Welcome to a Big Brash Life

I started blogging back in 2010 - if you can even call it that. I had a page, with a URL and everything, called It’s Better With Beer. My goal was to do one unique workout and drink a different beer for every day of the year. I got about 200 days in, then I got sick and called it a day. Apparently drinking beer every single day doesn’t make for a strong immune response to sickness. Who knew?

You might have found your way here from thegirlwiththebutter.com - where' I’ve been blogging and posting for the last 5 years. We’ll get into that later - but welcome to my new internet home!

I learned about the Paleo diet, and started making major changes to my nutritional lifestyle. Recipes, then! I have to post recipes! Paleo, gluten-free, recipes! Eventually, I spent 9 months getting my Nutritional Therapy Practitioner Certification. Nutrition information! That’s it! I have to write about nutrition! All the while, I was over on Instagram posting about mindset, CrossFit, travel, the coffee houses and restaurants I was finding, ranting about the shit women deal with and the crap we tell ourselves. I would sometimes force myself to write a ‘blog post’ - but they were few and far between.

This blog thing has changed so many times over the last few years. From beer blog, to fitness diary, to Paleo Nutrition resource and Whole Life Challenge Recipes. Rants and baked goods. 

Cocktails, and odes to body image. 

Travel. Drop ins. Restaurant picks.

It finally dawned on me what the hell this thing is.

*GASP*

It’s a….

…lifestyle blog.

Could I BE any more millennial?

But that’s what it is. A lifestyle blog.

It’s not about one thing, or one topic, or about staying in one lane. Over time, as I’ve grown up and leaned into who I am/what I want/what I believe, I’ve fallen away from the things that would keep me talking about one thing. Away from the need to label what I’m doing because that’s what internet gurus say to do: define your audience, define your voice, pick your schtick.

But that’s…. bullshit. We’re not one thing. We’re one thousand different things. We live in this world of contradictions and juxtapositions. We love exercise, but we also like to watch Friends for 4 hours in our pajamas. We care about the quality of our eggs, and meats, and vegetables, but we also love cocktails and nachos. We give people the benefit of the doubt, but also sometimes want to tell them to fuck off. We are not one thing. We do not live in a world of black and white. It's all gray. We’re magic carpets that are made with thousands of threads of all of the things that make us who we are.

What I want to talk about, and share with you, are ALL of the things that collide and combine to form your great big life. I want to show you all of the ways that it can be SO many things at the same time. The stuff that you gotta let go of in order to do it. How health and fitness are a part of living that big brash life, but not the whole. The places you gotta go and the stuff you gotta eat. Cooking and baking. Drinks. The thoughts that are holding you back from living your biggest, brashest, most unapologetic and unbreakable life.

Travel, food, the balance with health and fitness, living life on your own terms, being unafraid to be seen, saying no when you want and yes when you’re scared, wearing the shorts and eating the cake, counting macros when you want to and pouring that rose when the time is right –

YOUR life,

Lived in a way that YOU want,

with no room for dogma or bullshit – not from yourself or anyone else.

How can you dig in to all that good, juicy, stuff but keep things in one neat package?

I can’t.

The truth is, I kept trying to force this to be a business, because that’s what you do on the internet. Honestly, though – I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m just not. I like writing. I like sharing. I really like finding great food. At the end of the day, the reason I was never able to force myself to regularly post before, is because it didn’t serve me anymore – because I kept trying to make it something it wasn’t.

Let’s face it – I want to have a goddamn lifestyle blog.

So that’s what we’re gonna do.