to do that. To be honest, I have no idea how we have gotten through countless sports seasons with us showing up to the right venue at the right time all but once. (Yes I do. His name is Joe).
4. I lost my mom a few years ago and it is still the absolute worst. Learning to live in grief and in joy simultaneously has been a journey that I’m honestly quite grateful to her for, and that theme will likely be a recurring one around here. You can absolutely cry and laugh at the same time. It’s messy. But totally worth it to feel it all.
5. Black Friday is a holiday. And I am going to show up for it every year. I’m also going to have my Halloween decorations down before costumes are even off and I’m going to have a tree with well over 2000 lights on it put up before anyone even knows what hit them each year and I have not one singular regret about it. I might actually just start a paper chain counting down the days until the Christmas season now. In March.
6. I hate to cook and am spoiled by the fact that Joe loves to cook and at this point in our lives, if he is not home to cook, we don’t really bother eating.
7. I am the fixer of all of the things in our house. All of them. Unless it is a very little thing and then I will act like it is the biggest thing in the world and will just not fix it. The toilet breaks? I got it. We need to patch up some drywall and repaint really quick because the basement is treated as our own sports arena? No problem. But a lightbulb goes out? I will do absolutely nothing about it. Full stop. We will live in the dark until someone else can find the time to be bothered by it. Basketball season just ended and we were down to 1 of 8 functioning light bulbs in the bathroom. I wasn’t budging. Period.
8. I crack myself up, I do so fairly often and, the older I get, the less I seem to care about how flat my humor may fall. My funniest moments tend to have a bitchy undertone (or overtone, depending on who you ask), and there are VERY VERY few things I value in life more than when I genuinely make Joe laugh. It is not that he doesn’t laugh. But sometimes I will say or do something that will actually catch him totally off guard and make him legit laugh. And those…well, those are the very best of times. I mean I will ride that high for days. Sometimes the bitchy/funny me falls flat. But sometimes…sometimes it hits.
9. Somewhere along the way, I have totally become a Disney person. And I’m honestly here for this version of me. It happened like 8 years ago when we took the boys to Disney for the first time and now it is just apparently what I want to do like all of the time. I never had anything against Disney before that, and I genuinely loved every trip I had taken. But now, if you were to tell me I had $10K to spend on anything I wanted, I would act as if I were debt free and that my car wasn’t probably going to cost me a random $500 to $3000 out of nowhere next week and I would have the 5 of us on our way to Disney in like 2.5 seconds.
10. I am a control freak. Unless we are going on vacation or planning sports trips. Vacation Courtney/overwhelmed sports mom Courtney hands those reigns right on over. She is a very different person. And I love her. That might actually be why I love Disney so much. Joe loves to plan it. I love to not plan it. And there are zero conflicts because he is like “we are going to this park” and “we are doing this ride” and “we have dinner reservations here” and everyone is happy and I bought gift cards utilizing my 5% discount at Target to save some dough and pay for it all before we left so that I can strategically feel like the whole thing is free by the time we get there and swipe nothing but pre-loaded Disney gift cards for however many days and life is really just glorious.
11. I always mean to text you back. Seriously. I not only mean to text you back, I genuinely want to text you back. This part of me kind of ties the whole Type A thing and the whole being consistently overstimulated by 937 apps thing in one pretty little package. I read a text. If the response is much more than a quick yes or a no, I wait to respond because I feel that the person sending me the message deserves more of a response than I have the mental capacity to give at the moment. So I wait until I have time to give a thoughtful and meaningful response. But then I do not have time to do that until 11:00 at night and I do not know if I should send people texts at 11:00 at night. So then I decide I will text them in the morning. But then I wake up and we get the day moving and everyone ready and out the door and then my glittery coworker and I get to work and then a new set of messages will come in and I feel like I should answer the messages from yesterday before I answer the ones from today, but then I want to wait until I have time to respond in a way that seems meaningful and…well you see, the fact that I even have a singular friend left is absolutely astonishing.
12. I think life is way too short to take yourself too seriously, a well-placed swear word can add just the right amount of color to a story, crossword puzzles are the perfect way to end a day, there is not much in life that can’t be made even slightly better by a sun filled sky and a little bit of fresh air, and that writing is, quite possibly, the very best medicine.
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