Apparently, I’ve been trying to get my shit together since at least 2013.
I know this because I documented the whole damn thing. 😂
And when I say documented, I mean DOCUMENTED.
I recently started going back through blog posts I wrote more than a decade ago, and let me tell you—there is something slightly horrifying about being 41 years old and having access to the unfiltered thoughts of your twenty-something-year-old self.
She had a lot to say.
She also apparently had a personal vendetta against punctuation.
But damn, she felt everything.
And the more I read, the more I realized something I wasn’t expecting.
I’ve been trying to find myself for a really long time.
Not in the cute take a vacation, drink some wine and rediscover yourself kind of way.
I mean genuinely asking:
Who the hell am I?
Why am I like this?
Why can’t I change things I KNOW need to change?
Why can I figure shit out for everybody else but struggle to do the simplest things for myself?
Why do I keep starting over?
And the biggest one:
Why can’t I just get my shit together?
Turns out, I’ve been asking that question for years.
I’m just not sure it was ever the right question.
I Thought Being Smart Meant I Should Be Able to Fix Myself
One thing that jumped out at me reading my old writing was how frustrated I was with myself.
I knew I was intelligent.
I knew I was capable.
And because of that, somewhere along the way I developed this belief that I should be able to figure everything out.
If I knew what the problem was, I should be able to fix it.
If someone gave me good advice, I should be able to follow it.
If I knew something needed to change, then why the hell couldn’t I just change it?
Except life doesn’t work like that.
There were people giving me advice back then that I completely understood.
I heard them.
I thought about what they said.
Some of them were probably right.
I just wasn’t ready to do anything with it yet.
I actually wrote about that in 2016. I said that sometimes people don’t ignore good advice—they need time before they’re capable of using it.
Ten years later, I understand that a whole lot better.
Knowing what you need to do and being in a place where you’re capable of doing it are two completely different things.
And being intelligent doesn’t magically exempt you from being human.
Sometimes your brain knows the answer long before the rest of you catches up.
For a Long Time, I Wasn’t Building a Life. I Was Surviving One.
This one was harder to recognize.
In 2016, I wrote:
“I have been living in survival mode for a long time…”
But what I wrote immediately after that matters even more.
I realized I was making decisions based on getting away from a future I was afraid of instead of moving toward a future I actually wanted.
Holy shit.
Reading that at 41 hit differently.
Because there’s a difference between surviving your life and building one.
When you’re surviving, you aren’t necessarily asking:
What do I want?
You’re asking:
What needs my attention right now?
What fire do I need to put out?
Who needs me?
What problem needs solving?
How do I get through today?
And I lived like that for a long time.
Some of it was because I had to.
Some of it eventually became habit.
There are things from those years I will probably carry with me for the rest of my life.
I haven’t seen my youngest daughter since she was two years old.
At the same time, I still had another daughter who needed her mother. I raised my oldest daughter, who is autistic, while carrying a kind of grief that didn’t conveniently disappear just because life kept moving.
That’s a strange thing about pain.
Life does not stop and politely wait for you to deal with it.
The laundry still exists.
People still need dinner.
Bills still show up.
Birthdays happen.
People laugh.
You laugh.
Something stupid happens and you crack a joke.
And then there are moments when the pain hits you all over again.
I wrote about that too.
In 2016, I said I could still smile, crack jokes and find the funny side of things wherever possible even while I was struggling with something much deeper underneath.
Reading that made me realize something else.
My sarcastic side didn’t suddenly appear because I started making content on Facebook.
That bitch has apparently been here the whole time. 😂
Humor has always been part of me.
So has pain.
Those things don’t cancel each other out.
I Spent Years Thinking I Needed to Become Someone Else
When I was younger, I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what was wrong with me.
Why wasn’t I more organized?
Why couldn’t I stay consistent?
Why did I get overwhelmed?
Why was I emotional?
Why couldn’t I just be normal?
Whatever the hell normal even means.
I thought getting my shit together meant eventually becoming this completely different woman.
She’d wake up every morning motivated.
Her house would always be clean.
She’d have her finances perfectly organized.
She’d never procrastinate.
She’d take care of herself every day.
She’d always know what she was doing.
She’d make good decisions.
She’d never lose her shit.
Basically, she’d be some imaginary woman who apparently didn’t have children, trauma, responsibilities, emotions, laundry, bad days or a functioning nervous system.
Sounds delightful.
Never met her. 😂
But I spent a lot of years believing I was supposed to become her.
And here’s what’s crazy.
Back in 2016, I literally wrote that I had never mastered the convincing smile of “having it all together.”
Maybe I was never supposed to.
I Thought Valuing Myself Was Something I Was Supposed to Feel
I’ve written about self-worth for years.
Long before Pinterest graphics telling us to KNOW YOUR WORTH 👑 were everywhere, I was trying to figure out what the hell loving myself actually meant.
In 2016, I wrote that I was finally realizing that healing required me to start loving myself and taking care of my own needs.
But I also admitted I would probably get it wrong more often than I got it right.
That sounds much more familiar to me than the polished version of self-love we see online.
Because here’s something I’m only really starting to understand now:
Knowing your worth and living like you know your worth are two completely different things.
You can know you deserve better and still accept less.
You can love yourself and neglect yourself.
You can tell everybody else to chase their dreams while yours sit untouched in a notebook.
You can preach boundaries while giving everyone unlimited access to your time.
You can know exactly what you need and continually put yourself at the bottom of the list.
You can promise yourself you’ll start Monday so many Mondays in a row that eventually years have gone by.
And I think that’s where my definition of self-worth has changed.
Maybe valuing yourself isn’t something you finally feel.
Maybe it’s a relationship you have to maintain.
And relationships require behavior.
What If Self-Worth Has Behavior?
