Author: Jen Hatmaker

“I stopped waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel and lit that bitch myself.”
– Alexandra Elle

My life fell apart in July 2020, and the next July I changed my own story. It was an accident really. After a bruising year, I made a spontaneous promise to a kid heading for a month of summer camp that I would stay near her the whole time in case she needed me. I was just running my mouth because we were both so fragile. Bloop. Problem was, her camp was in Maine. Somehow, through the power of the internet and a total lack of restraint, I ended up renting an (almost) renovated three-story convent in Bar Harbor for the month of July. 

Married at nineteen, I had not spent a day of my life independently since 1993. I’d never even been to a movie alone. And all of a sudden I was a divorced girl traveling by myself? For an entire month? Ridiculous. Outrageous. I found myself on the Atlantic Ocean in a small town charming enough to be in a Hallmark Summer Romance, but the romance turned out to be with myself. 

Thus, Me Camp was born. 

Maybe the best way to explain how much that experience changed my life is to tell you that I am currently at my fifth Me Camp — this time, it’s Yachats, Oregon. The template was set in Bar Harbor: small northern town, cool weather, walkable and bike-able, near water, idyllic and darling. Like, sleepy dogs in all the shops and family-owned bakeries with scratch made bagels every morning. Weathered old bars with names like The Thirsty Whale and Bell’s Tavern. Gorgeous galleries with handmade Petoskey stone jewelry by local artists because that is the state rock. Neighbors friendly enough to invite me to happy hour, brunch, movie night on the porch, because if I am going to be there a whole month, I’m not leaving without some new friends. 

Me Camp unlocked something precious. It is hard to uplink the delight to just one factor, because the sum is greater than its parts. Some combination of the slow pace, charming little town, lack of hustle, extravagant independence, and wide open heart to absolutely everything and everyone changed my life. I mean it. I am different. 

Among the grab bag of joy Me Camp delivers, it replenishes my creative reserves that are dangerously low by the time I get there. I am unquestionably a creative, but the unfortunate thing about having to make a living is that all that delicious creativity gets squashed by meetings, spreadsheets, and Zoom calls. The work part of my work is so encompassing. All that strategy and business sucks the oxygen from the room, and most of my creative energy gets depleted. I’d say “business” now takes up 80% of my time. I so often have to squeeze my creative work in between all the work work, which makes it sound forced and strained, because it is. 

Me Camp is dedicated to creative renewal for me. I front-load tons of work before I leave so the podcast, partner content, and administrative tasks are largely in the bank for July, and I commit to spend most of my time away creatively. Can you imagine the hubris? I don’t worry how much will come of it, because my end game isn’t productivity. It is joy. It is remembering that I am at my best when I am creating. 

Last year in South Haven, Michigan, I wrote a huge chunk of Awake which comes out this September. When writing such complicated material, the gift of unforced time cannot be overstated. Knowing I could stretch out the process as long as I needed to, leave for a long lunch overlooking Lake Michigan then come back to the story, the words flowed in an avalanche. I put no pressure on them. I told my memories: “I’m here when you’re ready.” And I was. And they came. 

This year at Me Camp, I am recipe testing and writing for my next cookbook. If this sounds like work, you must not know me. The only thing I love more than cooking is writing about cooking. I have lists and ideas, and a standing visit to the Yachats Farmers Market every Sunday on Fourth Street. My kitchen overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Since it never gets out of the 60s, think: windows open, 90s country on the speaker, local produce everywhere, knife in hand, Oregon Pinot Noir in glass nearby. This is absolutely Jen Hatmaker Paradise. 

Midlife seems to beg the question for so many of us: What do I love? What lights me up? Some combination of age, empty nesting or close to it, and wisdom is slowing us down and asking us to honor our own creative desires. I see it all around me. Women changing their course, changing their rhythms, changing their hustle. We crave personal expression. And by the way, everyone is a creator. We were literally made to be. We make things out of nothing: food, art, design, stories, beauty, gardens, dancing, dinner parties, music, order, words, adventure, connections. Creative energy takes us in a million directions, but it fills something in us duty can never touch. 

