Within These Four Walls & Authentic Living This Week

Gratitude, memories, challenges, writing and inspiration

Hello Friends!

Here's what you'll find in today’s newsletter:

A Piece of Life in Focus This Week

• These Four Walls: A brain dump of consciousness in the form of prose

Authentic Living This Week

• Gratitude Corner - Fresh bread, Miss Moni and Adulting

• Making Memories - Martial Arts, Bunnings and Bikes

• Reality Check - Ball Pit Pee and Lost in a Playground

• Fiction Writing Progress & Learnings - Submission and Writing Friends

• Inspiring Finds - Substack to read

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Welcome to My Substack! My Name is Tania.

I invite you to join me on a journey of embracing authentic living. Through honest stories, personal insights, and reflections on authenticity, I seek to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Subscribe for free & tap the ❤️ if you enjoy this post!

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Life in Focus This Week

Behold my latest stream of consciousness I call this: ‘These Four Walls’:

I hold them in tighter, closer. Protected and safe.
Whatever is out there can’t bother us in here.
We are cozy and content within these four walls.
Confined in a bubble of daily churn,
untouched by the angry and wailing world around us.
Retracting inward, keeping what we love close
and minding our own minds, memories and personal matters.
The world is mad. At times it’s too much to bear.
It swirls around us with unfathomable chaos that we cannot control.
Shut the windows. Lock the doors. Keep it out.
Stay inside. Wait it out. Hold tight.
Focus on these four walls. The here and now. What matters most.
Our own little bubble of delight and perfection.
A little piece of existence, thrumming away, day-in-day-out.
Existing within a smaller space, a smaller state of mind.
As the world spins madly on, we find our centre here,
in this space we've carved out for ourselves.
Our fortress, our anchor, our home.

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Authentic Living This Week

This Substack series is devoted to everything that I feel adds authenticity and realness to my life and I hope it helps you focus on the authentic joy you can create and experience in your day-to-day lives too.

Gratitude Corner: Finding Appreciation in the Everyday

Taking time to find things to be grateful for in everyday moments is a great way to stay grounded and remind yourself of the things that really matter.

This week I’m grateful for:

• Freshly baked bread. My hubby is fully invested in his new bread-baking hobby, which means we are spoilt with a freshly baked loaf of bread a few times a week. Sourdough is his go-to. He’s so into it that he’s even bought big bags of grain on Amazon that he keeps on the floor of his office, and a flour mill to grind that wheat by hand. This bread is baked from the ground up. Sometimes it comes out of the oven as dense as a brick, other times it’s the perfect combination of crunchy crust and soft middle. He’s perfecting his technique, but when it’s baked right it’s so good, especially paired with olive oil and herbs. Too bad the boys don’t want a bar of daddy’s baked bread.

• Miss Moni - Any North American mums out there with toddlers would know of Ms Rachel on YouTube. Well, Miss Moni is an Australian version of her, with an authentically Aussie accent to match. My one-year-old loves her and has been picking up so many new words including ‘Yellow’ yesterday.

• Adulting with Adults. I had some genuine face-to-face adult-only time at our in-person company catch-up this week. It was held on the roof of our multi-story office building with an amazing view across the city of Brisbane. With everyone at my company working remotely and only talking on Facetime, it was a rare occasion for us all to be together face-to-face in one space. All 100 of us from all corners of Australia. It was an especially rare moment for me too, as most of my adult interactions these days (other than work) involve the kids being present in some way, shape or form.

What are you grateful for this week?

Making Memories: Cherished Moments & Milestones

Making memories and recording them has always been incredibly important to me. Our memories tend to fail us, so keeping a record of precious moments enhances our memory-keeping abilities.

Here are my favourite memories from this week:

• My 3-year-old son trying out martial arts classes with his dad. No actual martial arts moves were involved. Rather exercises and obstacle courses within the walls of a martial arts gym. It was a great little class to get some energy out and spend quality time with his dad. My one-year-old and I watched on briefly before he tried to launch out of the pram to be involved, so I took him for a walk until they were done.

• We took both boys to a park to ride their scooter and tricycle together for the first time. My eldest son is like me—uncoordinated and not a big bicycle person—so that meant a few falls, getting upset and then giving up to play on the playground instead. My one-year-old was keen as a bean but insisted on being pushed the entire time with zero attempt at putting his feet on the ground to do the grunt work himself.

• Watching my boys take turns pushing the miniature trolley at Bunnings for the first time. Major milestone right there. The trolley may have fallen on its side at one point, with potting mix spilled out on the concrete floor, but that did not deter their determination to get that trolley and its contents to the counter in one piece.

