False Start

Remember three and a half years ago when I said I was starting a blog? We were coming out of a global pandemic, living in a changed and battered world left in its wake, in the most hostile political and social environment since Vietnam, and it just felt heavy all of the time. I'd been writing myself through it and thought that starting a blog would be a good way to process the shared human experience of living in completely surreal and unprecedented times...

Man, was I optimistic.

I had all the best intentions. But let's be honest, the only digital things I've successfully committed to in my technologically-savvy adult life are digital cameras (R.I.P.) and Facebook ("get off my lawn!"). I'm a Twitter dropout, tried Threads for the 3.7 minutes it wasn't full of trolling bots, and got as far into Bluesky as creating an account and following Mark Cuban.

So perhaps a reintroduction is needed.

Hello! I'm Megan and I'm what the young folks call an "aging" Millennial (although I prefer Elder Millennial, it garners more respect.) I was born in the 80's, had a simple, screen-free childhood with a landline phone, no cable television, and dial-up internet right around the time I was in high school. I went to college with MySpace and Napster and was finally introduced to "wireless internet" my junior year. My generation was the last to live a free range, come-home-when-the-streetlights-come-on, digital-free childhood, and then turn right around and fully embrace the tech boom and everything that came with it. I taught myself basic html code when I was 19 but cannot for the life of me fix a printer without causing it serious damage first.

Fast forward to now. I'm a full-time professional working mom of two, a 10-year-old sweetheart of a son, and a 6-year-old firecracker of a daughter, wife to a DIY, cross-fitting man of finance, and human to a young, age-unknown Boxer/Great Pyrenees rescue who's a very good girl. My husband of 16 years chills in the basement everyday working through budgets and cash sheets for his company, while I reside in the office upstairs saving the healthcare world, one unengaged clinician at a time. (We both work at home full time if that wasn't clear.)

Growing up, back in the late 1900's, writing was an outlet I used to try to make sense of the complicated, confusing mess of emotions I felt as a kid, a teenager, and a young adult. I still have dozens of journals (and a very severe-sounding, college LiveJournal account) full of angst and sadness and confusion. It breaks my heart that young Megan suffered so much with such a lack of understanding of why she felt the things she did. Not understanding why she felt like she was in trouble when she got pulled out of class to see the school counselor every week in the third grade. Why she spent countless nights crying in her mom's lap for reasons she didn't understand. Being told there was a "family history" - whatever that meant - but not actually knowing what all these emotions meant or where they came from.

Turns out (SPOILER ALERT!), mental health wasn't something taken very seriously or even really talked about growing up, and my feelings - anxiety and depression - weren't because I was "too sensitive" or a "crybaby". They stemmed from my very real family history that predisposed me from the start. And like many fellow travelers of my generation, it wasn't until well into adulthood when I finally recognized it, named it, and started to actually do something about it. Therapy, medication, writing it down, talking it out. And now that I'm well into my mental health recovery and maintenance journey, I hope to use this little platform (that probably only my mom and two of my friends will read) to rediscover why I enjoyed writing in the first place. To work through the invisible weight, gain new perspectives, and celebrate the beauty that is this multifaceted, shared human experience of life.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to write about, but I hope this revives something in me that has grown quiet and almost dormant amidst the busy mundaneness of the routines and demands of living. The embers are still there, quietly crackling, just waiting for some kindling, and a little spark.

So, let's try this again, shall we?

:)

Megan

P.S. Here's my cute little fam, in our wonderfully and professionally edited photo. I assure you; this is not real life :)