Welcome to A Hermit’s Journey

Hi. Grab a seat and your beverage of choice, and let’s hang out for a while.

My name is KC. I'm 43 years old and live on the Front Range of Colorado. I'm single with a dog, a cat, and I'm my mother's caretaker while also working a full-time office job. I could write several blog posts, and probably will, about how I’m a mess and how I got to be in this state of being. But for today, just to start, I’ll give you the CliffsNotes version.

Basically, I’m not happy with myself or my life right now. There are many days when I feel like I’m barely hanging on by a thread. My life is not what I would have designed for myself when I was on the cusp of adulthood and planning what my adult life would be. Hell, my life isn’t what I would design if my fairy godmother were to give me a chance to do a hard reboot and wake up with the perfect life. 

So I’m going to change it. The changes will be slow and probably take a few (or several) years. I need to make changes that are sustainable and realistic. So yeah, it’s going to take a while, and let’s be honest, that perfect life is a moving target. It will always change as life’s phases ebb and flow. 

Mental Health

The overarching theme of everything is going to be my mental health. I have the diagnosis of depression and anxiety. I’ve been struggling with my depression and anxiety more last year. My mental health has ebbed and flowed for years, but it’s been at its worst for a few years now, and 2025 was the worst. As of writing this in April 2026,  I’m in a mostly okay-ish place with my depression and anxiety, but I want to get to an actually good place. I would love to get to a great place where they aren’t always lurking in the back of my mind. I don’t know if that’s even possible, but it’s something to work towards and hope for. 

My mental health has a lot of affect on how I view the world and myself. I definitely view a lot of things with a negative slant. I’ve also noticed that I get stuck in toxic mental spirals. I don’t feel good mentally, so I do something that negatively affects me or my life. I tell myself I don’t deserve any better and that I’m not worthy of having it any other way. Then I feel worse, and the cycle starts again. 

I need to move my mental health to a healthier place. I want to stop the cycles quicker and lessen the effects of them on my life. I would love to make them less frequent and identify ways to prevent the cycles from even starting. I’ll only write a mental health-specific post every few months, but nearly all of the changes being worked on on the blog are rooted in mental health or have a very strong connection to it. 

Self & Body

The first two topics that I plan to write about on this blog are myself and my body. My body is my physical health. I am overweight and out of shape. My self refers to the other aspects of my appearance, my wardrobe, my makeup, my hair, skincare. 

Honestly, I don’t like my appearance.

I’m overweight (300+ pounds at the time of writing this). I struggle with dressing the way that I want to, styling my hair in the way that I want it to look, and wearing the makeup that I want to. I have some ideas and plans for how I’m going to makeover myself. One of my biggest issues is my weight. But that’s a lot of stuff to unpack and plan for, so I’ll write about my plan for weight loss in a future post. 

I want to make my outside match the mental image I have of my ideal appearance. I need to figure out what my style is and thoughtfully move my wardrobe, makeup collection, and grooming towards that style goal. Additionally, I know that I have a lot of makeup and beauty products that help contribute to the clutter in my bedroom and bathroom, so a Project Pan is probably in my near future.

Home

I am a hoarder. I’m fairly certain that I actually could be diagnosed if I spoke to a psychologist about it. The fire department my house as a hoarder house yet; they’ve been here multiple times over the last year and a half. Probably because while the house is an absolute mess, I have been careful to maintain walkways through all rooms and to all exits. So my mom and I would be able to escape if an emergency ever happened. 

But we’re just existing in this house. It’s a house. Not home. And I want it to be home. 

I have to declutter all the shit and find ways to prevent it from collecting again in the future. In the long term, I want my house to be cozy, inviting, relaxing. But immediately, I need to have a house that is easy to care for and is wheelchair or walker accessible for my mom. I think my best plan of action for making over my home is to define what the baseline for the house as a whole and each specific room is. The baseline is the minimum of what the room needs in order to be fully functional. Then, once the ENTIRE house is at baseline, I will begin making the house into a beautiful and cozy home. 

Life

This also ties in with my mental health, but a lot of times I don’t do the things that I want to do, like travel or have local experiences, because of the emotional turmoil and stress caused by the state that my house is in. I can’t go do things because I need to be at home cleaning and decluttering. It’s not just the state of my house that causes me to miss out on experiences and hobbies. I also have some debt. After my mom’s initial medical emergency and 4-month hospitalization, I had to start shopping online for medical supplies. Not only can that be expensive, but it also reignited my need to shop, and I’ve struggled with getting that back under control. It’s probably also fed by the emotional upheaval that comes with unexpectedly becoming my mom’s medical and physical caretaker in a way I never expected to. 

I also allow myself to miss out on experiences because I’ve always struggled to find my people, that group of friends who want to do the same things that I want to do and put the same importance on spending time with me that I put on spending time with them. So I need to put more priority on doing the things that I want to do and taking steps to find my people. 

While I do need to get my spending under control and pay off my debt, I don’t want my life to be at a total standstill until I’m at a zero balance. I need to find ways to balance my finances with the ability to travel, work on my old hobbies, and find new ones. My mom and I already completed a road trip to Las Vegas earlier this month that I will detail in a future post, and I have travel coming up for BTS concerts (because of course they can’t come to Colorado, jerks). 

Why Blog About It

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably sitting there thinking, “That’s cool, but why blog about it?”

I could just journal about it and be done with it, but I know myself. I’m a sporadic journaler and tend to end up with an absolute mess of chicken-scratch scribbles in my journals. It makes it hard to keep things straight or flip back through to find something I’ve previously written. Keeping a digital format will make it easily searchable by using tags and Ctrl+F. Not everything is going to work, so keeping a log of what changes I’ve made and the results will be a handy resource to look back on. And someday, when I don’t remember what the beginning looked like, I’ll have a place to look back and remind myself what the beginning was. And writing it all down gives me a way to work through my thoughts as I’m having them. 

I could have a digital journal, and there are plenty of apps and programs like that. I mean, I am typing this post in Google Docs before moving it to the site. So I could just leave it there. But I want to build a community. I want to create an online home for others who want to undertake similar life journeys or even just those who are entertained by my failures and successes. 

And you’re now my accountability buddy. Knowing that I have to write a post or two each week and have something to write about will help spur me into actually making steps to change. Otherwise, I’ll just keep putting it off until someday. Then someday will come and go, and I’ll still be stuck living the same bullshit that I am now.

Someday, I would like the blog to provide a side income. Depending on what’s happening in my life, I sometimes want but also sometimes need to supplement my income. I do have a full-time job; however, I work 40+ hours each week and have to have permission to work outside jobs. My responsibilities as my mom’s caretaker severely limit the time I have that I would be able to work a second job. So hopefully, by blogging, I can open an avenue for income that is more flexible and easier to work around the restrictions of my day job. As of writing this, I do not have any income from the blog. When I hopefully do start receiving income, you’ll be the first to know. 

I sincerely hope that all of that makes sense when you’re reading it. It made sense when I was writing it. Either way, say hi and introduce yourself below. Are you in a similar place, or are you just here for entertainment?

Header photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash‍ ‍