What memories have you made this week?

Reality Check: Navigating Life’s Challenges

Writing about or vocalising the tougher moments in life helps us process them and knowing we're not alone in these struggles is helpful too.

Here are some struggles I’d like to highlight this week:

• My 3-year-old son peed in a ball pit at our local play centre. We had been there barely ten minutes before my son grew still while lying neck-deep in a ball pit surrounded by other children. He whispered ‘I pee-peed in the balls’, so I hauled him over my shoulder and pulled my non-compliant one-year-old out too and headed to the bathroom. My 3-year-old walked silently with a wide-legged stance all the way from the back of the play centre to the front where the bathroom was, making it clear to everyone what had happened. Needless to say, it may be a while before we head back to that play centre again.

• Getting lost at a new playground. I took my boys to a newly opened playground by myself. School was back after the holidays so I thought it wouldn’t be busy. I was wrong. Both boys were busy exploring and I was doing the classic mum juggling act of following the youngest one while keeping an eye on where my eldest was going. Inevitably when chasing after my one-year-old who tried to scramble up a stone ledge that was far too dangerous to climb, my 3-year-old son lost sight of me and immediately started crying out ‘Mummy!’. I could see him and hear him from across the playground, but he couldn’t see me. Other worried parents began to approach him as I tried to pull my insanely strong one-year-old off the piece of stone and carry him towards his distraught brothers. Note to self. No solo adventures to a new playground with two toddlers who run in opposite directions.

What do you feel like venting about this week? This is your safe space! No judgment here.

Fiction Writing Progress and Learnings

I’m currently focused on improving my fiction writing skills and am working towards the goal of publishing my first novel. Follow me on my journey…

I submitted my story to the Richelle Prize contest for emerging writers. Now I wait, but I won’t hear the results on that one until October.

Until then I have been having a blast editing the rest of my rom-com story while also studying up on the craft of writing and storytelling and connecting with other writers on both Threads and Facebook. I have found a wonderful Facebook group of Aussie authors with a chat attached that has become a great supportive community for me. Through that group, I’ve also met another Aussie writer and mum who reached out to see if we could be critique partners. She is writing a country rom-com. Of course, I said yes! I’m still blown away by how supportive the writing community has been so far in my journey. It’s so helpful to talk to others on the same path.

My whole story is at about 35,000 words so far. Pretty short for a standard novel but long for a Novella. I’m hoping it will bulk out more through the editing process, but if not, that’s okay too. It will be whatever length it needs to be to tell the story right.

Inspiring Finds

Inspiration helps drive us to do more, be more and perhaps even take our lives in a whole new direction.

Here are a few Substacks that caught my eye over the last two weeks:

What does motherhood and writing a book have in common? by

Lauren Tina Brady

from Lauren’s Substack

I’ve grappled with two massive things recently, each one jostling with a place in my mind. That is the persona-defining ‘motherhood’ label, alongside ‘writer.’ What, if anything, do they have in common with each other?

These are my favourite moments, the ones I won’t remember by

Breeann Adam

from Just Write Mama

Now, as an adult, I walk into a room and can’t remember what I went in there for. I don’t know what I had for breakfast yesterday. I can’t tell you what I did for my birthday two years ago. I often scroll back in my camera roll, using it to fill in holes in my memory, searching by year or location to find pictures of the moments I want to recall, but are fuzzy around the edges or gone altogether.

Grateful for my disappointments by

Reid Cox

from Dare You

It’s a fact of life that we all experience disappointment. There is no escaping it. But what if our disappointments were all just big blessings in disguise? I’ve lived enough life by now to look back on my past disappointments and see how each and every one of them were keeping me safe from something that was never meant to be mine.

I’ve been on Substack for 4 weeks by

Megan Lee

from Shame Sandwich

You will catch 0% percent of your sneaky typos in draft mode. You will catch 11% in preview mode, 32% in test email mode, and 57% after you’ve already sent that bitch out. This will make you feel squirmy and stupid but ultimately will strengthen your sphincter emotional resilience muscle. Which, we call a win.

What has inspired you this week?

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Here are a few quotes to round out another week:

• Find your escapism, enjoy it and don’t feel guilty about it. We all need to escape reality from time to time to relax and replenish our mental state.

• So much of what we experience in life is subjective, our views and pre-conceptions impact our individual experiences immensely.

• Show kindness in action if you hope to receive kindness in return.

Please let me know what you think of my posts by leaving a comment below or reaching out to me in the app. If you enjoy reading this newsletter consider hitting subscribe. Have a wonderful day!