I have mild anxiety just not knowing how or where to start this. My name is Erica and I am struggling to even figure out how to define myself in this moment, so I suppose I will have to try to blog my way towards a little self awareness. :)

I am a mom to a smart and shy 4 year old girl who is my mini-me. I need to figure out how to raise her so she doesn't suffer from the same shyness and anxiety that I had growing up. My 18 month old son is a super cute smiley michelin man baby who is SO musical and loves to dance. He's got a great sense of beat already. I'll never forget how psyched I was when he was a baby sitting in the playroom and I threw on a Roy Orbison record and the beat of Pretty Woman comes on, and he just starts bobbing his head to it- amazing. He likes Elvis and was really rocking out to Pandora's Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons station. Both of my kids have also had an early indoctrination into the Beatles, my lifelong favorite.

I am originally from Massachusetts and I am married to a guy I fell for about 3 weeks after moving into our college freshmen dorm. We both moved to the Chicago suburbs near his family after graduating and have been in this area since. I do corporate graphic design and I am very into branding, and enjoy when there is enough budget in a project to let me really take the full reign on a PPT or whitepaper or infographic design, so that I try to find new ways to play with our company's updated brand.

A few more bits about me and my life:

We love to travel when we can, including road trips with kids that leave our friends and family thinking we are insane.
I love to pretty up my home and yard. I work from home and as I walk through my house day and night I am constantly and erratically fantasizing about all of the little projects I'd love to accomplish. I am obsessed with the color spectrum of mint/aqua.
I am a huge dog lover and our we lost our Hank almost 2 years ago now- still miss him like crazy. We are starting to look at getting a new one, but I'm having a heart time being ready to get emotionally attached again.
I am a compulsive researcher of any and all subjects that interest me. I feel like I google my entire life sometimes.

Why Steemit?

More than anything, I think at this point in my life I am feeling pretty isolated by my shifting world views and interests - I would be labelled a free-thinker, alternative. I am a life long liberal with a mix of progressive/green views mixed with some conservative/libertarian idealogy.

Sketch of an idea of mine that the political spectrum could come full circle and find common ground where the extreme ends come together.

I think the whole world is worn and exhausted from the stress of our current political climate, but when you accept the corporate oligarchy and deep state for what it is, it becomes a whole added sublayer of weight to bear. And sometimes I just step away from it all for a bit, life is overwhelming enough getting sucked into the day-to-day of it all. But then there's a week where a lot happens in the independent news communities and I'm reading stories all day and I want to engage and talk to people about it, but there are crickets of course on Facebook and twitter is great to find news to read but I am not terribly conversational on it. I am a lurker and now I just need to find a safe space to engage.

I have all of these ideas and half thoughts that I'll attempt to put together a 'blog-like post' (I've never blogged before) and I never seem to have the time or patience to flesh out an idea. I am very A.D.D. in my interests and how I want to spend my free time so I jump around and feel like I don't get a lot done, which kills me a little inside because I fantasize about being super Type A organized about every aspect of my life. I have delusions of grandeur when it comes to having a mental picture of how a space or concept should be visually organized to make sense to me, but I definitely suck at execution. I will partially blame that on some type of introverted, insecure side of me that has a hard time just DOING shit that allows progress to occur in my life. It's on my to-do list of things to work on.
To try to tie that all together, I'm hoping this will be a good outlet for me to interact with a new group of people that is collaborative and embracing of exploring perspectives that are different from your own. I feel like my world view has evolved so much, and that it is so important actually take the time to learn about something before accepting or rejecting it. I am so tired of seeing "controversial views" or "conspiracy theories" being ostracized by a population who has been tricked with a few buzzwords to reject entire schools of thought without actually taking 5 damn minutes to hear a rational counter-argument with an open mind.
I am interested in having conversations about how we can engage our own personal communities to try and figure out effective ways to get people to accept and care that people can have different views and those views can also be valid. I want to wake enough people to the notion that we actually can rise above the two-party system. I want try to explore totally new ways of talking about polarizing issues, and by shifting perspectives getting people to rise above the deliberately divisive lens that is focused on Social Issues. I am anti-war, and I feel strongly about medical freedom. As a mom of the littles especially, vaccine safety and human-trafficking are important issues for me.

I am also very interested in all things holistic health. This goes hand in hand with the politics in a lot of ways, my views on the medical industry, etc. I've read a decent amount on alternative cancer treatment, to the point that if at any point in my life I were to ever get a cancer diagnosis, I don't see how I could possibly consider conventional treatment. I highly, highly recommend the Ty Bollinger's docuseries "The Truth About Cancer".

I've sought more alternative and integrative health care for myself and my family - not 100%, but I have really tried to explore a lot of different things and I've had a lot of interesting experiences in the last couple of years especially. I have had several different experiences start to make me curious about energy fields. I have a new interest in kinesiology, in addition to homeopathy, essential oils, apple cider vinegar, bentonite clay, restructured water, etc.
I am really intrigued with crowdsourcing right now. I am really interested in trying to lay out and make sense of different types of information via infographic. I have an image in my head of how when corporate media is accused of being fake news, a lot of the time their deception is lies of omission. I imagine them shining a spotlight on the selective points of a story that tell their narrative, whatever it may be, and then when you expand your peripheral view there is so much more to the story that needs to be pieced together to provide the right context. I love the word CONTEXT. I want to create infographics that show context and can also illustrate why the deception in media requires everyone to be their own critical thinker. I'd like to put out some concepts for an infographic and see if we can crowdsource the meta data to put them together, hell I'd even love to collaborate on storyboarding if anyone were interested. I just really LIKE to present information in a new way to make people think or see differently, and I don't have enough hours in the day to pull it off alone. So for those interested, more to come on that.

Sorry if that was a bit of a ramble. Hope some of this was interesting to some of you!

My family- as illustrated by my talented family friend