I am a writer, not just a worker. I am a maker, not just a manager. I am a dreamer, not just a doer. My gosh, the speed at which I can drift from this. 

And of course, I am grounded enough to acknowledge that all of us have to pay our bills, and work is work. We don’t live in fantasy worlds. I am a single parent with no financial partner. I have no secondary safety net. I don’t get to bank on someone else’s salary or retirement. Most of us need to work and have to work (and get to work). I’m not a starry-eyed romanticizer with her head in the clouds. 

But it is possible to abandon creativity for an endless grind. We don’t mean for it to happen, but it does. After all, there are only so many hours in a day, and every woman I know is at the center of her family’s universe. Which means absolutely no one is going to tell you to spend some energy on your favorite creative expression. Nooooo ooooone. No child, spouse, partner, or boss is interested in your artistic expression for your own sake. Most people like your productive hours spent bettering their bottom line. If you leave every waking hour up to the preferences of your people, you will never have another hour to yourself. 

Thus it is up to you. If you want to nurture your own creativity, you’ll have to damn well decide to do it. It needs to go on a calendar, in a time slot, moved up to the top of the pile. I obviously understand that a month of solo travel is absurd, and something I couldn’t have managed or imagined when I was in the thick of the Family Years. But you know what isn’t absurd? A carved-out Saturday morning. A weekly class you join. A Tuesday afternoon. One weekend off the grid. An overnight at your friend’s cabin. One Thursday night a week when every minute past 7:00 p.m. belongs to you. A weekend away you plan. 

What if you claimed some time to create? Oh, create what? Whatever is it you love. If you make something from nothing, that is art. Where would we be without art right now? It might just save the world. Or at any rate, it might save ourselves. You are not just a doer, manager, and worker. You are more than someone’s mom, wife, partner, or colleague. There is a creativity inside you that is special, and you are the only one who can honor it. It may matter for the world, but more than anything, it will matter for you. And that is reason enough. 

“Art is the highest form of hope.”
– Gerhard Richter

So listen—spring cleaning? I’m a fan. Not the Pinterest kind where everything ends up in labeled mason jars. No ma’am. I’m talking: order a giant dumpster, drag it into the driveway, and start tossing everything that isn’t nailed to the floor. THAT kind of spring cleaning.

It’s therapeutic. I feel lighter in a space that isn’t yelling at me with every junk drawer and closet corner.

But here’s the real mic drop: the most powerful thing I declutter isn’t in my house. It’s my calendar.

If you’re wondering how to simplify your life, start there. Your calendar is probably holding more than your time—it’s holding your mental load, your peace, your margin. And maybe it’s time to Marie Kondo that thing too, but in the meantime here are a few tips to get the clutter out of your schedule… 

1. Look at Your Calendar With Fresh Eyes

Pull up the next two weeks and really look at it. I mean zoom out and take it all in. What’s filling your days? What’s draining your energy before you even get to lunch?

Ask yourself:

• Do I actually want to do this?
  
• Is this necessary or just habitual?
  
• Did I say yes out of guilt?
  

Now—here’s the challenge: cancel one thing. Just one. A meeting, a plan, a whatever. Watch how the world keeps turning, and how your shoulders drop three inches.

Simplifying doesn’t mean canceling everything—it just means being more intentional with your yeses.

2. Designate a “No Work Zone”

A few years ago, I decided Fridays at noon = DONE. Work ends. Zooms are banned. I close my laptop like it’s cursed. Everyone on my team does the same.

It’s only a few hours, but it changed everything. Now I spend Friday afternoons with girlfriends, my sisters, or just eating chips on the couch with no one asking me for anything.

You get to create your own finish line, friend. Claim a boundary and protect it like it’s your peace—because it is.

3. Simplify Your Daily Routine (You’re Allowed To Do That)

If your mornings feel like a triathlon and your evenings feel like a Netflix-and-anxiety combo platter, it might be time to pause and ask:

• Why is everything so complicated?
• Who am I doing this for?
• What if I just… didn’t?
  

