🦄 What sets you apart can actually be a good thing
What if the “otherness” of stepfamily life is a feature, not a bug?
I make my living online, but started using pen + paper to map out my life several years back because digital planning and to-do lists completely stopped working with my brain.
I never knew till I bought my first paper planner that there is a whole dang planner community online — endless YouTube channels on planners and planning and journaling, deep-dive videos and podcasts discussing weekly layouts and paper quality and you name it.
We’re currently neck-deep in what the planner community calls “planner season,” when several big-name (and small-but-growing name) companies start their releases and pre-orders for 2025. Dutiful planner nerd that I am, I’ve faithfully pored over preview vids and made many wishlists.
One particular planner release has their followers feeling all angsty because they drastically changed their layout. I won’t bore you with details (unless you too are a planner nerd, in which case hit reply or leave a comment and I’ll dish with you 😂) but basically they had a unique layout that set them apart from the competition… and now their 2025 planners look pretty much like everyone else’s.
Their decision didn’t come out of nowhere. They polled their customers and their customers overwhelmingly voted for those changes. Yet in doing so, the company has alienated their die-hard user base — the folks who bought these specific planners for that specific layout, which now no longer exists.
The entire launch has been a case study in how we can get so busy trying to please the masses that we overlook the good stuff that sets us apart.
So many of us in blended families struggle with our feelings of “otherness” — like no matter how much love and tears and brainstorming we pour into these families of ours, we still don’t feel blended. We don’t fit neatly into a family-shaped box the way we think we should.
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