Life – Budget Bliss: Bucket List

The Gift You Give Yourself

Published on December 10, 2025 by BudgetBlissLeave a comment

There comes a point in adulthood when you look around at your own life and realize just how much of it was built from other people’s expectations. Parents, partners, coworkers, even strangers on the internet all seem to carry opinions about what a “good” life should look like whether that’s the classic white picket fence and 2 kids, jetting around the world or having that corner office. With the shorter days and colder nights which entice us to stay inside sipping a warm cup of tea, December has a way of handing us a quiet pause in the middle of all that noise. In that stillness you can ask a gentler and more liberating question: What if the best gift you give yourself this year is a life that actually fits you? Not a life you are supposed to want. Not a life that earns gold stars. A life that feels like home when you step into it.

Most of us carry at least a few pieces of life that no longer fit. A commitment you keep out of habit. A routine that once served you but now drains you. A goal you set years ago that you are still dragging around even though it no longer reflects who you are. Just like clothes that shrink in the dryer, some roles tighten over time until they restrict your movement. One of the most compassionate things you can do for yourself is to notice what feels constricting. If something consistently brings dread or resentment, it deserves a second look.

Try asking yourself: What do I continue to do only because I feel I should? What parts of my week feel like a performance? What drains me more than it fills me? These small gut checks can reveal more truth than grand resolutions ever will. Because often resolutions are about adding things to our lives when maybe we should be asking what isn’t serving us anymore.

Photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery on Pexels.com

Permission to Want What You Want

Wanting something different for your life can feel almost rebellious. We are taught early that desire is selfish or impractical. Yet desire is really a compass. It points you toward what brings meaning. The permission you refuse to give yourself is often the permission you most need. You are allowed to want a simple life. You are allowed to want a bold one. You are allowed to want rest, creativity, adventure, peace or a mix of them.

Let go of the guilt around wanting something others do not understand. You do not have to justify your dream life like it is a court case. Your preferences do not require a panel of approval. They only require your honesty. After all, the only person who gets to live your life is you. They have their own.

Every person inherits a set of default settings. These can be expectations from family, cultural messages or values absorbed without question. Some defaults are helpful. Others keep you living a script that never belonged to you. December is an ideal moment to ask where those settings came from. Did you choose them or were they assigned to you? Are they aligned with who you are now or with a past version of you who no longer exists?

Letting go does not always require a dramatic overhaul. It can be as simple as replacing one outdated belief with a more generous one. It can be as quiet as deciding your worth is not measured by productivity. Sometimes the life that fits begins with subtracting what never matched your shape in the first place.

Crafting a Life That Fits

Once you clear the space, you can begin creating a life that feels right in your hands. Think of it like tailoring. Small adjustments can change everything. You might shift your morning routine to match your natural rhythm. You might redefine what rest means so it supports you instead of feeling like a guilty pleasure. You might choose relationships that nourish you instead of ones that keep you hustling for belonging.

Crafting a life that fits is not a single grand gesture. It is a set of choices made consistently. When something feels peaceful instead of performative, you are moving in the right direction.

A good life should give you room. Room to breathe. Room to change your mind. Room to fail safely. Room to explore new interests without embarrassment. If your life feels like a tight shoe, it is not a sign that you need to force yourself into it. It is a sign that you need to loosen the laces. When you prioritize a life that can expand with you, you trade perfection for sustainability. You also create conditions in which joy can actually take root instead of feeling like a visitor.

A Gift You Keep Giving Yourself

The gift of a well-fitting life is not wrapped once and placed under a tree. It is something you give yourself again and again. Through honesty. Through reflection. Through paying attention to what your life is telling you. You will outgrow some things. You will discover new ones. You will learn what brings you back to yourself. The point is not to build a life that looks impressive. The point is to build one that feels true.

As this year winds down, take a moment to appreciate the small ways you have already reshaped your life into something more authentic. And if you have not started yet, that is all right. The gift is not in the timing. The gift is in choosing yourself.