Maybe you don’t need to say yes to every invite. Maybe “Taco Tuesday” doesn’t require a 6-step recipe from a food blog. Maybe cereal is fine. Maybe skipping a thing is self-care, not laziness.

This is your permission slip to opt out of the chaos.

4. Get Good at Saying No (Without the Guilt Spiral)

Saying “no” doesn’t make you difficult. It makes you honest. It means you’re paying attention to what matters.

Say no to the dinner you just cannot fit into your schedule without compromise. Say no to the project that’s going to cost your sanity. Say no to the internal voice that says your worth = your productivity.

You’re not a machine. You’re a human woman with a limited amount of bandwidth and possibly a half-charged emotional battery. Use it wisely.

5. Declutter Your Soul, Too

Let’s be honest—physical stuff is the easy part. The harder work? Letting go of outdated expectations. Of trying to be all things to all people. Of identities that don’t fit anymore.

If you’re asking how can I simplify my daily routine, zoom out and ask: what’s underneath the busyness? What stories am I still carrying that I can finally lay down?

Because that’s the kind of clearing out that creates real space.

If this resonates with you—and you’re ready to actually reclaim your time, energy, and sanity—I loaded my Self-Care & Sanity Bundle with all my best simplicity hacks, schedule edits, mindset shifts, and boundary-builders.

You don’t need more stuff.
You don’t need a tighter color-coded plan.
You need space.

Let’s make some together.

Because your spiral-bound diary from 1997 isn’t cutting it anymore.

Let me start with a confession: I’ve started approximately 47 journals in my lifetime. Maybe more. Most are abandoned halfway through January with about three entries and a grocery list. So if you’ve ever bought a gorgeous notebook, wrote one angsty paragraph, and then lost it in your nightstand drawer forever—hi, welcome. You are my people.

But lately, I’ve actually figured out a journaling practice that works for real-life humans. It’s not about being poetic or consistent or good. It’s about getting quiet with yourself for five dang minutes and being honest. That’s it.

So whether you’re journaling for clarity, healing, sanity, or just to remember what day it is—let’s make it simple, doable, and maybe even…enjoyable?

Here are my go-to journaling tips for beginners that actually stick. No guilt. No perfection. Just real life on paper.

My List of Journal Tips That Stick

1. Lower the bar. No, seriously. Lower it.
   You don’t need to write a novel or start with “Dear Diary.” (Unless you want to. You do you.) One sentence is enough. A word. A doodle. A hot take on your day. The key? Just show up messy. No rules.
2. Give your journal a “job.”
   Is it a gratitude log? A venting vault? A space to process big feelings? Pick a vibe. It helps your brain know what to do when the page is staring at you like a blank void.
3. Pick a time that actually works for you.
   Some people journal at dawn. Those people are adorable. There’s no magic hour—just whatever time you can commit to without hating your life.
4. Use prompts if your brain goes blank.
   Some days I’m like, “What even happened today?” and nothing comes. So I keep a stash of prompts handy, like:

• What made me feel something today?
  
• What am I avoiding?
  
• What do I need more or less of right now?
  

(If you want more where this came from, my Wellness for the Rest of Us course is packed with self-reflection tools like this.)

5. Go for five minutes. Set a timer. That’s it.
   This is my favorite trick. Set a 5-minute timer, write whatever spills out, then move on with your day. You will be amazed how much lighter you feel after just five honest minutes.
6. Don’t reread it. Yet.
   This isn’t for editing. It’s not a memoir-in-progress. Let it be raw. Let it be rambly. Just get it out and move on. (You can read it back later when you’re ready for insight—or comedy.)
7. Celebrate tiny wins.
   Three days in a row? You’re basically an icon. One honest page? Queen behavior. A half-finished entry that helped you breathe deeper? That counts. It all counts.

Ready to Make Journaling Part of Your Real-Life Self-Care?

