152 Hawaii Parent SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026 That doesn’t require some elaborate self-care routine or a weekend retreat you don’t have time for. It’s smaller than that. It’s the ten minutes with the book back on the nightstand. It’s the one text back to a friend instead of letting the group chat go silent for another month. It’s remembering that “who am I” and “whose parent am I” can be the same sentence, not competing ones. Finding Your Way Back to Yourself This is where simplicity earns its place—not as a design trend, but as a practical way to reclaim a little bit of yourself. Every extra decision, every extra object, every extra thing you have to manage on behalf of your kid is time and attention that isn’t going toward you. Decision fatigue doesn’t just wear you down—it’s actively competing with the parts of your day that could belong to the person you still are underneath all of it. Simplifying where you can isn’t going to magically hand you your identity back; nothing does that on its own. But every decision you don’t have to make, every bag you don’t have to overpack, and every unnecessary item you leave behind is a little bit of your attention returned to you. And what you do with that attention is up to you—a phone call, a walk, five quiet minutes with a book you haven’t touched in months. If you’re like me, reclaiming yourself doesn’t always look like slowing down,
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==