Men, Middle-Age, And Marriage

“I don’t know you anymore.”

Since the inception of the modern age, this phrase has meant the beginning of the end for many marriages. In this article regarding menopause and divorce, I offered a real life example of a time when a husband said these words to his wife. I discussed how “The Change” can cause much more than the simple shutdown of the female reproductive system, and how those changes often lead to divorce.

But it takes two to Tango; or, in this case, two to ruin what used to be a wonderful relationship.

Man-o-pause is real.

All right, so to an extent, the effects of dropping testosterone levels in men aren’t nearly what they are for women. As it tends to do, the natural health world has exaggerated the incidence and ramifications of the male side of things.

Nevertheless, the drop does happen, and in some men, testosterone levels drop to the extent that they experience mood swings, fatigue, muscle loss, hot flashes, and/or the dreaded erectile dysfunction. They may even, as a consequence, develop estrogen dominance, which can exacerbate and add to the variety of unwanted physical and psychological problems. Just as low estrogen and progesterone levels in women can cause a skewed perspective on life, so can low testosterone levels in men.

Even if those levels are within the normal range, medically speaking, a guy can still feel the physiological shift. And regardless of testosterone, no one can argue that between the ages of forty and fifty, men begin to experience the aging process, which can lead to both physical discomforts and emotional issues.

Therefore, while middle-aged husbands need to have some understanding and empathy toward the difficulties their middle-aged wives are going through, so do the wives toward their husbands. If you’re a man experiencing symptoms such as those I mentioned above, I encourage you to research how you might remedy the situation. Either way, I beg both husband and wife who have hit the particular time of life in question not to give up on each other.

Let’s talk about how and why.

How to train the (middle-age) dragon

How To Train Your Dragon has to be my favorite movie of all time. Yes, even before Forrest Gump, the previous winner. In the movie, dragon-fighter-in-training Hiccup encounters one of the rarest dragons known to the Viking clan of which he is a part. Instead of killing the Night Fury, he becomes the dragon-whisperer, studying Toothless (as he names his new friend) to learn what the dragon likes and hates, and how to be its friend.

Menopause can turn a previously mellow, kind woman into a dragon. Same for men experiencing a drop in testosterone. Hormonal changes affect brain chemistry, and that can turn you into a wild creature who constantly reacts with instinctive fear to the slightest of threats, whether real or imagined. Or it can turn a previously active, fun-loving person into a depressed couch potato.

Such changes can precipitate the frustration-born observation, “I don’t know you anymore,” which can precipitate the end of a marriage.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Instead, the frustrated spouse in question can choose gentle communication. They can choose to ask, with genuine love and care, how they can help their partner. They can choose to surreptitiously and carefully study their unhappy spouse to figure out what activities or rituals or words now ground them and bring them a sense of calm and balance. They can choose, together with their spouse, to research ways to conquer the root problem, the low hormone levels, the messed-up brain chemistry.

But, it’s not always about hormones.

In my last blog post, I revealed that a memoir audiobook inspired my thoughts about menopause and divorce. Having now completed listening to the memoir, I know that while perimenopause might have been at the root of the struggles of the author, her husband’s struggles may have had another cause.

Basically, he’d been fed a lie about the place where he, his wife, and their young daughter went to live on the other side of the globe. The owners of the private school who’d hired him to teach in a jungle had deceived not only him, but also all the other teachers. Long story short, the author’s husband became physically and psychologically exhausted within a relatively short period of time. The situation was nothing like the panacea of education they’d been told it would be.

And so, for a time, the husband took his frustrations out on his wife. It was an easy cop-out because of how she’d been behaving for months before they made the move. Toward the end of the memoir, he admits as much. When you’re feeling beat down every day, it’s next to impossible to have the right perspective on anything. Easy to cast the blame on other people.

And this is where a lot of marriages that might have otherwise gone on, end.

