Keensider

The Personality Trait I Was Most Proud Of That Turned Out to Be a Coping Mechanism

Keens — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:33:27 GMT

I was a very good achiever.

I want to say that without irony, because it is true and because I worked hard for it and I think we should be allowed to acknowledge the things we were genuinely good at before we dismantle them. I was organized, driven, relentlessly productive, and I wore it the way some people wear a good coat. Visibly. Intentionally. With the quiet confidence of someone who knows it fits.

What I did not know, for a very long time, was that the coat was also armour.

Achievement, when you are really good at it, becomes invisible to you. It stops being a choice and starts being just the way you are. You stop noticing that you chose this pace because eventually the pace chooses you back.

I could not have told you, at 25, that I was anxious. I would have said I was motivated. Similar to a previous post of mine, I was a “gloat on social about the 5am club” kind of gal. I could not have told you I was afraid of stopping. I would have said I was ambitious. The language of achievement is very good at disguising the thing underneath it, which is sometimes just a person who discovered early that doing things well made the world feel more manageable and never quite found a reason to stop.

Our business started in 2016. The full time job continued. The to-do lists multiplied. The sunrise posts were made. Yet underneath all of it, humming along quietly, was the same engine that had always been running: if I keep moving, if I keep building, if I keep achieving, everything will be fine.

This is a very effective strategy right up until the moment it stops working.

The moment came slowly and then all at once. A baby who did not care about my schedule. A body that needed more rest than I was giving it. A life that had gotten so full of doing that there was very little room left for just being. The engine that had carried me through my twenties was still running but I was starting to notice the sound it made. The particular hum of a person who has never really learned how to stop.

Here is the thing about dismantling a coping mechanism that has served you well. You cannot just put it down. You have to figure out what it was doing for you first. What it was protecting.

For me, the answer was somewhere in the neighbourhood of: I did not know who I was without the doing.

Which is a confronting thing to discover about yourself in your 30s, holding a baby, in a house with two dogs and a business, a blog, and a copious amount of other things you still love to this day.

I am not a recovering achiever in the sense that I have given up achieving. I still make lists. I still build things. I still feel the particular satisfaction of a crossed off task. The coat still fits. I just wear it differently now.

What changed is that I stopped needing the doing to tell me I was okay. Stopped measuring the value of a day by its output. Stopped treating rest as something to earn and productivity as the price of admission to my own self-worth.

Slowly. Imperfectly. With significant backsliding and more than one afternoon of colour coding a planner I did not need to colour code just because it felt like control.

But still. Changing.

The personality trait I was most proud of turned out to be, in part, a coping mechanism and the strange thing is that knowing that has not made me like it less. It has just made me understand it better. Made me a little more patient with the version of myself that needed it so badly, and a little more honest about the version that is learning she does not need it quite as much anymore.

She still gets things done.

She just does not need them to define her.

Which, it turns out, is actually the achievement she was working toward all along.

The First Time I Touched a Soccer Ball Postpartum and Immediately Regretted Every Decision

Keens — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 04:03:01 GMT

I used to be fast.

I want that on record before I tell you the rest of this story, because what happened next will not reflect that truth in any visible way. There was a version of me, not too many years ago, who could run for ninety minutes and feel good about it. Who understood her body as an instrument that simply did what she asked of it, reliably, w…

Why I Started Tracking Literally Nothing

Keens — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:32:48 GMT

I have a planner.

A beautiful one, that’s even Canadian made! Paper, obviously, because I am a person who believes that writing something down with an actual pen makes it more real, more official, more likely to happen. I have strong opinions about paper planners the way some people have strong opinions about wine or running routes. I have tried many and…

The Management Skills That Actually Transfer to Running a Home With a Newborn

Keens — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 03:23:08 GMT

Nobody handed me an onboarding package.

There was no orientation. No thirty sixty ninety day plan. No welcome email with login credentials and a list of key stakeholders. One day I was a person with a career and a job title and a calendar that made sense, and the next I was responsible for keeping a six pound human alive with nothing but instinct, a stac…

We Built a Business in a Basement and Only Cried a Little

Keens — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:30:42 GMT

In 2016, my husband looked at me and said he wanted to bring back old school shaving and beard care products. Simple ingredients, real craftsmanship, the kind of thing your grandfather used before the grooming aisle became a wall of synthetic everything. It all started with a straight razor he received that was his grandfathers. Hence the name, Like Gra…

My Body Did Something Miraculous and I Kind of Hate It Right Now

Keens — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 03:10:00 GMT

Let me be clear about something before we begin.

I am in awe of my body. It grew a person. An entire person, with fingernails and a very specific preference for being held in exactly one position that took me three weeks to figure out. My body did that. It is extraordinary and I mean it.

I also do not fully recognize myself in the mirror right now, and I …

The Season I Stopped Performing Productivity

Keens — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:23:19 GMT

I used to have a to-do list that had a to-do list.

I was the person who set an alarm for 5am not because I had to, but because I believed getting up before the sun was a personality trait worth having. I posted sunrise photos to my Instagram with captions like “the early bird gets the worm,” and I meant every single word. I worked a full time job during …

I Bought a Plant Because I Needed Something That Wasn't Asking Me for Anything

Keens — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:50:35 GMT

There is a hoya plant in my kitchen windowsill that has never once needed me to explain myself.

It has never asked me why I teared up during a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, or whether I have eaten something today beyond a handful of crackers standing over the sink. It does not care that I am wearing the same shirt I slept in. It does not need me to be anyt…

Can I Sit With You? On Making Friends as a Mom

Keens — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:33:39 GMT

There is a cruelty in how friendship works when you're young. You see someone on the playground with the same light-up sneakers as you, and that is simply enough. "Do you want to be my friend?" you ask, with the casual confidence of someone who has never once been told no in a way that stayed with them. Then just like that, you have a friend.

Nobody tell…

Nobody Told Me Four Months Would Be the Hardest Part

Keens — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:35:19 GMT

The adrenaline is gone. The casseroles stopped coming. And somehow, you're supposed to be fine.

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that lives at four months postpartum. It doesn't announce itself the way the newborn stage does. No one is bringing you meals anymore, the visitors have thinned out, and the world has quietly resumed its assumption that …