I figured it was well past time for me to write some kind of blog post, since my content has been very, very sparse this year. 

Hello! This is me back at work, wearing clothes I bought in Japan.

It’s sort of amazing actually — for the longest time I felt like I had been making videos for such a huge portion of my life that I really didn’t know how not to make videos. I had all these extreme notions that video-making and being a YouTuber defined a huge portion of my existence, and it turns out — that was just bs guilt I was putting on myself.

Once you strip away the false obligations, the needless stress, the sense that you owe people something, it’s surprisingly easy to not do something. As soon as I stopped making videos, it didn’t take me long to get very used to having one less thing on my list of stuff to do. I hate to say this, but I hardly miss it at all.

Here’s something I’ve learned in the past year:

I started seeing a therapist, who early on, asked me to divide up my time into 4 buckets. Work, Family, Friends, and Things for Me. She told me to guess what percentages of time each of these buckets was taking up in my life, and I’m pretty sure I said something that sounded very reasonable and balanced.

Then we actually divided it up, I was shockingly wrong. Doing this was such a strange experience — I kept trying to put things like YouTube, blogging, social media, and costume-making in the “Things for Me” box, because that’s the way I’ve always viewed them. But my therapist wouldn’t let me. 

“Those things are work,” she said. “They belong in the work category.”

“But they not my job anymore,” I argued. “They’re hobbies.”

“But do they take up energy? Do you feel tired after you do these things? Do they drain you creatively? Do they take up time you could be spending on other things?”

I felt called out, I felt seen — and not in the good way. “I like doing this stuff. I do this stuff for me,” I tried again, a bit less certain.

“Do you?” she asked me. “Do you make YouTube videos for you? Do you post on Twitter for you?”

I paused. Did I? Were all of these hobbies, this incredible amount of time I spent making things, was it because it energized me? Or because I felt some sort of obligation to do it, like most work?

When did making internet content become akin to eating my proverbial vegetables?

“Let’s start here,” she told me. “How much time do you spend… taking a bubble bath. Exercising. Watching TV. Coloring. Going for a walk.”

Let’s just say it was an embarrassingly small percentage of my time. But the knowledge that those things do have their place and should take up a percentage of my time made them vastly easier to do. And knowing that some things I had convinced myself were enriching and necessary were just more work I had convinced myself was ~so important~ was… a wakeup call.

So that’s why I’m over 2 months past my wedding, but haven’t posted many pictures, haven’t made a big blog post about it, or even sent thank you cards yet. Because those things are all work, and there’s a time and a place for them, but maybe it’s next month. Or not at all. Or maybe tomorrow. 

Since I got married, here’s what I have done:

• Went on an amazing honeymoon with Joe to Japan and and Hawaii, and we still dream about it just about every day
• Went camping twice, once with my family and once with a large group of friends. On the friend camping trip, we played a lot of board games, and by ‘a lot of board games’ I mean I was part of a group of 4 people who played 7 games of SeaFall over 2 days which probably amounted to over 20 waking hours of our trip
• Found out my org at Microsoft was being dissolved, which catapulted me into a rigorous job search almost immediately upon getting home
• Took on a massive house clean-out project, which has resulted in most of my weekends being spent moving things and rearranging things and throwing things out
• Spent a lot of time with my friends. So many of them did so much incredible stuff for Joe and I to make our insane wedding dreams a reality, and now we’re trying our hardest to repay them by being the chillest, most agreeable people we can be

I’m looking forward to figuring out what my next career step will be, spending even more time on my book, trying to be a yes-girl when it comes to fun things going on with my friends, actually having time to do BookTubeAThon this year, enjoying a few upcoming trips to NY and SF, and of course, there’s this year’s NaNoWriMo. It’s lucky number 13.

Joe and I on a hike in Hawaii.

I’m trying my hardest to get ‘back to normal’, even though I really have no idea what that means anymore. It’s been pretty incredible discovering it every single day, with Joe right by my side.