The Moonglow Blog
Supporting PRIDE Makes a Difference
I have spent most of my working life working for small businesses. I have even had two of my own, including my current business as a life coach. I understand that there are stakes to every business decision made. As someone who has chosen to make advocacy a tenet of my own business I know that that means not everyone will want to support my business. And while I understand that every business gets to decide how they show up in the world, much like how every human gets to decide how they show up in the world, here are three simple but important reasons small businesses should consider visibly supporting Pride month.
Embracing the Weird & Moving Forward Anyway
Y’all–Life has been WEIRD. If you follow me on socials you already know I’ve been in a mental health/physical health/identity crisis-ish FUNK. There are plenty of factors that have played into this vortex of strange in my brain, but they’re not the important thing here. Right now I just want to share where I’m at in this moment and my intentions moving forward.
Reflecting on Thirty-Three
Last year I wrote on Instagram, “I can’t wait to see what 33 is going to bring. Deep in my bones, I ✨know✨ it’s going to be ✨magic.✨”
And when I first reread that the other day, my initial response was that little huff we make that basically means, “yeah right.”
Then my brain said, “Sometimes magic doesn’t look like dreams coming true. Sometimes magic is alchemy—and sometimes we might look at the “during” of a transformative process and think nothing is happening or it’s all just a mess—and that’s certainly what this past year has felt like. But the poetic part of me would like to believe that all the mess was more than just plans falling apart around me all year.
I still don’t have a clear vision of what’s going to happen in this next year of life, but for once I’m doing my best to simply surrender.
Holiday Survival Guide: Self-Connection Through the Holidays
The holiday season can bring joy, excitement, good food, and quality time with loved ones… and it can equally bring up stressors, triggers, frustrations, and testing of your boundaries. Whether you love the holidays or dread them, whether you carol your way through them or feel like you barely survive, the holiday season has a way of drawing you away from yourself and into the fray of complicated family dynamics, capitalist frenzies, and all sorts of expectations and obligations. It’s a complex time of year for a lot of us.
Let’s talk about some of the main ways we end up disconnected from ourselves during the holidays and what we can do to protect ourselves this holiday season.
Real Talk: Mental Health Lows
For a moment I actually believed that maybe I wouldn’t experience another mental health “low.” My anxiety, which used to be a daily battle with significant physical symptoms, had been practically non-existent. I hadn’t experienced depression symptoms since spring of last year (2021). I’d been pouring long and hard into healing from trauma along with building up my self-belief and choosing brave choices over my normal default of fear. As someone who prides themselves on being highly self-aware, I would have expected to be able to recognize the moment I started to slip… but mental health can be sneaky.
The Ghosts of Junes Past
Pride has always felt almost like a taunt. A celebration of a community to which I never fully felt like I belonged. Both a reminder of how hard we’ve had to fight for the right to exist–and how hard we’re still fighting–and a beautiful uprising of support and recognition. Everything I wanted to own and be a part of, and yet I felt silent and invisible. How could I celebrate the part of my identity (my bisexuality) that introduced so much trauma to my life (from polyam and relationship experiences)? Then, how could I celebrate the part of my identity (my gayness) that quite literally broke me down to pieces and forced me to completely start over at 32 years old?
Experiencing Disconnection and Beginning the Journey Back Home to Yourself
Have you ever had someone ask you a question–something seemingly simple like, “What do you enjoy doing?”–and you realize in that moment that you don’t even really know? So many of us are walking around, living our daily lives, completely disconnected from our own souls. Even worse is that we don’t even know how disconnected we are because we’ve been living like this for so long it feels NORMAL. And when we do begin to realize it, we have no clue how to imagine what it would feel like to actually BE CONNECTED to ourselves again, no less actually BEGIN that reconnection process.
What To Do When Authenticity Feels Hard
If showing up authentically was easy, we wouldn’t need to talk about it so much. The reality is, there’s a ton of layers covering up our authentic selves, and sometimes those layers can make it really challenging to show up the way we would like to. Let’s talk first about the layers and then I’ll share some ways to keep showing up even when it’s difficult or scary.
Why Life Coaching?
As 2020 continued, I couldn’t ignore this pull I felt to be doing something more with my life. To be pouring into a career that would support others on similar journeys to my own. I finally admitted that what I really wanted was to become a life coach. In the first week of 2021, after obsessively reading the Beautiful You Life Coaching Academy website over and over for weeks, I finally decided to take a chance on myself and sign up for the course.