This is where I’ve been sitting lately.
Because if I say I value myself, eventually shouldn’t that show up somewhere in my life?
Not perfectly.
I’m never going to be that woman.
But somewhere.
Maybe it shows up in taking care of myself when nobody is watching.
Maybe it’s keeping a promise I made to myself even though nobody else would know if I broke it.
Maybe it’s building the business I’ve spent years thinking about.
Maybe it’s taking my goals seriously.
Maybe it’s learning how to manage my money instead of being afraid to look at it.
Maybe it’s getting dressed and doing my hair simply because I feel better when I do.
Maybe it’s creating routines because my life works better with them.
Maybe it’s saying no.
Maybe it’s saying yes to something that scares the shit out of me.
Maybe it’s finally understanding that wanting more from my life doesn’t mean I’m ungrateful for what I already have.
And maybe it’s accepting that I am allowed to build something for myself while still loving and taking care of the people who depend on me.
That last one has taken me a long damn time.
Because I know how to show up for other people.
I’ve done that my entire life.
Learning to show up for Amanda has been a much longer process.
Maybe I Wasn’t Lazy. Maybe I Was Exhausted From Surviving.
I want to be careful with this because I don’t believe everything should be blamed on our past.
At some point, we are responsible for what we do next.
I believe that.
I’ve believed it for years.
But responsibility and understanding aren’t opposites.
I can look backward and understand why I developed certain behaviors without giving myself permission to live inside those behaviors forever.
I can say:
This makes sense.
And then:
But this isn’t working anymore.
Both can be true.
That’s something younger me struggled with.
She wanted an explanation.
Why did this happen?
Why am I like this?
Why can’t I fix it?
Why can’t somebody understand?
Why can’t I get it together?
Forty-one-year-old me asks something slightly different now:
Okay. This is where I am. What the hell am I going to do with it?
That’s progress.
Not perfection.
Progress.
I Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Waiting to Become Her
There’s always been some future version of me.
You probably have one too.
She’s going to lose the weight.
Start the business.
Organize the house.
Make the money.
Take care of herself.
Wear the clothes.
Take the pictures.
Set the boundaries.
Finish the project.
Finally stop giving a shit about what everybody thinks.
And apparently we’re supposed to wake up one morning magically transformed into her.
Except that’s not how it happens.
You build her.
One decision at a time.
And sometimes you build her for six days and completely fuck up Tuesday.
Welcome to being alive.
The important part is coming back.
Because I’m starting to believe getting your shit together isn’t something you accomplish once.
Life is going to knock some of it apart again.
Something unexpected will happen.
Someone will need you.
You’ll make a bad decision.
You’ll lose something.
You’ll get tired.
You’ll procrastinate.
You’ll have a week when everything you’ve been doing goes straight to hell.
Then what?
Come back.
That’s the part I’m learning.
I Found an Unfinished Sentence From 2016
Out of everything I’ve read from my old blog, this is the part I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
In July of 2016, I was writing about starting over.
I wrote about my family.
My daughters.
Things I regretted.
Things I was beginning to understand.
I wrote that I was starting to tell myself I was proud of myself.
That I was beautiful.
That I was intelligent.
And then I wrote:
“I am far from where I am headed…”
A little later, I wrote that it wasn’t too late to use everything I had in me:
“…so that I can…..”
And that’s where it ends.
I never finished the sentence.
Ten years later, I keep thinking about those dots.
So that I can…..
Maybe I didn’t know how to finish it.
Maybe life interrupted me.
Maybe I was still trying to figure out who the hell I was supposed to become.
I wish I could sit beside that version of myself for five minutes.
Not because I have some perfect answer for her.
I don’t.
I think I’d tell her something much simpler.
You’re going to keep going.
Some things aren’t going to turn out the way you’re desperately hoping they will.
Some pain isn’t going to disappear.
You’re going to make more mistakes.
You’re going to start over more than once.
You’re going to have days when you still don’t have your shit together.
But you’re also going to laugh again.
You’re going to create again.
You’re going to write again.
You’re going to dream about things that belong to you again.
You’re going to start building.
And one day you’re going to find the words you wrote when you thought you were completely lost and realize something:
Maybe you weren’t as lost as you thought you were.
So What Does “Getting Your Shit Together” Mean to Me Now?
It doesn’t mean fixing myself.
I’m not a broken appliance.
It doesn’t mean having a perfect house, perfect routine, perfect body, perfect bank account or perfectly organized life.
And it definitely doesn’t mean convincing everybody watching that I have it all together.
I’ve already spent enough of my life worrying about what things looked like from the outside.
Getting my shit together means something different to me now.
It means deciding the rest of my life deserves my participation.
It means valuing myself enough to build instead of only survive.
Taking care of myself instead of constantly putting myself last.
Doing something today that future Amanda will be grateful I did.
Making the damn appointment.
Writing the blog.
Building the business.
Looking at the numbers.
Cleaning the room.
Taking the walk.
Starting again.
And sometimes?
Getting my shit together might mean admitting:
Today fucking sucked. I’ll try again tomorrow.
Because I don’t think valuing yourself means never falling apart.
I think it means you stop abandoning yourself every time you do.
And maybe that’s how I’d finally finish the sentence I started ten years ago.
It’s not too late to use everything I am so that I can…
Build.
Create.
Love.
Laugh.
Make money.
Make mistakes.
Be a mother.
Be Amanda.
And find out what the hell happens next.
I’m still far from where I’m headed.
But I’m finally building in that direction.
— Amanda Lee
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If any part of this made you think “damn, she just described me,” stick around.
I’m still figuring some shit out too, and I write about all of it — rebuilding your life, motherhood, self-worth, getting unstuck, making money, starting over, and the occasional completely inappropriate thought that probably should’ve stayed in my head. 😂
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