A dream is a wish. . .

I have procrastinated creating a blog for 10 years.

Pregnant with my second child, ready to go on leave, I registered and began building my first attempt--themommyadventure.com. Trust me, you've never heard of it. Because after hyper fixating on font styles and color palettes, agonizing through landing pages and mobile applications (the tech has grown in leaps and bounds since then), I hit a very classic Jessica  roadblock: I could not upload the custom "♥️ Jess" signature I'd envisioned. 

That was it. Just the signature. 

The edit mode of that very first post sat in Word Press for at least 6 years--long after I'd volunteered at my child's school, run a PTA, gone back to working full time--lovingly paid for annually by my husband Anthony (just in case). 

I wish I could say I never thought about The Mommy Adventure again; that my friends and family didn't regularly hear from me about how I could have been using my time to blog, or that blogs had been replaced with instagram and then TikTok; or that my literary idol Glennon Doyle had turned a mommy blog she wrote in her closet in the early mornings into multiple books, a brand, and a podcast I can't live without. In another life, that could have been me. The never published blog adventure became a core piece of my personal narrative--the limiting stories I told myself about myself.

Along with a slew of hobbies, passion projects, business ideas, book beginnings, side hustles, and eventually my career as an elementary educator --pieces of myself I couldn't sustain or maintain--left unfinished, incomplete.

In late 2023, about a year and a half into my "retirement" from teaching, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD]. This shouldn't have been a shock. Honestly. Except that I'd walked around my whole adult life with a smorgasbord of diagnoses and neuroses, all of which I worked at and through and around in any way I could--therapy, meditation, yoga, visualization, sound healing--you name it I tried it. At first I thought adding a new title to the mix wouldn't really change much about my life. And then something remarkable started to happen.

I began to connect all these false starts and failed finishes to ADHD. Compassion and grace had always been something I granted in unlimited supply to the people in my life, but never to myself. Yet for the first time, I could see how perhaps these setbacks might not be character flaws, but symptoms of something beyond my control. What if instead of judging myself for being myself, I tried just this once to embrace all the parts of me?

It's. . . all the things is my tangible attempt at marrying my strengths & passions with my limitations. I know I could never sustain just one carefully chosen, researched and refined niche topic. That is just not who I am. But I want to do this. I want to write a blog. Even if no one reads it. 

I dedicate this blog to myself, to my community of amazing friends and family, and to a world that is too full of wonder to be limited to just one thing.

xo

Jess