A third reason I believe a lot of marriages end when the couple is between the ages of forty and fifty: people change. Not completely. But over the period of twenty years, a person is going to develop different goals, create a bucket list, change religions, quit religion, try a new career, become more passionate about a certain issue, and so on. The way each person changes is as unique as each individual. And if a spouse changes in a particular way that competes with or clashes against how the other half of the couple has changed – or not changed – this can cause conflict.

Many couples decide that a no-fault divorce is in order in such cases, but that’s not the case. A couple can stay married, have a strong marriage, despite differences that crop up between them.

How? The answer is simple, but not easy.

Commitment.

I’m not talking about sticking with an abuser or adulterer. I’m talking about the typical struggles of life that bring people down, as well as the changing I just discussed. None of it has to signal the end of a marriage. In fact, sticking to the person you made vows to could end up being by far the better option. Why?

Working through hard times forces you to grow. 

It also brings you closer to the person you’re taking the life journey with. Working through the challenges of marriage might actually help you become a much better person than you would have had you just thrown in the towel.

Communicate. Express what you’re feeling, your concerns. Ask what your spouse is feeling, their concerns. Talk and think and talk some more until you both have come upon a plan of action to improve things.

If it’s about change, compromise will be in order. Say she loves to travel, but he’s a homebody. Maybe they agree that twice a year, he’ll go on a short trip with her, but once or twice a year she can take a longer trip by herself.

Focus on and nurture those things you still have in common.

My mother was born, raised, and remains, in her late eighties, Democrat. Her second late husband was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.

BUT. They were both Catholic.

So. They talked about spiritual things, and mostly left political things alone. They had other things in common, as well: they were both parents and grandparents. Both had lost their first spouse. They were born and raised in the same general region of the U.S., a mere state apart.

Remember the things you have in common with your spouse. Remember the unchangeable aspects of their core that contributed to your attraction to them in the first place.

Unless your spouse has decided to engage in illicit or morally gray behavior that is simply unconscionable to you, stark differences in dreams, goals, beliefs, and desires do not need to mean the end of a marriage. Neither do emotional struggles. 

The latter are usually temporary, the pain of which can be mitigated when the non-suffering spouse is supportive. If they have an organic cause, they can be treated with diet, supplements, and/or medication.

Commitment. Communication. The ability to accept your spouse where they are on life’s journey. These are the stuff that strong marriages are made of.

The ingredients that divorce-proof any marriage.

A Question All Middle-Aged Women (and men!) Need To Address

 

“I don’t know you anymore.”

These were the ominous words of a husband to his wife after they’d had one of their worst fights during their fourteen years of marriage. Over the past year, she’d grown increasingly negative, expressing that negativity with more frequency and intensity until he was near the breaking point. 

When he’d proposed marriage to her a decade and a half earlier, he’d told her that he wanted to wake up every morning to her smile, that she made him laugh every day. By the morning of that fight, she must have, indeed, seemed like a completely different person to him.

The story comes from a memoir I’m currently reading, and it’s got my mind back on a train of thought that it’s been bouncing on and off of for several years. It’s a question, really, a question that occurred to me primarily because of my own experiences, and also because of the snippets of other people’s stories that I’ve heard.

It relates to the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad symptoms leading up – and persisting through – menopause. Specifically, the symptoms that cause a mentally stable woman to suddenly suffer from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and paranoia.

The question is this: Does menopause cause divorce?

Why this is an important question.

The symptoms I just mention can convince a woman that life is meaningless, that there is nothing to look forward to after life on earth, that her entire life has been a sham, void of purpose, a mere game of survival, that there is no reason for going on because everything is dreary and gray and nothing matters because everything eventually dies.

If she doesn’t quite get to the bottom of that pit, then she wakes up one day completely discontented with her life for no reason other than her perspective has suddenly and (ostensibly) unaccountably shifted. Her husband isn’t romantic enough, doesn’t make enough money, doesn’t have enough self-motivation. Her job is joyless and pointless. Her home is ugly, and so is she. Regardless of how much weight she loses, or what kind of makeup she uses, or how fashionable she dresses, she knows she’ll never look thirty again and she. Can’t. Stand it. She’s tired of having to keep house, wishes her teenage or young adult children would just grow up already and leave her alone.

