This Messy Life— Navigating Sharing Kids, Divorce, Dating, and Blending Families

  “Imitation is the biggest form of flattery.”  I hadn’t felt like I had words for the last several weeks. I’d sit down and try to write and they just didn’t come. So when they flowed during my break at work yesterday, I went with it and posted.  Several hours later I got a message from a friend, and then another. “Were those your words? I saw So-and-so posted the exact same thing on her page.” This was a mutual Facebook friend so naturally I went to check it out only to realize she had de-friended me. So she’d stolen my words, defriended me and then posted them as her own. And her post was blowing up. Ugh.  I felt it in my gut. Violated? Insecure? Angry? Disappointed?! I struggled to discern what I was feeling but I knew I felt SUPER disappointed in this person for not only stealing my words, but for also refusing to take them down 😭🤯. (She has since blocked me and all of our mutual friends). What I realized was one of the issues is that I was feeling my ego a bit...

  I tire of living in fear. I vacillate between feeling strong, independent and brave af, and feeling small and scared and afraid to be heard.  It’s something I have always dealt with but it’s for sure been worse since my divorce. I knew going through such a big life choice rather publicly (on social media) that I would attract and have more haters (or at least be more aware of the haters), but I figured eventually it would really fizzle out. The truth is, there are always gonna be people who don’t like me or don’t believe what I have to say. There will always be people who don’t believe in me or who want to make me feel less than or small. But for every one person who doesn’t like me or support me, there are so many more who do.  And I guess the thing that’s taken me the LONGEST to learn, and something I still have to practice consciously every day, is that my opinion of myself matters most. My opinion of my decisions matters most. And once I feel that, all the haters an...