Let Me Reintroduce Myself - 2023 Edition

Who is Sarah and what can you expect On the Journey?

The lighthouse in St. Joseph, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan. With all of the moves throughout my life, this is the closest I come to calling “home” when we are not at our actual home.

When I moved my blog over to Substack just over a year ago, I had already been writing on my blog for nearly nine years. With a small but mostly faithful audience, I had shared my experiences in parenting, home improvement, marriage, personal discovery, travel, and more. After making an introduction for my Frazzled Reflections Blogger page and then again for Accepting the Unexpected Journey on Wordpress, it seemed unnecessary to write a completely new blog post reintroducing myself to a new community, with the exception of the announcement that I was, in fact, moving my blog, yet again, to a new platform.

Shifting Goals and New Focus

But with the introduction of Substack Notes, a small growth in readership, and plans to finish my second book this summer, I felt it was prudent to take some time to formally introduce myself to my current audience and possibly entice a few others to join me here.

So how do I summarize everything that I am in a single post?

I am a wife, mother, and high school English teacher. I am a writer. I am a politically homeless Christian who is too progressive for most conservatives and just conservative enough to annoy some progressives. I am a Lutheran church worker’s kid who saw the dark underbelly of the system for most of my life and still went into teaching at Lutheran high schools and loved it, until I discovered that being a high school teacher didn’t protect me from everything. I’m starting to process some of that with a nearly monthly post for my paid subscribers. (I’m probably going to miss this month, but I’ll make it up this summer.)

The First Time the Church Left Me Behind

What you will discover here is that I am a little bit of everything. I’ve gone against every piece of blogging advice on the internet by writing about everything and anything. While my theme is always about being on a journey, my niche is whatever I feel like writing about on a given day. This became very clear to me when I sat down to work on my first book, a collection of essays from my blogs over the years, but I was still able to make the theme work. For better or for worse, I’m just too many things.

I love reading and have embraced the power of audiobooks to get me through my extensive “to-read” list. I’m constantly on the hunt for the next home improvement project, which has challenged our bank account since we bought our first house. Then again, it’s also the reason I started blogging in the first place. I enjoy analyzing pop culture so much, that a friend and I started

Lit Think Podcast

two years ago so we could scratch our teacher itch to talk about the likes of Marvel and musical theater with the language of English teachers. I’m not an athlete but I love sports and finally started running in my mid-30s. My proudest athletic accomplishment is finishing the St. Louis half-marathon at the end of my 2023 spring break.

I love the outdoors and travel and our family loves camping, so be prepared for seasonal posts about all of our travel adventures. My current book project is a camping memoir, with full chapters from my alpha draft available to my paid subscribers. I am a national parks junkie and hope to someday just travel the national parks with my husband Jeff and work as a park ranger. At least, that’s the dream.

Did I forget stuff? Oh, probably, but I’m sure you’ll discover more if you stick with me.

You can also follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where you will find addition pictures, commentary, and stories to fill out the narrative you find here.

Sifting through the pages

As I said, I don’t believe in just one genre, which is why I have split my Substack into sections. If you don’t love getting emails from one category, you can unsubscribe to just that category and continue to get the rest.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I write about the life experience that continues to influence my thoughts about the world around me and the things that affect my life and the life of my family. At those times, I write to process, reflect, and share those reflections to reassure myself that I’m not alone. While these reflections cover a wide range of topics, I do my best to write and reflect with nuance and honesty. This is my writing workshop. Most of these posts are free for non-subscribers, but I occasionally write “spicier" takes that I reserve for my paid subscribers.

Embracing Curiosity is where I write about culture, faith, and politics. Like with Accepting the Unexpected, I write to process, reflect, and share those reflections to reassure myself that I’m not alone. Again, I do my best to write and reflect with nuance and honesty. Most of these posts are free for non-subscribers, but I occasionally write “spicier" takes that I reserve for my paid subscribers.

I started Mission: Wanderlust for just my travel writing and storytelling. I have spent a lot of time writing about camping and our life outdoors because that is our escape from work and our chance to reconnect as a family. I mostly write but occasionally podcast about new adventures as they come. All podcast episodes are available to the public and can be downloaded on most player apps.

I started Writing the Journey as I worked through publishing my first book. Here you will find everything about that publishing journey and the lessons that I continue to learn as a writer. All of these posts are free to all readers.

So that’s what you can expect from me. Like I said, I’m sure that you will continue to learn about me the longer you stick with me on this life journey, but I hope that it lifts you up as much as it helps me to write about it as I go.

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