Any woman over the age of forty-five knows exactly what I’m talking about. Even if she didn’t experience this dramatic shift in thinking, she likely knows someone who did. However, most have never wondered about a connection between menopause and divorce.

It’s time to get our heads out of the sand. Because the first scenario, if it doesn’t lead to the woman’s suicide, could provoke her husband to leave. In the second scenario, it’ll be the wife leaving because she’s convinced she needs a new life.

Understanding what’s going on in a woman’s brain during perimenopause and beyond could be a gamechanger and marriage-saver. I’m going to get to that in a few moments. But first, let’s remember: I only have a theory, based on a question. What do the facts say?

Do divorce statistics support my belief?

The other day, spurred on by the memoir and the author’s poignant story, I did some digging on divorce statistics. I was somewhat surprised to find that the lion’s share of divorces are initiated by women. As several of the most common reasons for divorce include infidelity, domestic violence, and addiction, that makes sense. Not that women aren’t unfaithful, or suffer with addictions. I know, in rare occasions, wives have even physically abused their husbands.

But it could be that men commit such sins more often. I’m confident, as well, that men are better at turning a blind eye to such issues. Because, let’s face it, sisters – men lose a lot when a woman walks out of the house. Translation: they end up with a lot more work to do.

Also, men generally are more chill. Not as emotionally reactive, they tend, even in the midst of pain and heartache, not to take extreme actions when their wives have done wrong.

Back to reasons for divorce. Menopause was not listed as one. Of course not. Because the forty-plus women asking for “no-fault” divorces, or claiming that their husbands aren’t “meeting their needs” don’t have a clue as to the root cause of why they suddenly hate their lives.

However.

HOWEVER.

In the 2010’s, the percent of divorces between couples who were between forty and sixty years old skyrocketed. The divorce rate at that age used to be low; today, it’s the opposite.

One reason is that many members of Generation X have eschewed the faith traditions of their parents and grandparents. Life is about being happy, not about pleasing God; therefore, if you are no longer happy with the person you promised “death till you part” with, you don’t have to wait until death to part from them.

I’m not talking abuse or adultery here. I’m talking, he wants to live on the East Coast, she wants to live on the West. No agreement, so the obvious course of action is divorce.

Or.

OR.

Menopause literally messes with a woman’s head.

In the years leading up to menopause, a woman’s estrogen and progesterone levels bounce all over the place. The overall direction of both hormones, however, is down.

Ever heard of serotonin? It’s the happy chemical. It is THE reason anybody ever feels happy. Upbeat. Positive. It’s what keeps you from getting depressed, anxious, and angry.

Well, guess what other chemicals are essential not only for the production of serotonin, but for proper functioning of neural pathways in the brain?

Yep. Estrogen and progesterone. Take those out of the picture, and you get mood swings, depression, paranoia, anxiety, and panic attacks. You get women who used to be full of vivacity and a strong sense of purpose, suddenly wondering why they were even born. You get women who used to find contentment with ease, suddenly thinking that every decision they’ve ever made has been the wrong one.

Lower estrogen and progesterone levels leads to reduced serotonin production leads to despair, depression, and a chronic sense of impending doom.

Leads to… divorce?

I think it’s worth a look.

If you’re a middle-aged woman reading this article and you recognize yourself in the above descriptions, especially if these new and unwanted character traits are causing problems between you and your husband, may I encourage you that there is hope. You can get your old self back (the inside, not the outside, sorry). You can feel contented, even happy, again. You can fall back in love with your man… or at least see him once again as the friend and support that you always used to see him as.

There is hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.

If you don’t want to take that, or can’t afford it, I have two free books that will help most women. The first, So Long, Stress! takes you down a spiritual path. It’s a biblically based method of releasing emotions which has transformed my life. Clickhere to check out that book.

The second, From Suffering To Singing, addresses how to ameliorate the physiological effects of low hormone and serotonin levels with diet and supplements, including progesterone cream. Click here, or  the book image in the sidebar, to download it from Amazon.

