I have an addiction to those inspirational images that go around social media.I even dabble in creating them sometimes. If you are my friend on Facebook, you know that around 80% of what I post is just re-sharing inspirational quotes. (On an aside, I do have a reason for sharing beyond “Oh isn’t that nice,” but that is not what this post is about.) A week ago, this hit my feed, a repost from Panache Desai, and I knew what I had to do.

I have been thinking about blogging off and on for the better part of a decade, when I packed up messylissa.com out of fear that it might somehow become courtroom fodder for my now husband’s custody case. I willingly took my light and hid it, because at the time it was the right thing to do. I’ve tried to pick up other pseudonyms over the years, blogging sporadically, but nothing ever quite fit right. I wasn’t sure what I should and shouldn’t post, everyone had a different name, nothing felt authentic and I always ended up abandoning the effort.

I’m so over that.

I am a writer and if this life has given me anything, it has given me plenty to write about. This is how I cope, this is who I AM. I have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing I want to hide. I am taking back my power, embracing the mess–my messy family, my messy fitness, my messy faith, my messy career, my messy LIFE–and it doesn’t matter to me who reads it. It is the messy parts of life that are the most beautiful and I am done hiding my beauty. I am a full-time mom, but I’ve never given birth. I live for the outdoors, but I’ve never not been overweight. I embrace tenets of mindfulness and Buddhism, but consider myself Catholic at my roots. I completed coursework and am still painstakingly plugging away on a thesis for a Masters degree in child development, but somehow ended up in the public sector doing data analysis. Everything is an imperfect contradiction of the life I thought I was working towards.

Bring on the mess.