A Purpose Life: Lifting Up Others

Published on March 4, 2025January 19, 2025 by BudgetBlissLeave a comment

I’ve now espoused upon cultivating your talents and exploring your calling as pieces of a purposeful life or applying your y amounted to applying your talents in support of your calling to serve others in some nebulous manner. Of course in my post about your calling, it was basically looking at your passions and applying them to helping others. But what does it look like to help others? How does one help? Who does one choose?

It really does depend doesn’t it? On who you are helping and what you are helping them achieve. How do we choose who to help? Does the who have to be another human being? There are plenty of people who dedicate themselves to helping animals. Jane Goodall is often hailed in the same breath as Martin Luther King Jr or Ghandi and she concerned herself primarily with gorillas. Julia Hill was lauded for her activism to save a tree from a logging company. Yes, their actions certainly helped the human race as a whole later on but in the meantime their energy could have been put forth in other areas.

As someone who has worked and interned at non-profits one of my favorite interview questions to ask people both when I was being interviewed and when I was doing the interviewing, was “why this issue”. Why out of the hundreds of social issues and concerns this one. Why Haiti? Why the homeless? Why mothers and children? Why not Kenya? Why not veterans? Why not people suffering from addiction? Why not cute, cuddly puppies? After all, if you devote a majority of your time, effort and resources into a given area that means those same resources aren’t being spent on another area of importance and naturally one cannot reasonably support all areas of importance. In a way, that means you are saying that this thing here is the most important thing to me to be doing. That’s a pretty big statement when you think about it.

Now it may be that there were numerous things that were important to you and this is the one that happened to have the opportunity for you at the time to use your gifts and passions for it. When I did an internship for a non-profit that worked in Haiti it was because I needed an internship and that happened to be the one offered to me. It wasn’t because Haiti was the top of my list of countries that needed my support and I was particularly passionate about Haiti. I have become more passionate about it for my experience, but I also understand it is because I now have a personal connection to that country whereas previously there was nothing to push Haiti higher on my list than any other developing country. I wanted to help others and this happened to be an opportunity that opened up for me – but remember my job isn’t necessarily my calling (we already discussed how the two shouldn’t be conflated).

Still, one can find that one has stumbled more or less into something that is calling adjacent. That doesn’t make it wrong necessarily. After all, one may be called to something and then discover the opportunities just aren’t there or you haven’t found them yet. The point is that one should not leave it unexamined. Why this population in this particular part of the world? Why this issue and not another issue? Is this really your top priority? There are, after all, a near infinite array of issues facing us today that all scream for attention from climate change to housing issues from substance use disorders to lack of access to healthcare. There are different ways to approach these issues as well from a one on one individual level to pushing for larger social and political changes. Which one do you pick?

In social work, we have this adorable story of a boy walking along the beach picking up starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. Around the boy there are hundreds of starfish all struggling to survive. An old man asks the boy what he’s doing telling him sadly that there is simply no way for him to save all the starfish so what does it matter? The boy responds that it mattered to the one that he threw back. It reminds those of us working in a system that is always throwing more “starfish” on the beach not to stop fighting, not to give up because it matters to each person we do help, each life we’re able to impact. Personally, I like to add that there’s another child, a girl, who has climbed onto a boat and is out in the water looking for the reason why all the damn starfish are washing up on the shore in the first place. I call those people the macro-level social workers who are trying to fix the underlying issue.

Now, I’m not saying the people on the shore are doing something wrong. The macro level people may remind us that you can feed a man a fish and he will eat one day of his life, but if you teach a man to fish, he will eat every day of his life. My flippant response is he can’t learn if he’s dead so many you should feed him first anyways. In other words, you need to triage the problem and fix the underlying issue. Some people are there to prevent an issue, some people are there to stabilize one diaster hits, others are there to fix underlying causes and other are there to repair damage. It’s like how in the Intensive Care Unit you often have a patients who require multiple different specialties in order to recover. If all the doctors had said that only the heart is necessary and to forget about pesky other organs like lungs then a lot of us would be dead. If the only science anyone cared about was chemistry we wouldn’t have gone to the moon. Each of us is part of a bigger whole trying to triage this patient called human society.

