You roll over and open your eyes. It’s 3:13 am. You realize you have to pee so you crawl out of bed, quietly tiptoe to the bathroom, and sit on the toilet. You are trying to keep your eyes closed so you can stay half asleep and not wake all the way up. You know if you wake all the way up you’re fucked. You finish peeing, go back to bed, and squeeze your eyes shut praying that you drift back to sleep peacefully. Right at this moment, a thought enters your mind. You forgot to schedule that doctor’s appointment for your kid. What a shitty mom. Other moms seem to do all the right things all the time and you can’t even schedule a fucking doctor’s appointment when your kid is hacking up a lung in the next room.  You make a note in your phone to call the doctor. Then you remember the report you’re working on for a client at work. You keep telling them you’re almost finished but you know you’re stalling because you’re stuck and don’t know what to do next. Add shitty employee to the list. You wonder how you’ve gotten this far in your career and you feel like a total imposter. What would you do if it all came crumbling down? Would you be able to keep your house and your cars and keep your kids in the sports they like to play? Could you move in with your parents? Would your marriage survive? Speaking of marriage, how does your husband even sleep next to you anymore? You aren’t the woman he married. You’re 50 lbs heavier than the woman he proposed to. Your boobs are deflated whoopie cushions. You have a permanent fat apron where your abs used to be. You haven’t shaved your legs in two weeks. He insists you’re still sexy to him but how could you be? You know he’s lying. And the drinking. You said you weren’t going to drink yesterday and then you did anyway. When you started you said you’d only have one glass of wine but then the bottle was gone. That’s been happening a lot lately. No one in your life has mentioned it, but you feel like it’s the elephant in the room. You wonder why you can’t keep these promises to yourself. You know your life would be happier and more manageable if you did all the things you know you need to do. You know because you see it everywhere and read it everywhere. Stop drinking so much. Start going to the gym. Eat healthy. Drink water. Everyone knows the recipe for success so why can’t you just fucking do the things you know you need to do? You tell yourself that you will start today. Today will be the first day of the rest of your life. You start to imagine what your life looks like when everything is “better.” You picture yourself getting awards at work and rocking a bikini on the beach and crossing the finish line of a marathon. You think “today I start my healthy habits so I can be the person I know I can be.” It’s now 5:26 am and your alarm is set to go off in 34 minutes. You finally drift off to sleep. At 5:33 the baby starts crying. And here we go again…

Any of this sound familiar? These thoughts used to consume my mind for two to three hours a day, seven days a week. That is 20 hours a week, more than most part time jobs. I spent so much time and energy worrying and obsessing over not being enough. Not being a good enough mom or a good enough friend or a good enough wife or a good enough employee. There were so many people depending on me and my biggest fear was letting them all down. What I didn’t realize was that by spending every ounce of energy I had either worrying about not being enough or trying to numb out the feelings of not being enough, I was in fact making my own biggest fear my reality. 

Lots of people talk about a rock bottom. You know, that moment when you sink as low as you can possibly go. The time you steal a ring from your mom and pawn it so you can buy some booze and cigs. The time you go to sit down at your niece’s wedding but break the chair because the cheap ass chair can’t hold your weight. The time you pass out at your kid’s school on Field Day because you’re so out of shape you can’t stand to exist in the heat for that long. Or the time you skip an important event in your life because your anxiety won’t let you leave your house. Supposedly people reach these “rock bottom” moments and they feel so awful or are so mortified that it propels them forward and inspires them to change their life. But what if there’s another option? Do we really have to hit a rock bottom before we decide to get off our asses and make some real, meaningful changes in our lives? Do we really have to sit back and watch our lives go to shit while we wait for the “ah ha” moment to make us change course? If we see the direction our life is heading in and we don’t like it, why don’t we take action and make some changes before we become the person we hate so much?

I have spent the last year and a half transforming my life in to one that I am proud of. I spent three years prior to that discontent and sensing a rock bottom coming, but hesitant to do anything about it. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I can’t say specifically what made me wake up and decide to start living the version of my life that I wanted so desperately, but I am grateful every single damn day that I never had to hit a rock bottom to pull me out of my trance. That’s not to say I didn’t have some “scratch the bottom of the surface” type lows. I have plenty of thoughts and stories that I am not proud of. Some of them funny, some of them sad, all of them relevant to my story. My goal with Shimmer & Shame is two-fold. 1) I have gone through a massive transformation over the last year and a half and I have yet to unpack my thoughts, feelings, opinions, stories, knowledge, successes, and failures in a meaningful way. This is my attempt at doing just that. 2) The small bits and pieces I have shared of my journey with friends and family seems to elicit curiosity and positive feedback. If unpacking my story here can help even one person find a way to live as a more authentic version of themselves, I’d call it successful. 

I plan to post here weekly and touch on a variety of specific topics related to alcohol, nutrition, fitness, and self-development. These were my four pillars for transformation so each topic will relate to one of those four categories. I’ll be sharing lots of stories and intimate details of my life, being vulnerable with the world in a way I never have before. I’ll also be sharing lots of advice based on my successes and failures. I am by no means a finished product here, but one thing I have learned is that no one is a finished product. I will be learning and evolving and becoming better and better every day for the rest of my life if I’m doing it right. I’d just like to share with you as I go!

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