Did you notice my absence? It’s totally okay if you didn’t, if I’m being totally honest I didn’t notice it at first either. Then when I did notice it, it felt like such a big gaping hole that was so obvious I was embarrassed to not have noticed it. At the same time, I had no idea how to go about filling that hole, any more than I knew how to go about refilling my well. Doubly embarrassing is the fact that all of this began well before the global pandemic we’ve all been enduring for the last two years. It started before Covid, it started before we were all trapped together in our homes for 24 months. And I still didn’t know how to fill the gap.

It started several years ago when a confluence of events happened the way life tends to happen. Most of it is attributed to the fact that I landed what I thought (keywords there, pay attention) was my dream job managing the community of a self-care app for women. What I didn’t know until I had left that job was that while the product we were building was something that made us incredibly proud and helped us change the lives of women who used the app, our bosses were so incredibly toxic they were actually using the same content that helped women change their lives to manipulate those of us working shoulder to shoulder with them every day. They listened to an audio series on gaslighting like it was a master class on how to gaslight. They listened to a series on boundaries and learned how to ignore their employees’ boundaries. And, not one of us saw it until we emerged from the fog of working for them.

It’s only now, almost a year and a half out from that experience that I’m realizing that what I’d love to do with that experience is take the self-care learnings that I absorbed and have learned to apply to my life and my writing and share them with my fellow women writers. So, all of that was my long-winded way of saying I’d like to start a new blog series here on my website with self-care tips for writers, especially women writers.

I have a mental list of topics I want to cover like fear, writers block, stress, boundaries, and a few more but I’d love to hear from you. What topics related to self-care for authors do you want to learn more about?

What makes me qualified to talk to anyone about self-care? Especially if I’m admitting that I’ve struggled for the last few years because of a self-care issue? Well, the answer is exactly that. I’m qualified because I’ve dealt with (am dealing with) it myself. Plus I was a founding member of a team that built a successful self-care app for women. That plus general life experiences and learning from my own mistakes means I’d like to be able to share some of my lessons with others. To help make my own bruises and hard earned knowledge with someone else to pay it forward if I can.