Photo by Efe Yau011fu0131z Soysal on Pexels.com

Some of us have been called to fix plants and save trees. Others of us have been asked to focus on the cute fuzzy creatures or not so fuzzy creatures. Some of us need to answer the call to our neighbors here in our backyard, others are to be called away to lands far from home. There are many, many different areas of the world that desperately need your time, talent, attention and resources. The question is which ones are you most drawn to help? Which ones need your talents the most? My great uncle was an amazing statistician and helped work on projects like calculating where the fish in the ocean are to help guide international fishing laws and treaties through the UN. He also worked with astronomers to help unmask the mysteries of space.

As always it’s important to reflect on these things when talking stock of your own life. What have you been doing with your time? Does it line up with your values? Was it something you just sort of fell into? Have you looked around more recently to see if there are opportunities that more align with what you feel called to do? Do you know why you’re supporting this particular cause over others? Some of us are lucky and obtain a singular vision that helps guide them forward. The majority of us are left stumbling about grasping at whatever happens to be near and hoping it’s the right thing. Although truthfully, it might not matter that you land on precisely the right thing. There are many different passions one can pursue and there are many different causes by which one can apply one’s talents and passions to.

Perhaps, we spend too much time wondering about our purpose in life and worrying about it when the truth is there are many different paths to living a purposeful life so long as you are able to do meaningful work where your talents and skills are utilized. Some people are meant to be devoted their whole lives to a singular issue. Others are meant to move between issues. After all, my great uncle didn’t spend his whole time focused on the movement of fish in the ocean. He helped them figure out how much they could reasonably fish and where so that we wouldn’t run out of food. A huge contribution to the human race if I do say so myself. However, he was one of several people who prepared reports and of course, he wasn’t the one who drew up the final agreements, so it was a group effort. However, he moved on from that project and applied himself to the next. Which was fine! There are some people out there whose sole purpose is just to start things and let others take over once they’ve started a project. The point is to reflect on your own personal journey toward meaning and allow yourself to shape it without preconceived notions about what it should look like. The most purposeful life is not necessarily becoming a nun and spoon feeding the starving orphans of some wartorn area of the world. A purposeful life is one in which we can develop our interests into skills, to apply those skills and gifts to alleviate a deep wound in the world that we are passionate about healing in whatever way that may be.

You Can Never Fully Prepare For Everything Life Will Throw at You

Published on September 24, 2024July 19, 2024 by BudgetBlissLeave a comment

For those of us “type A” personalities, the planners, the cautious and the dare-I-admit somewhat controlling personality types, we like to be prepared. I am the sort of person who you want on a vacation because if something happens I will usually be whipping out the solution to the problem from my bag. Wine spill? Tide pen. Hangnail? Why of course, I brought nail clippers. Bug bite? I have just the thing that pulls out the venom or “juice” that causes the sting/itch. Don’t worry about your hair, I put extra pins in mine just for this occasion! I am the person not with a Plan B but Plans B through Z. Or at least I was.

Through all my careful planning and preparing there is always some unplanned event. I was the coordinator of a homeless shelter tasked in part with developing our policies and procedures. I had developed a plan for everything. Earthquakes, fires, floods, drug overdose. Or so I thought. I had nothing in the book for a pandemic. The ONE thing that I had not planned for happened. So I had to develop my plan on the fly, in face of ever changing regulations, restrictions and recommendations throughout COVID. None of us had planned for COVID, yet we somehow got through it. Perhaps, not unscathed, but hopefully more resilient than before in the face of uncertainty to handle whatever it is life decides to throw at us. I certainly grew from the experience.

You can still see where his eye was infected.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are things life gives us that are wonderful surprises that we cannot prepare for. I certainly was not prepared to adopt a stray, near death’s door, kitten and nurse him back to health. Luke was and continues to be one of the very best surprises that life gave me. One might think one is prepared for a pet, but I assure you no matter how many you’ve had before the next one is always its own set of special surprises. I imagine it is much like with children, each sibling is a unique challenge unto themselves.

