I have never in my life slept through an alarm, thankfully. Usually, I’m a pretty light sleeper and the slightest sounds can wake me up. That works in my favor if I accidentally doze off after turning an alarm off, but works against me if there’s ever a bump in the night. I have to be exhausted to fall asleep with lots of noise around me.

Even though our wedding was a beautiful day and ceremony, I can’t say I would love to plan another wedding. While I refused to allow the moment to stress me out, it was a lot getting family and friends together in Athens as we celebrated our nuptials. I understand why getting married is a once in a lifetime event. From dress shopping to cake tasting to deciding the tuxes for the groomsmen to picking flowers and everything in between, it’s definitely a marathon and not a sprint.

At the end of the day, my blog is a passion project. If one day in the future it’s able to get monetized and be a passive money maker, cool, but that’s not why I consistently write these posts. I write because I genuinely enjoy getting the words out of my head in a creatively engineered sentence, paragraph, passage.

For someone who was determined to go out of state for college, I’m a huge UGA fan. It was the only university I applied to in Georgia, and not once have I regretted that decision. Fun fact, I applied early action to UGA but since I actually misspelled my name, I had to wait on pins and needles until the regular decisions went out. My initial mark on UGA will always be Jesssica.

Talk about embarrassing lol.

While some internal timelines are beneficial, some definitely cause more damage than good. For example, an internal timeline can let us know when it’s time to work out again or when it’s time to push ourselves to get a little bit better each day. An internal timeline can become detrimental if we’re using that timeline to compare to other people’s highlight reel. We’re all human so we all wonder if other people are going through the same things at the same pace as we are. More often, the answer just isn’t that simple.

I saw this quote recently that had an impact on me. Someone said “Post your content. It doesn’t matter who is watching or how nervous you feel. It’s valuable.” So often, I get in my head over how other people will view the things I post, including this entire blog. For the longest, I didn’t post anything on my Instagram story because it didn’t seem that anyone cared for the content I created. Truthfully, it still doesn’t seem like many people care, but I’m pushing myself to not let that be a deterrent for me.

My options for the replacement car came down to a Lexus RX 350 and a Honda CR-V. I was initially drawn to the CR-V, but when I thought about what I wanted most in a car, the RX 350 fit the bill better at my budget. The first couple we went to see in person were a bust. The very first one wasn’t well maintained, didn’t have a backup camera, and needed more repairs than we were willing to take on. The second one ended up being over budget once taxes, tag, and title were taken into account and it had more miles than we necessarily liked. The third one was unconventional and maybe a little risky, but it ended up being the best option and the one I’m driving today.

My 8 AM to 5 PM has been working my nerves this week. Okay, that’s dramatic. Maybe not working my nerves, but I’ve been having some conniptions about it. There are major issues that seem oh so simple to fix along with too much information floating around in my head.

While it’s definitely a thing, I try not to dwell on it. Ultimately, that’s one of the quirks that make me, me. I’ve learned to push forward in making sure I don’t just drop what is important for me to say all because I get scared no one is actually paying attention. Krissy has done a great job helping me understand that my voice is important not just in our relationship, but in all aspects of my life.

I don’t have the enthusiasm for work like I did when I was desperate to get hired or when I first started in Marketing. The nonstop, customer facing aspect of being on the Service Team has worn that newness off really quick. That combined with the constant turnover, lack of true leadership and development, location restraints, and angry customers has me dreading 8:00 AM and praying for 5:00 PM every day.

The list feature in Amazon is undefeated. The fact that I can create a list for each section of my house and window shop for things that I might never buy speaks to the Type A in my personality.

Over the past few months, I’ve really noticed that my creativity, motivation, and drive waxes and wanes similar to the moon. There’s times when I’m bursting at the seams with great ideas just waiting to be put into action. That’s when I crank out a new design or put some time aside to make edits to my website verbiage or even try to update some Etsy listings. And then there’s the other side of the coin when I ~want to be creative, excited, and motivated, but I just can’t get into my groove.

Brain fog is real. Being so busy that you can’t see the trees from the forest is real. Having boundaries and understanding that there are just certain situations that you have to push through are vital pills to swallow early. I definitely still struggle with all of the above.

I like to assume positive intent. I stray away from assuming people are all bad (or all good for that matter) and instead hope that people will do the right thing. I don’t have a jaded view of the world where I inherently think people are out to make your life unnecessarily difficult or only care about their own personal gain. I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt and assume something was an oversight instead of malicious intent.

Fear definitely has a way of holding you back if you let it. It can make you second guess yourself and what you know is right. It can also paralyze you from making any decisions or following your heart/passions.

Fridays are really overrated. When you really think about it, we wait four days to get to the magical end of the week just to do nothing. Usually we’re too tired to actually do anything fun and we typically just want to go home and relax. Fridays almost never live up to our expectations.

I enjoy putting together furniture. In fact, I’ve put together every piece of furniture that’s arrived from Amazon. It might take me a while (and I might have to unscrew, flip a piece around, and re-screw) but I stick with the task until the very end. For some reason, I enjoy the challenge of figuring out the super obtuse and poorly written instruction manual to produce a complete piece of furniture.

The older I get, the more I need planners to remember appointments and the less I need planners to manage my hourly tasks. I do enjoy the art of writing on paper and when I was in middle and high school, I refused to convert to the convenience of electronic journaling because it just didn’t feel as authentic as putting a pen to paper. But now, I enjoy being able to write on the go with my computer and my phone to make sure that I’m able to get my thoughts across without having to actually sit down and be still for hours at a time.

I’ve always had this passion for writing. Figuring out new ways to combine ordinary words into extraordinary sentences has always been great exercise for my brain. I’m happy that I’m tapping back into that hobby.