Remember, both books are free. If you don’t want to obtain them from Amazon, they are available everywhere else, too, including Hoopla, Overdrive, and Everand.

It takes two to Tango.

As I finish up this blog post, I have reached the part of the memoir where the author reveals a little more about her husband. Enough so that I can see that she wasn’t the only one committing acts that put a strain on their marriage. Yes, menopause can change a woman in unhappy ways. And sometimes, the man remains the same and is doing his best with this strange and unfamiliar creature he used to know.

But as they age, men, too, go through hormonal changes. They are equally vulnerable to developing a skewed perspective on life, on themselves, on their wives, which can eventually lead to problems. I’ll be talking about that in the next post.

In the meantime, ladies, seek help. Seek healing. You don’t have to feel miserable for the rest of your life,

Or lose your decades-long marriage because of that misery.

An Observation.

 You know you're a Highly Sensitive Person when you watch a sci-fi comedy movie and hate it because the writers kill off a mother and her little girl.

(Alien Trespass, in case you're wondering.)

No More "Wide"; Here's Why

About a year ago, I decided to make all of my novels available in every major ebook store. In the self-publishing industry, this action is referred to as “going wide.” That is versus being exclusive with the Amazon store. I had two reasons for making that decision.

First, I finally bought into the narrative the Amazon wants to control the world and shut down every other online store. That, of course, means Jeff Bezos must be the Antichrist and Christians should have nothing to do with him. I even wrote a blog post where I smack-talked author exclusivity with Amazon, and particularly their Kindle Unlimited program.

I bit the hand that had been feeding me, and it came back to bite me. I've discovered since that sometimes, exclusivity is a self-published author's best friend. More on that in a minute.

The second, and more compelling, reason that I went wide was that I learned that the Apple iBooks store had decided to make free digital (AI) narration available for authors… as long as their books were in their store.

I’ve been hearing for some time that audiobooks are the new ebook, that you’re only playing house if you publish ebooks but don’t create an audiobook for every novel that you write. You’re not “professional.” You won’t make “real” money.

But for most authors, handing a thousand bucks over to a voice actor to narrate a book is a financial risk we can’t afford to take.

So, I thought, great! Free audiobooks of my novels! I can finally do this self-publishing thing right.

And, I hoped, make a lot more money than I ever had.

Reality check.

Long story short, as far as I can tell, I’ve had zero sales of any of my novels in audio form from Apple. And that was even after getting a lot of downloads of my free Christmas novels. On top of that, during the past few months the money I made from the non-Amazon stores hasn’t even come close to equating what I used to make from the Kindle Unlimited fund.

Somebody might tell me I haven’t waited long enough. Or done enough promotions.

Maybe not. Truth be told, I don’t want to. I don’t want to do the leg work to become known enough so that I can make a decent income from the twenty percent of the population who purchase ebooks from a non-Amazon store.

“But I’ve boycotted Amazon!”

Some people will tell me (have told me, as a matter of fact) that Amazon is evil, and that anyone who goes exclusive with them is selling their soul to the devil.

Well. I hope that person grows all of their own food, grows or raises plants or livestock from which they make their own clothing, doesn’t own a car, doesn’t use a bank or credit union, is totally off the grid with energy and power, and never buys anything from any kind of store, because I wouldn’t want them to be a hypocrite.

Amazon is far from being the only imperfect corporation out there. It’s just one of the biggest, which is why it’s gotten bad press.

I’m going back to basics.

More truth: my life was simpler and less stressful when I was almost exclusive with Amazon. I say “almost” because all the first novels in my series are available wide, as are the boxed sets for each series.

However, from now on, all of my novels that are NOT the first in a series will be exclusive with Amazon, which means they can either be purchased individually from Amazon, or read through the Kindle Unlimited program.

I’ve already created paperback and hardcover versions for each novel, as well. They are priced so I earn around two dollars per sale of each print novel, which is actually less than what I make from ebook sales.