It is a good thing that life carries with it surprises that you cannot readily respond to without a little growth or creative thinking. It is in these moments of challenge that we are stretched into stronger and (hopefully) better versions of ourselves. Consider what might happen if we could simply prepare for everything life is going to throw at us. How might that affect our development? Would we learn humility? Would we be resilient? Would we think creatively? Would we feel empathy for others when they are struggling to overcome their own challenges? Would we be able to help them? From my own observations, individuals who have not been adequately challenged and overly protected from the surprises of life seem to struggle in these areas. They are disconnected from reality without experiencing the full wealth of life. We have the biggest opportunities for growth in the things we couldn’t prepare for.

Photo by Dagmara Dombrovska on Pexels.com

These challenges can be gifts! Contrasting experiences help highlight one another much like how two characters act as foils to one another in order for a reader to fully understand both. I ask you to consider, dear reader, how much sweeter is the view from a mountain top that you struggled to see versus one that you did not? It might seem nice to simply drive your car up and look at the view, but I can almost promise you the person who hiked the whole thing is probably enjoying it more. Without the challenge you may be missing more than half the experience and certainly none of the triumph.

These are gifts not only for your own personal growth, but also for the opportunities they present. In those times, you may discover your best friend or gain a new skill that lands you your dream job. You may get to live out a bucket list experience or finally get that break you’ve been needing. If we are constantly grasping at control we miss the opportunities around us, focusing on the negative instead of what might be. We close ourselves off to the possibilities continuing to ram our heads against a wall that will not break completely missing the door that has been opened instead.

In fact we may hurt ourselves most when we refuse to let go of control. How many times have we been told to relax when getting a shot because it hurts more when we’re tensed up? Life is often the same way. When we are tense and controlling, life hits a lot harder than when we are relaxed and go with the flow of things. In that flow state, we are willing and open to trying new things, to look for windows rather than doors, to see beauty where others only see ash, to believe in what might yet be without being too attached to any one thing.

This “harsh” truth is once again a blessing in disguise. It encourages us to let go of all the things we cannot control and to focus on what we can control, ourselves. Preparing for everything is exactly trying to control everything. So often we plan to free ourselves of worry, but we fail to see the burden we take up instead. Do you think about the sheer amount of mental weight you place on controlling everything? If you control everything, then everything that goes wrong is your fault! That is certainly a weighty responsibility to carry about. What about all the extra effort you place to prepare for things that never happen? How much time is stolen from you? Consider my own tendency to overprepare. Do you have any idea how heavy all my extra stuff becomes when I go out places? My bag is bigger than everyone else’s and heavier. Almost no one offers to carry it (precisely because it’s heavy) but they certainly don’t mind asking me for help. They all get to walk around free from care because I’m carrying the burden of their worries. Granted, my sister is also a planner and so we take turns carrying the bag, but other than her, it is a rare person indeed who offers.

I have also gotten better about over packing and overplanning saying instead that I have some extra cash and we’ll be near a store if something happens for most of our day trips opting instead to merely go with the flow. The freedom of this cannot be understated. Instead of focusing on all that can go wrong, I look forward to the event. Instead of endlessly checking the weather leading up to it, I just wait until the morning of to make any decisions. I plan for what I’d like to happen without closing myself off to new possibilities – more than often better possibilities.

This principle can be applied to the small things like a day out to the larger challenges like a pandemic. Let go of the burden of control and take up the freedom of the flow. Embrace the challenges as the opportunities they are! Yes, they often suck in the moment, but looking back you will be amazed at yourself for getting through!

5 “Harsh” Truths About Life

Published on September 3, 2024July 19, 2024 by BudgetBlissLeave a comment

I recently came across a post on facebook that really resonated with me, but perhaps not in the way it was meant.

Five Harsh Truths About Life:

1. You are responsible for your own happiness.

2. The majority of your limits are self-imposed.

3. You can never fully prepare for everything life will throw at you.

4. You will mess up. The best thing you can do is learn from it and move on.

5. Your loved ones will not be around forever.

Although, I don’t know that I would call them harsh, in fact I would say these are freeing truths. In my next five posts, I will be diving into each of these truths to show you how awesome each one is and how these can free you to live your best life.