I'm sitting in front of my computer with all of the ingredients for writing success:

• My space is uncluttered

• The kids are gone

• I have Christmas lights on and music playing (that I don't know the lyrics to because #amwriting)

• It's a pocket of time I set aside specifically for the purpose of writing

• I'm wearing my writing toque

And all I can think about is how much I don't want to write.

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Sometimes when it rains, it really freaking pours.

And that downpour can be so relentless that you wonder whether or not you'll drown in it. Which then makes you feel guilty because really, it could be worse so like a hurricane or tsunami so hashtag gratitude, right?

Well grab an umbrella, friend.

Because this email is coming at you after a helluva week over here at Casa Sones.

Yeah yeah, it was Christmas which is always a bit of a crazy time, but I wasn't too worried heading into the weekend before the holiday blitz because I felt like I was ready this year.

Ha ha ha.

I mean, I hadn't quite wrapped all the work I wanted to by Friday PM, but I had a sitter coming on Saturday and felt confident that there was plenty of time to finish what I needed to.

Ha ha ha. I know.

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I like Mondays.

Really, I do.

I have for as long as I've viewed them as the breath I take before my week really begins...which started when my kids started full-time daycare.

(That's when I realized that the weekends were the most taxing part of my week, and I needed a hot minute to transition between the chaos of full-time kids to making the most of the time they're in childcare.)

I couldn't put an exact date on when this became my practice, but somewhere along the lines in my work-from-home career I started to pencil Monday in as a buffer day.

That mental boundary looks like:

I'll book fill-me-up calls on Mondays, get acquainted with the work that I need to accomplish that week, and allocate most of my to-dos to Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

For me, each week brings the opportunity to make some tweaks to how I'm doing things. I'm kind of constantly taking stock of the things that worked and the things that didn't, so I can do more and less of each one, respectively.

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The other day, when my friend Sara asked what my writing plan was, I told her that I was going to use this prompt from For Women Who Roar:

If you could sit with yourself from when you were a child, what would you say?

It seems so cliché — the therapy scene where you sit down and are asked to talk about your upbringing. You know. Heal your inner child and all that crap. And it's easy to dismiss the past when you want to deal with the issues at present...but it's also impossible to separate the two.

Because all of the experiences we have today are based on what we learned in the past, and the way that we make sense of those experiences has everything to do with what we create for ourselves in the future.

To get where you want to go, you have to know where you've been.

But remembering is a funny thing. The brain doesn't work like a computer, fetching a video for you to watch for a real time play-by-play, even though that's kind of how we think about it.

Memory is much more fluid than that, and constantly evolving —

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Today I want to write about the concept of "enough."

One of my favourite times of year in high school + college was the break you'd get after exams were over. I liked it even more than March break because for a brief pocket of time there weren't any academic expectations of me.

I live in a pretty constant state of feeling like what I'm doing isn't "enough."

There aren't enough hours in the day to do all the writing, all the meal prep, all the quality time with my kids, all of the client work, all of the cleaning...the list goes on. And on. Ad nauseum.

(Literally — one of my major anxiety markers is nausea and barfing. Isn't that a fun fact you didn't expect to learn about me today!)

My therapist wrote a post-it note for me after a session one day, and it said:

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Here's to another week of making the writing happen on the go! 💪

I remember reading one of Glennon Doyle's books and she mentions that she wrote a bunch of it while sitting in her car, and while holed up in a closet...so I feel like I'm in good company here.

And I'm about to be in even better company because I'm at the airport to pick up one of my best friends! 😍

She's flying in from Ontario (with her wee baby) to hang out with me and the boys for a couple days while Joe works out of town, and I am so grateful.

They say it takes a long time to grow an old friend...this one's been growing for 32 years.

The richest area in my life is the people that are in it.

Because my crew isn't an average one — it's made up of extraordinary human beings.

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I made a very fun discovery this week.

To say that I was excited to find Pride and Prejudice (the Kiera Knightley version, duh) is now on the Canadian Netflix is an understatement.

In fact, to call my excitement an understatement, is also an understatement.

I. Adore. This. Movie.

I've watched Pride and Prejudice more times than I can count, and spent countless nights as a teen falling asleep while I watched the DVD.

...TBH the sleeping thing is a bit of a conditioned response now. I'm not sure if I can stay awake for the whole film, but I love every moment of it.

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There are two kinds of people in this world:

People who use that expression, and those that don't.

My mom is a person who uses that expression, and one of the phrases I heard over and over while growing up is, "There are two kinds of people in this world: Givers and Takers."

I wanted to be a Giver (duh, sounds way better) but it turns out that I'm a Taker.

When I tell people this, they're usually a bit surprised and try to insist that they know me to be generous and giving. Which I am -- but only because it's done very intentionally and with boundaries in place.

That's the thing about Takers: it's not that we don't give at all, we just don't give by default. Giving is a skill that we have to learn and practise.

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