I’m sorry, I don’t want to write this. However, I feel obligated to write something because I set this blog up with “Embracing Social Media Part 2“. I attempted to post on social media everyday and learn how to have fun with it. Instead I struggled through the process and about halfway through the month, I decided to give up. Yet I still learned a very valuable lesson.
This weekend I wore one of my favorite dresses. It is body con with rainbow stripes, and It makes me so happy. I proceeded to go to pick up the best donuts I have ever eaten in my life, and to no surprise sported my “food baby” in the form of belly bloat as I went about living my life. I ate lunch out with a friend I haven’t seen in far too long, I stopped at home and had a salad because I knew it would make my slight sugar headache feel better and then went out to have some drinks and socialize to end the night. I didn’t think twice about any of it. There have been times in the past few years where I would have put far more thought into the calories of that day. That mental headspace would take away from all the good, lovely events that made up my Saturday, which would be such a shame.
This past month Erin and I started talking about our unpublished book. I was hoping that someday I’d get to write a blog post sharing how we are ready to self-publish, but it turns out this post is going to be very different. I’m sad to say we are shelving our beloved Fan-Zoned. It’s a full book of content, we’ve spent about three years working on it, sent it to a bunch of literary agents, edited it and then sent it out again, we’ve enjoyed rereading it, and we’ve considered reworking it a mess of different ways, and after all that we’ve finally decided to give it a break. The weird thing is, after all this time, we weren’t actually sad to see our “book baby” go.
Sometimes I feel like I give off the appearance that I hate social media. My personal accounts are either abandoned or quiet in terms of which posts are actually shared by me. I’m not resisting social media because I think I’m above it, I’m resisting it because I’m not good at sharing my life with anyone. Even in face-to-face conversation, I don’t want to let people in. I know I should, but it’s hard.
After reading through each of Erin’s posts about how she was able to accomplish her goal of getting healthier, I started looking at my own life to reevaluate how I’ve been doing with my own goals. It didn’t take long to realize I wasn’t as far along as I hoped I’d be by this point in my life, with one goal in particular.
I’ve noticed something as a young adult. Peers around me seem to talk a lot about being successful and how they are going to be successful. It’s very possible if not certain that I am in the minority in not fully understanding where they are coming from. I’m not really one to stress about much, and I’ve pinpointed the period of my life where I honed this demeanor.
In the middle of my high school experience, I was cut from the volleyball team. Coming from a family of athletes and being a 6′ tall female I felt my heart shrivel in my chest when I got to the last name that was not my own. I moved through the rest of the day on the verge of tears, being the emotional human that I am. Something I had worked so hard for and wanted so much had been ripped away from me.
I am a firm believer in the second you have the motivation to do something you have to jump on it. This seems counterintuitive on New Year’s Day as many people wait to act on their resolutions until the new year, but not necessarily. As we enter into 2019 it’s hard to not reflect back on where we have been in the past year and where we are going in the years to come.
Shannon and I spent the morning of New Year’s Eve sitting on my bed and talking about our goals for this year to come. We have a lot of lofty goals when we take a look at all we want to accomplish, on top of keeping our 40+ hours a week jobs.
As we have discussed before, when we want to reach a goal, what works the best for us is having people and platforms holding us accountable. Sure we have each other, and we have our online platforms. However, at the end of the day, getting it on paper, in posts, or recorded anywhere is the only thing that has ever worked for us. So here it goes… this is where we are going in 2019:
I love podcasts, and I’ve always loved the idea of starting one with my sister. Optimizing our lives and being happy is something we are always striving for and we want to share our journeys. We are 20 somethings fumbling through life, we don’t have it all figured out and that’s okay. We’d love for you to witness us try and sort it all out.
We’re going to be brave this year, so if you so choose, you’re going to see us more often. We don’t know exactly what it will look like yet, but it’s happening, and we’re excited to document our journey.
I’ve lost 60lbs in the past year by working on my relationship with food and developing sustainable habits. I still have room to get better and get closer to my healthy weight, and I plan to continue on this journey. Shannon is interested in joining me. We are going to become more active together and keep working on our diets. I couldn’t be more excited to have a partner in crime and for us to be each other’s cheerleaders.
We wrote a novel. We still have work we want to do on it. We want to share it. We are going to do all of that this year.
This year we are going to try our best to share more on the blog and on all of our social media platforms. We want posts like this to become more frequent and we intend to make that happen. We are going to post what we love and what is driving us at the moment because if we don’t we will burn out and that is not an option.
This last year I also got engaged to the love of my life. I’m realistic and I know my time is limited, so the big day will be in 2020, however, I am not a procrastinator, so by year end, I want to have all of the big decisions made and major vendors booked. I also want to make sure to have fun along the way and not let my budget or expectations get out of hand.
In May our apartment will go from a home of three (Shannon, our cat Tina, and myself) to one of four. Decluttering and reorganizing has to happen before then. Moving is never fun, and living with my significant other will be an adjustment. This is a major life change we look forward to tackling in the year to come.
Last but most certainly not least we want to stay sane and happy during all of this. We don’t want to become overly consumed with one goal over the others and we want to keep level heads about what is actually important. By having patience with ourselves we have faith that little slip-ups won’t completely derail us.
We’re excited, and we’d love to have you join us on our journey. You are some of our biggest motivators. We have no idea what unforeseen road bumps are on our path, but we are excited for where they will take us. For us 2019 is going to be the year of leaning into the unknown and never settling for our comfort zone. Hoping for the best, but ready for the worst. Expect to hear more from us soon and regularly…ish? Not sure how regularly, but confident in an exponential increase from last year.
Love,
Erin
When you start writing a novel everything is shiny and brand new. However, to plan for the inevitable walls you’ll hit along the way, you need to take time before tackling a new project to fully get into the writing mood. That’s why we’re going to cover things we do before deep diving into plotting. With a strong start the momentum can typically overcompensate for any loss in productivity. These should also be kept in mind if you get stuck anywhere along the way. So here are the activities we have been doing to get ready for our next writing adventure, and would love to share with you.
Here’s a video that we put together based on our experience of writing every day for a year, and based off our post 100 Things Learned from 365 Days of Writing.
Last year was our year of 365 days of writing prompts. By writing every day we learned about the craft, reaching goals, and ourselves. We highly recommend the experience to anyone, but in case you don’t feel like taking on the challenge we thought we would share the top 100 things we gained from the year:
Pelky Sisters 