I have not always considered myself to be an over thinker. I was never one to analyze a decision for very long and tended to favor spontaneity and adventure to meticulous planning and thorough consideration. Case in point: on the day we were married, my husband and I had known each other for 5 months, 29 days. To quote Andy from Parks and Rec, ““I cannot emphasize how little we thought about this,” And yes, my family are all still breathing a collective sigh of relief with every passing year that sees us still happily married.

I’ve always trusted my intuition. For better or for worse, my gut feeling was usually in charge of my decisions. I didn’t hem and haw or agonize over details, I just dove in head first and hoped for the best.

I lived on the edge, people. Sometimes it led to great things and sometimes it led to disaster, but overall, my gut led and my brain followed. (I say daily prayers of thanks that one of the times my gut feeling got it right was when I was choosing my husband. Terrifying. And also exhilarating. Hashtag no regrets.) However, that delicious spontaneity all came to a crashing halt seven years ago with the arrival of baby boy number one.

Suddenly life was a lot more serious because mine was not the only life on the line when I made choices. My gut could no longer be trusted because it was telling me one thing and the ‘experts’ were telling me another and my friends had an equally compelling take and my mom was saying something different altogether so my once easy-going brain, who was at one time just along for the ride, couldn’t take it anymore and committed mutiny against my intuition, taking over as captain and locking the intuitive impulses in the brig. Never to be heard from again.

It was then that I got in touch with my inner type “A”. Suddenly, pros and cons lists reigned supreme and I couldn’t make a single choice without consulting numerous hosts of people. And it’s only gotten worse as I’ve had more children; more people’s lives who are affected by every single choice I make. And to further complicate matters, once I’d figured it out for one kid, the other kids had the audacity to come out as completely different human beings and whatever I’d finally learned inevitably wouldn’t work for the next one. It was a mess.

I’m sorry to say, this inability to just go for it has bled into my personal life quite significantly. I’ve always been a dreamer; a planner; a schemer. Always a new idea for a business or a hobby or a novel. Always a new ambition or hope for my life. But now that I’m a mother and am dedicating so much of my life to the welfare of my children, I’ve had to put many of those dreams to bed for a time. The sacrifice has been well worth it, let me tell you, but at times it has been draining and has left me feeling like an empty shell of a person; out of touch with who I am besides Diaper-Changer Extraordinaire. I miss dreaming and planning and scheming. I miss working on the next big thing. And in light of my previous failure, I have been wary to jump right into the next big idea.

But here’s what I’m realizing: in the seven-years that I’ve been a meticulous planner; an over-thinker to the nth degree; an overly cautious namby-pamby, I have seen an equal number of failures and an equal number of successes as I did back when I let my gut feeling do the steering. Honest to goodness, it turns out that letting logic take the reigns didn’t even out my odds of seeing disaster as a result of a choice I’ve made. So here’s my last resolution made in January: less thinking; more doing. Fewer pros and cons lists; more stomach turning leaps into the abyss. Less light; more walks into darkness. Less logic; more dreaming.

I have a ‘next project’ in the works, you guys. And let me just tell you: it is a stomach turning leap into the abyss if ever there were one. I’m much more terrified to take this plunge in light of my last disappointing venture and so am riding this new wave into the unknown in a boat of abject terror and towering self-doubt. But hot dang, I’m riding the wave! I’m not going to look back…a whole lot more times…I’m moving forward. For better or for worse, it’s all you, Gut Feeling.

Join me, mamas! Throw caution to the wind and do all the things!
Or at least do some of the things.

“What if it doesn’t work out? Ah, but what if it does.”