In addition, Amazon has just rolled out its own virtual audiobook narration program. The voices aren’t quite the quality as those of Apple, but they’re good enough. Within a few days – say, by the 20^th of January – all of my novels will be available in audiobook format in the Amazon store. I’ve priced them all at $7.99, just to keep things simple.

I’m done playing everybody else’s game. I want to enjoy writing, and I can’t do that if I’m stressing out over all the marketing rules.

So I’ve decided that I’m done trying to follow everybody’s rules.

It’s like I heard one six-figure romance author say: Kindle Unlimited is like the biggest library in the world, available around the world, and on whatever device you read books, there’s a Kindle app that allows you to read Kindle books on it.

I wish I would have stuck to that advice, and not wasted a ton of time last March following yet another shiny object that turned out to be fool's gold. 

The grass on the other side of the fence is not always as green as the cows are claiming.

Rediscovering A Childhood Love

 Most of the month of December, I did a huge total-house purge and reorganization, including furniture rearrangement and a bit of redecorating. As I shifted my creativity away from writing stories and toward the visual arts, a part of me that I buried somewhere deep in my soul after growing up wriggled its way out of the box I'd put it in.

I began to want to color again.

Before I say anything more, I must confess that I'm terrible at drawing people and animals. But when I was a child, I relished the mere creation of designs on paper. I enjoyed exploring with colors, and making something pretty.

I thought, as the nights grew longer and I became more disillusioned with the increasingly paltry offerings on YouTube, why not? The fact that we have loads of paper and two boxes of little-used crayons that would otherwise sit idle for years, only served to spur me on.

And so, a few times a week, in the evening, I sit down at the table with a piece of paper and the markers and crayons, and I draw and color. Here's what I created the other night:

Drawing and coloring make for a nice rest away from the mental effort required for writing stories.

Speaking of that, you might be interested to know that I am around a quarter of the way finished with my third novel in my latest series, which will top off at four novels. It's another Christmas romance series, so I won't be releasing it until October, but sometime this summer I'll post the first chapter of the first book in the series, just to give you a taste. Follow this blog so you don't miss it!

In the meantime, why not sit down with some paper and a box of crayons one evening? You might be surprised at how joyful and grounding the activity of creating a colorful picture can be. Rediscover the artist you once knew you were before somebody told you otherwise!

Many blessings to you,

Emily Josephine

Six Benefits To Doing YouTube As A Hobby

 

I've been trying for years to build up one YouTube channel or another to the point where it would at least pay our grocery bills. I've finally decided to give that up.

If you've tried to go full-time with YouTube and become frustrated, or if you enjoy making videos and are wondering whether you should just stick with it as a hobby, the video above and this article explains the six benefits to doing YouTube as a hobby.

Benefit #1.

When YouTube is a hobby, there's no pressure or stress around it. Anyone who makes any decent amount of money from YouTube, whether it's a few hundred dollars a month or six figures a month, will tell you that pleasing both their audience and the YouTube algorithm is stressful. You have to look right, sound right, say the right things, be entertaining in some way, edit footage well, and continually come up with fresh content. All this encompasses both financial stress and psychological stress.

Then there are the negative comments, and social media and online forums where big YouTubers are often ripped to shreds by perfect strangers. In some niches, such diet and nutrition, people opposed to a particular lifestyle create channels dedicated to tearing down YouTubers who follow that lifestyle. If you're just doing YouTube as a hobby, you'll probably never get that big, and won't have to worry about that.

As a hobby YouTuber, you can upload as frequently or as infrequently as you want. Full-time YouTubers, on the other hand, are constantly under pressure to upload videos on a consistent basis.

Benefit #2.

Unlike a full-time YouTuber, a hobbyist isn't constrained to a single topic or a single video format. You can create whatever kind of video suits your current whim, about whatever topic is on your mind. You can do a lifestyle vlog one day, and two days later do a talking head video teaching about the best way to remove fleas from a dog. 

Benefit #3.