If you’re craving a gentler, more grounded rhythm in your life—not just journaling, but real tools for rest, healing, and breathing room—I created something just for you.

The Self-Care & Sanity Me Course Bundle is where we take tiny habits (like journaling!) and build them into something healing and sustainable. Think of it as a soul reset button. You’ll love it.

And friend—if you’ve fallen off the journaling wagon before, welcome to the club. Just start again. There’s zero shame in coming back to yourself.

Your story is worth writing down — even if it’s one messy, honest, beautiful line at a time.

The thing about life is that we are surrounded by other people we are expected to live with. Apparently, every last one of them is a human person. These people around us can be irritating, bewildering, explosive, and weird. They make a thousand dumb choices while refusing to operate according to our preferences. Sometimes they are insane. A bunch of them chew too loud. They are too much or not enough depending on our mood that day, and it can be a real trial to be in relationships is all I am saying. (Lucky for them, they get to love precious, adorable us and we never bother them in the slightest because we live right.)

The point is that learning to manage conflict and repair is a useful skill down here on God’s earth. Fine, if I may be honest: of all the healthy practices I’ve improved on in adulthood, this one is still pretty not great. I have an avoidant attachment style, and conflict immobilizes me. Over an accrued amount of years, I developed a freeze response to what I perceived as aggression. In my closest relationship, I spent a fair amount of time feeling verbally pummeled, and rather than develop healthy communication skills, I just went dark. This, as you might imagine, didn’t only not help, it made everything worse. Consistent withdrawal is just as damaging as consistent anger in a relationship. 

My crucible is equating conflict with a lack of safety, which is sometimes true but usually not. I immediately feel threatened. A heavily raised voice, a monologue lecture instead of a conversation, words intended to sting; these have locked me out of agency in conflict. I can’t hold my own center, my nervous system over-activates, and I default to old internal messaging: “I am not safe with this person.” (In my defense, I have been right on this, so.) 

The WAY I do not want to live the second half of my life the same way. Because the truth is, conflict is nooooooormal. It happens. It happens between two pretty great people. It happens because life is stressful. It happens because we are constantly telling ourselves stories about other people’s motives and intentions. It happens because we are hungry. It happens because we get triggered. It happens because sometimes even pretty great people blow it. 

For the purposes of this lil’ piece, I’m not addressing conflict with a super toxic, dysfunctional person. That is its own category and has its own set of rules. For now, I’m talking about conflict between two mostly healthy people who care about each other but suck sometimes. You know, regular run-of-the-mill bullshittery. None of this is from a book, but this is simply what I have learned (okay, am learning) and how I’d like to show up in conflict from here on out:

Establish safety immediately. 

As mentioned, I need this ground to stay solid, or I am unable to engage in a way that aligns with my values. I attempt this by gently reminding myself: “I am safe with me.” After plunging to the lowest possible standard for how I will be treated, I simply know I will never allow it again, and I’ve earned my own trust. Generally, collapse is preceded with death by a thousand cuts. I know those cuts, and I know they escalate once we let them past the firewall enough times. 

Saying kindly to yourself “I am safe with me” reorients around your own standards, and it takes the power and responsibility away from another person to be your safety enforcer. Otherwise, we are constantly on someone else’s hook. We have absolutely no agency over our own emotional regulation, because we have handed control to someone else. Thus they have to thread a perfect needle in conflict to keep us stable. 

Protecting my own safety means trusting my own boundaries: I will not yell or be yelled at. I will not stay on the receiving end of one-sided aggression. I will honor my own standards for how I will be treated, even directly in the middle of conflict. I am in charge of my own regulation, and when that baseline is established, I am able to deal with the conflict actually in front of me instead of any bad history I am attaching it to. Let this thing just be this thing.  

Set a quick internal goal. 

Every instinct I have says the goal is to win, or convince, or be right, or land a punch if I am particularly upset. But if I tell myself right out of the gate: “We are on the same team, and the goal is to find connection and resolution,” that changes my whole energy. Even if I am hurt or confused, I still need to be able to listen. The gap between experience and intent is where a lot of shit goes sideways. Plus, sometimes a good person’s immediate reaction goes nuclear, and it takes maturity to look beyond the explosion and find out what set it off.  

