Once upon a time, about 11.5 years ago, a girl (me! I'm the girl!) started a blog.

Okay, that's not exactly where this story starts. We're only at the beginning, and already I need to back up a little bit. This story actually starts a year before that when a girl (same girl, still me!) decided to go on a trip around the world.

She went to 12 different countries over the span of about a year — traveling to eastern Europe, eastern Africa, and southeast Asia to work with different non-profits — and as she did (we're still in 3rd person here…) she kept a blog.

Honestly, that blog wasn't even my idea. (I gotta switch to 1st person, 3rd person is getting weird 🤣). As a participant of the trip, you were expected to keep a blog — writing one post per week. It was partially a marketing effort for the organization, partially for fundraising, and partially to keep in touch with family and friends.

I'd just graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism, so I wasn't new to the world of writing or even the world of blogging — but telling my own stories? Talking about what was happening around me and what was happening in me? That was totally new.

Turns out, I loved it. And, much to my surprise and amazement, so did some of you! (If you've been here since the very beginning, thank you, thank you, thank you!)

As I began to tell stories of what I was seeing and experiencing on my travels and how I was changing and growing, I started to get emails first from friends and then from strangers — telling me how my story had impacted theirs.

My setting may have been unique — lessons learned while rafting the Nile in Uganda, for example — but the things I was struggling with, working through, and learning, those weren't unique. They were things lots of women were going through, lessons so many of us were learning, reminders we all needed to hear.

Little by little that blog grew that year, and before I even came home, I knew this was something I wanted to keep doing.

I loved writing, loved connecting with women through words and through stories. So the second I got home, I started working on a little website of my own.

I'll never forget, it was July 2012, and I got home right in the middle of the summer Olympics. I was out-of-my-mind jet-lagged. There was a slight time change in between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Denver, Colorado. 🤪 And so I sat at my computer in the middle of the night, and began to build my own little website.

The creative and catchy title of my brand new website was StephanieLouiseMay.Wordpress.com (no, it's not still there!). I had no idea what this little blog could turn into, but I really wanted to find out.

Blogging became my full-time job!

Over the next few years, that little blog became my full-time job. I wrote a book, and then another, and then another, and then another. I responded to hundreds and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands of emails from women who were reading my words and I loved every second of it.

But then, I started to get a bit buried under emails, so I started to try to come up with another way to share the things I was sharing in those individual emails. That's when I created my online course! Not long after, came my podcast — Girls Night. It's one of my favorite things I've ever created. I love every second I get to work on it.

But you know what disappeared throughout those years? My blog.

Part of the reason is that I was working on so many other things, and there's really only so much time in the day.

But also, I think I got scared.

The more people that started to read my work, the more nervous I got about writing. I wanted every word to be exactly perfect. In that way, podcasting felt so much easier. There's not a delete button in a conversation. You can't be a perfectionist, you just have to be you.

And over the years, I'd lost my ability to just be me while writing.

Instagram didn't help, that's for sure. Trying to fit your life into little squares and 400 words is tough, but not only are you squishing and squeezing your life into such tiny little bites, you have to filter and curate those little bites. Nobody wants your actual life — they want the best parts of your life, the most inspiring parts, the most put together parts. Or, depending on the current trends, the most raw, unpolished, vulnerable parts.

But wait, don't put them in a post, it's all about carousels now. Oops, missed the boat on the carousel trend, now you have to dance. 🫠

My best thoughts have gone toward Instagram for years now — toward trying to make (and keep) Instagram happy. I don't know that I've failed, necessarily, but it's not my best thing. And the more I think about it, the more I'm not totally sure that making Instagram happy is a prize I really want to win.

But even so, I've spent the last… what… 8 years or so, trying. It's been years of that, and I think along the way I just lost my ability to write.

Okay, okay, I can still write — I just finished writing a book, actually — which is absolutely the best thing I've ever written. I don't know if you can say that about your own book, but I'm just so dang proud of it. I'm so excited for you to get to read it.

But along the way — with Instagram, and growing a business, and getting caught up in my own perfectionism and my own fear of saying something wrong or making a mistake, I've lost my ability to write like I used to, to connect and tell stories and write words I care about and really mean — and to do it on a regular basis.

And I miss it.

I've been missing it for a while, I think, but the missing has grown and gotten bigger and now here I am — it's 10pm, there's a 50/50 chance I'm going to be up in the middle of the night with a sick toddler (or two!), and I really should go to bed. But still, I'm here, it's 10pm, and I'm writing the first real blog post I've written in years.

And oh my goodness, it feels so good.

I have some really big life changes coming, and some that have already happened that I'll get to tell you about soon.

Some big things are shifting in our family, in the way we operate, in the things we all need, and the decisions we're making as a result. I'm changing, I'm growing, I'm seeing and experiencing so much — and I'm about to see and experience so much more.

And I want to write about it.

I want to bring you with me, because even though the setting of your life may be different from mine, I know that we're going through so many of the same things. Or maybe we're not going through the same things at the same time, but maybe something I go through and learn this week is the exact thing you'll need to hear a month from now. I think it's important to write these things down.

So friends, welcome to my very first, very imperfect, not even edited one little bit blog post.

More to come.