I've already touched on this, but it's such a critical issue regarding what you want to do with YouTube that it bears repeating.

If YouTube is only a hobby, you don't have to worry about consistency in uploading. Someone trying to make YouTube into a career HAS to have an uploading schedule, and keep it consistent. And at this point in time, you need to be uploading a bare minimum of once a week if you want to be seen by even a few people.

But as a YouTube hobbyist, you would be under no such constraints. If you want to upload every day for two weeks, then disappear for four months, it's fine.  

Benefit #4.

You can turn off comments. 

If you want to build a big channel so you can make big bucks from it, this is a no-no. One thing the YouTube algorithm looks for when recommending videos to viewers is engagement; i.e., likes, dislikes, and comments. So, turning off comments while trying to become a full-time YouTuber is like shooting yourself in the foot right before running a marathon.

But if you don't care about growing a big channel, you can turn off comments. And therefore, never have to deal with ugly or stupid people.

Benefit #5.

If you're doing YouTube as a hobby, you'll never obsess over your analytics. When I say "obsess," I mean, OBSESS. People trying to grow a YouTube channel are constantly worrying over a variety of numbers: those related to watch time, subscribers, and views. If those numbers are discouraging - which is inevitable if you're trying to start a YouTube channel in 2023 and beyond - they turn their brains inside out trying to figure out how to "improve" the numbers.

Ugh.

But as a hobbyist, you couldn't care less about all that. All the fun, none of the stress.

Benefit #6.

There's a fact that YouTube gurus keep locked at the back of a closet that is essential to understand when you're looking at the "YouTube: hobby, or career?" question. That fact is, unless you're a really huge channel (tens of millions of subs or more), your YouTube income is inconsistent and unstable. In fact, many YouTubers who have been full-time, in recent years have been forced to go out and get a real job because their income suddenly and inexplicably tanked.

Ha. Not so inexplicably. The more channels that are vying for advertising dollars, the less there is to go around. 

Whereas, if you're doing YouTube as a hobby, getting your living income from some other source, you don't have to sell your soul to sponsors or care about YouTube advertising glitches, and the usual advertising dollar ups and downs. 

I've decided to tap into the health-giving benefits of doing YouTube as a hobby. How about you?

If You Feel Like A Failure, Read This!

I am a big, fat failure. Okay, so maybe not so much the fat part. But you get my drift.

I know I'm not alone in having thought, multiple times for multiple reasons, that I'm a failure. Likely as not, you clicked on this video because you are, right now, feeling like a failure.

In this post, I hope to change your mind about being a failure by sharing a bit of my story, as well as a few bits of wisdom that will help you shift your perspective about your worth as a human being.

How have I failed? 

Let me count the ways. 

**I didn't pursue my performing art dreams.

**I went into a career that, in hindsight, feels like a huge waste of thirteen years.

**I failed at getting a traditional publishing contract.

**I failed at blogging.

**I failed at making a full-time income with my self-published books...so far.

**I failed at choosing a place to live with optimum conditions for growing fruits and vegetables.

**I failed at YouTube.

And that's really what drove me to make this video at this point: a few days ago, for the hundredth time, I was going to quit one of the over dozen YouTube channels I've started since 2011.

And, why shouldn't I? On my original channel, over the space of 12 years, I haven't able to grow it to more than 4,160 subscribers and never made more than $80 in a month month. And that was one time. Then, a couple of years ago, YouTube changed the requirements for monetization, and it demonetized my channel.

And now, in 2023, it's extremely difficult to build even a modest following on a YouTube channel, even if you follow all the rules.

Back to the channel I was about to quit. It wasn't this one, though if you've been watching all of my videos for the past several months and noticed weeks between uploads and three distinct changes in topic, you might have gotten the hint that my frustration with the lack of growth on this channel had me on the edge.

As you can see, I haven't given up on this channel. Nor did I quit the other one. The reason? 

I watched a video about failure and ADHD.

Whether or not you have ADHD, the tips that Jessica shared in her video, as well as the thoughts I had afterward, might very well be your ticket out of the failure mindset.

