What we do

Hello, my friend! Grab your favorite drink & relax a bit.

You're definitely in the right digital place if you're a Gen-X woman who is overworked, has caregiving fatigue, and is ready to kick some of that garbage to the curb and start learning how to treat yourself better.

Centering Self-Care is the website that curates the most effective professional advice for making the changes that help you live your life with more self-compassion, self-trust, and self-respect. If you've spent years' worth of sleepless nights worrying about, basically, everything then dreaded getting up the next morning - but stiiiilllll gotten up and done ALL. THE. THINGS. - then you know what I'm talking about.

Centering Self-Care is for you if you want to:

Get off the hamster wheel of endless doing & start enjoying your life

Recognize you're already enough, just the way you are

Release the toxic $#!@ that holds you back from feeling joy and delight where you are, right here, right now

Become your own greatest ally and inner champion, which only makes sense because you're the only one who's literally ALWAYS with you

Enjoy your life with courage, kindness, and compassion instead of the constant second-guessing, doubting, guilt, and self-criticism

Speaking of which - finally silence your inner critic because it’s not helping you - I promise

Trust yourself and your instincts, and live with the confidence to act on them (Bye-bye, “paralysis by analysis!”)

Live up to the expectations you set for yourself, not everyone else's

Set healthy boundaries with the people in your life

Wake up in the morning excited about the day ahead of you - even before your morning coffee!

Face daily challenges with calm confidence

AND WHO IS THIS LITTLE HEDGEHOG SPEAKING TO YOU FROM THE SCREEN???

(I know, I’m not really a hedgehog but wouldn’t a typing hedgehog be freaking awesome????? Anyway….)

Hi, I'm Jen! I'm a Gen-X woman, which means I’m a former latchkey kid, a college grad, a wife, a mom, and a career woman. It also means I’m someone who’s spent most of my life trying to figure out how to stop feeling like I’m endlessly doing and working and taking care of other people and chasing those constantly moving goalposts. Like, when are we done??? When is it okay to be okay?? When do I get to relax - not from exhaustion but from a feeling of contentment?

For the longest time, I thought there was something wrong with me. I tried to figure out what it was, what I was doing wrong, and why everyone else seemed to know something I didn’t.

I believed that constantly doing and pleasing would make me worthy of … what? Everything, I guess. Love. Appreciation. Basic human kindness. I was afraid if I didn’t keep up with all these things, people wouldn’t like me and would think less of me. What’s worse, I would tell myself that no matter how much I did or how well I did it, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.

Maybe you can relate?

So I started this site because I started hearing the same things from other women. I realized that, in spite of how much we do for others, we treat ourselves like we are our own worst enemy - like we’re trying to exorcise a demon or punish a perpetrator - instead of being kind and supportive of ourselves.

Seriously, why do we do that?

My guess? As Gen-Xers, we’ve been taught to “Just deal with it.”, “Stop crying,” “Get over it.”, and my all-time favorite, “You’re fine.” Except we’re not fine. (At least, I wasn’t fine.) But we think we should be fine and if we’re not, well, then we’re just not working hard enough, are we? Or we’re ashamed that we’re not fine, and if we’re not fine, then we’re definitely not good enough.

I found this whole thing exhausting, so I embarked on a journey to learn everything I could about why I felt this way and how to change it.

When it started.

It started when I was an adolescent because that’s when everything really starts turning to crap. I mean, middle school? UGH! At that time, my resources were kind of limited (This was pre-internet, after all!), so I went with what I had at hand - religion. Honestly, it wasn’t really “religion” so much as it was feeling connected to someone or something that told me, “Yeah, you’re okay.”. That was good. I definitely needed that. Unfortunately, religion was more about all the rules and reasons why I wasn’t actually okay, which was pretty problematic, as you can imagine.

In college, I took a few philosophy courses because gen ed requirements. I was majoring in Finance but I loved those philosophy courses so much, I considered making it my major. Of course, I let everyone convince me that was a dumb idea because, “What kind of job do you get with a degree in philosophy? Don’t you want to eat??” I was terrified this meant I couldn’t trust myself or my instincts, so I stayed with Finance. In hindsight, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world and has, so far, served me pretty well.

Finding Purpose.

After college, I was really busy, working, getting married, and having children. Keeping busy was good for me at the time because it meant I had PURPOSE! Finally! A reason to exist!

Except, especially if you have children, you eventually learn that you don’t find your reason to exist in other people, especially children, because - SURPRISE! - they start growing up and want to be their own people - which is often very different from who YOU want them to be.

When my oldest child started middle school, “What’s wrong with me?” REALLY roared back with a vengeance. Fortunately, I recognized it now and realized I needed serious help. I found an awesome therapist and have been with her since. My friends, I cannot overstate the value of a good therapist. #fuckmentalhealthstigma

I managed pretty well for a good long time, though never quite figuring out what was wrong with me. Then, in 2019, a friend invited me to a meditation class.

Indulge me here for a moment?

Now, “meditation,” “mindfulness,” and “self-care” are becoming buzzwords at best, and punchlines at worst, today, and that’s a big problem. When they’re done right, they’re essential tools that can help us live a more gratifying life. And when you’re living day to day - or feeling like several days are ganging up on you at once - you need those tools.

Anyway, off I went to meditation class, not quite sure what to expect, and for the first time in a VERY long time, I found a sliver of a sense of peace. This wasn't religion or spirituality or philosophy or even faith. It also wasn't trying to achieve some higher level of consciousness or levitate or whatever people think meditation is supposed to be. This was simply… being. It was an experience of calm awareness and openness, like an enormous, relieved exhale. I was hooked.

From there, the pieces finally started to fall into place.

I went back to the classes and in between, I read. A lot. I watched videos. A lot. And I started keeping a journal - sadly, another punchline these days.

I continued to practice and learned that the essence of meditation was awareness, which was really mind-blowing to me. I mean, that’s it? Awareness? Didn’t I need a mantra? Didn’t I need a candle? Or incense? Or beads? Or… something????

All I know is the more I practiced, the more I learned. And eventually, life started to get better - even in the middle of a pandemic.

As all of this came together, I realized that it wasn’t the religion or the philosophy or the therapy or the meditation or the journaling that I needed. It was the discovery. I stopped focusing on doing so much and started paying attention to what was going on inside me. And once I did that, I found more of myself, what I wanted and, important to note, what I didn’t want.

Mostly, I learned there’s nothing wrong with me.

So all of this became the inspiration for Centering Self-Care. I realized there’s a better way to experience life that I’d been missing because I was too busy doing. I learned that I can make changes without trashing everything. I found out that changing my relationship with myself changed my relationship with everyone else, and I thought maybe I could help other women find the same sense of peace and, more importantly, find themselves.

This is the start of what I hope will be helpful to other women. If you think you’d like to come along, I’d love to have the company - because burnout, resentment, guilt, and stress eating are no way to go through life - and we deserve to be treated and to treat ourselves better.