Let Me Reintroduce Myself - 2025 Edition

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

A picture from one of my 2025 book signings, this time at a local coffee shop

When I moved my blog over to Substack just over three years ago, I had already been writing on my blog for nearly eleven 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

Over the past three years, my readership has grown with ebbs and flows. I published a book of essays and then my camping memoir last fall. It’s been two years since I wrote an “introduction” post for my subscribers and a lot has changed in those two years. Therefore, 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. (Although that conservativism gets chipped away every day, especially in our current political times.) 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 getting closer every month to our Texas years, which change a lot of things for me, especially since they coincided with the first Trump term. Below is the first post, but you can check out the whole series here.

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 four 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 accomplishments are finishing the St. Louis half-marathon at the end of my 2023 spring break and then the Indy Mini in 2024. And no, I don’t plan run a half-marathon again.

I love the outdoors and travel and our family loves camping, so be prepared for seasonal posts about all of our travel adventures. My most recent 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 been the dream for years.

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, Threads, BlueSky, and Facebook, where you will find addition pictures, commentary, and stories to fill out the narrative you find here. Although honestly, I use those pages less and less now.

Support my writing

While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

And thank you for supporting my journey 💗