In the video in question, one of the things Jessica points out that's specific to those of us with ADHD is that it's nearly impossible to succeed at anything when you've always got ten projects going on at one time. We need to learn to quiet our minds so we can enable ourselves to focus on just one thing at a time. If you're like me and get bored after a few days of doing just one thing, then make sure to schedule time to play and to work on hobbies. Or take one to two day breaks from the main project, during which you work on a less important project.

Jessica also explains that when we see others succeed where we feel like we're failing, we need to realize that they are different. They may have more time, or more money, or a different personality, or a larger resource pool, or more knowledge or innate skill. That circles back to the principle you've probably heard more than once, but if you're like me, need constant reminding of: though success is really a subjective concept, which each person can define as they like, we've been taught to equate it with some level of wealth and fame, and/or uncommon achievement.

I'll talk more on that in a minute.

The last thing that Jessica discusses in her video felt like a punch in a gut, but I needed to hear it: if you're failing at a thing, maybe you're simply not meant to do that thing. No matter how badly you want it. After I finished watching that video, which I've linked below in case you want to check it out, I pondered over Jessica's words for a while. I thought about all the ways in my fifty-three years that I've considered myself a failure, and realized that what I needed was a change in perspective. 

First and foremost, I need to drop the idea, once and for all, that success equals a lot of followers and/or a lot of money. I know that mindset is paralyzing and discouraging, have known it for years. But for personal reasons I won't get into, it's been next to impossible to rip the deeply rooted belief out of my soul. But for my own sanity, I need to. And I finally decided to do the inner work necessary to get it done.

My first step is to define success, in part, as having achieved something most people never do. I've written over thirty novels. I've given birth to a child and, along with my husband, raised him to be a decent young adult. I've stayed married to the same man for eighteen years, despite going through issues in our relationship that would send many couples to divorce court. Including Christian couples. 

I succeeded in holding onto the same teaching job until I got pregnant thirteen years into my career, in a school district with a notoriously high turnover rate. And though I know that until I get to heaven, I won't know the full extent of the positive impact I had on the lives of all the children who walked through my classroom door, I do realize that I made at least a small difference in each one.

I know that if I wasn't here, my husband and son would struggle. And not just because they'd have to do their own laundry and prepare their own meals. So somehow, despite my mistakes and shortcomings, I've succeeding in forming a small family with tight bonds, who love, care for, and depend on each other.

I've wildly succeeded in learning about nutrition and healthy living, and thereby in creating a healthy home for my husband and son. 

A second part of my new definition of success is about personal fulfillment and serving others. If I work on a YouTube channel, or write a book, I am successful if it brings me and/or others joy in some measure. For example, you're watching this video. If I help you in even a small way, I've succeeded with this channel. That's the way I've decided to see it.

See, the success-failure thing is simply a matter of perspective. In everything we do, there's always somebody better than us, and there's always somebody worse than us. Nobody can be good at everything, and when you find one of those things you're not good at, consider yourself at having succeeded in the discovery, and being one step closer to living a more simple, more fulfilling life where you're not trying to be a super hero, but just the best you that you can be.

In every encounter you have with another person, if you strive to be positive and encouraging, you succeed at helping the world become a better place. Even if you hate your job, if you do it well, it ultimately ends up helping people in some way.

Okay, unless you're a hitman for hire. But, let's not get off track here. 

The fact of the matter is, when you're full of real joy and peace, you don't give a hoot about the world's definition of success. You find true joy and peace by connecting with your Creator, and learning to walk moment by moment with Him. I teach you the best way to do this in my free ebook, So Long Stress. 

Even though I sometimes still struggle with following the principles I lay out in that book, I'm telling you, I would be much worse off today than I am if I hadn't begun applying them to my life. 

Want to hear a real success story? I've succeeded at staying alive, even though there have been many times I wanted to check out of this life. Because I know that feelings are fickle and temporary, but the truth that God wants me lasts forever.

Peace to you, and may blessings abound in every area of your life.