If I am prioritizing connection and resolution, then all my communication tactics are different than if I am fixated on being right. This does not mean capitulating, or acquiescing, or rolling over, or denying my own feelings. Diminishing my feelings to spare someone else’s or hasten the end of conflict is a messsssssss. That resentment gets buried alive and will eventually poison the groundwater. It will absolutely ruin a relationship over time. Ask me how I know. 

But we can hold our own center while still listening carefully in order to understand: What made you feel that way? What did you hear me say? Is there something I don’t understand? What do you need me to hear? These questions are the magic elixir of connection, and that is my goal. So get there. 

Avoid inflammatory language. 

Oh, it is so tempting. Drawing blood feels good for one whole minute. Also, when our central nervous systems are triggered, we tend to exaggerate and catastrophize. You always, you never… We assign malintent to the other person and tell ourselves a story about their faults. Blame becomes a handy weapon. Anger is an easier tool than vulnerability. I prefer it so much, but alas, it sure doesn’t deliver.

So rather than reach for easy barbs, I take several deep, deep breaths. I will not resort to the lowest common denominator. I will not make sweeping statements about someone’s character, which is such an unfair response to a singular moment. I will not attach old, meaningfully resolved conflicts with this person to this moment. Fortunately or unfortunately, I know how to use words, so I will not wield them as weapons. They can be put to such beautiful use as tools of reconnection. Do no harm. 

Do not avoid honest language. 

Here is where I struggle most. My therapist had to tell me ten thousand times: “Jen, sad does not equal bad. Mad does not equal bad. Hard does not equal bad.” The Enneagram 3 equates conflict with lack of morality/safety/permanency. We prefer everything to be going greaaaaaaat. I have always grappled with contention. Which means I have eaten my feelings like a five-course meal. It is genuinely hard for me to express my feelings and needs clearly, which shows up in my personal and work relationships, and — fun fact — makes everything harder. 

So my adult work is learning to be honest about what I need, want, and hope for. What hurt my feelings. What made me feel anxious or unsafe. What I am perceiving. Sometimes that is more like saying: “The story I am telling myself is…” and then a more truthful conversation emerges, which is generally a massive improvement from the narrative I am imagining. When I am in dialogue with a safe person, this vulnerability almost always ends in reconnection.

Own my own shit. 

God, being a human is such a situation. We bring our histories and habits into every relationship. If you think you have never contributed to any problems, you “might” be an asshole. Where did I make assumptions? Did I misread the room? Did I project something unfairly? Did I overreact? Have I committed to misunderstanding? Did I respond in a way that escalated the thing? Did I take something personally that wasn’t intended that way? Did I just full on blow it? 

There is something so insanely powerful about simply saying: “I’m sorry for ____” and naming it clearly and truthfully. Even if your part is only half of it. You are only responsible for yourself. Most of us are out here trying our best, including the decent person you are in conflict with. Apologies literally make relationships work. Frankly, there is no other way. If your person never apologizes? Red flag. If you never apologize? Raise your own red flag.

I have been in conflict with every precious person in my life at some point. Parents, sibs, kids, friends, partners, coworkers; every one of them. Not because we are all doing life wrong, but because we are all doing life. This is how it is. We either figure out how to navigate conflict or we will end up alone and bitter. Amazingly, relationships mended through repair can be even stronger than before. When we blow it, own it, communicate it, and forgive it, we create safety with our best people. It releases the pressure cooker of perfection. Knowing we can make things right means we aren’t as terrified to get things wrong. At this point, those are the only kinds of relationships I can meaningfully be in. 

If I’m doing the calculations right, I’ll have this mastered right around the time my time on earth is about up. Take heart, fellow humans. It is a messy business, this living a life. Keep going. Keep your little wobbly heart open, and I think we’ll get connected, beautiful relationships on the other side of that tenderness.