Prefer to listen? Listen to Episode 34: Fun is Not Frivolous
If you've ever felt like the invisible infrastructure holding your family or business together while your own joy withers away, you are not alone. In this week's episode, Blaze challenges the cultural narrative that fun must be earned after the "heavy lifting" is done. She explores how grief, responsibility, and the fear of things falling apart can strip us of our whimsy, turning us into managers of life rather than participants in it.
Whether you're navigating the aftermath of loss, managing a busy household, or simply feeling exhausted by the weight of reliability, this conversation offers a gentle but firm reminder: You are worthy of joy right now, not later.
🌿 In this episode we explore:
- Why responsible women often carve their identities around being reliable and how that blocks fun.
- The danger of becoming the "conduit" for others' happiness while forgetting to participate yourself.
- How grief and the realization of life's fragility can shift our perspective on delaying joy.
- Practical ways to decouple "worthiness" from productivity and treat fun as a human right.
- Strategies for unlearning the belief that everything must be "earned" before it can be enjoyed.
- How to trust that the world (and your family) can survive if you step back and breathe.
- The importance of small, spontaneous moments of joy—like a walk in the garden or singing to a sprout.
Hello, my friends. If fun is feeling harder than responsibility for you right now, I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you. It is kind of what we've been taught to do.
And I kind of want to break that for us this week or at least ease into it a little bit. Because this week I want to talk about having fun and how important it is and how necessary it is for us to be able to break away from always being responsible, always caring for everyone, and always...
I guess putting on an air of knowing that we have it all together or that we know what's going on all the time because that's exhausting.
And we need that other half. We need to be able to experience fun in order to build up reserves and be able to participate in our lives more fully.
And I think a lot of the time when we're busy being responsible and pulling everything together for ourselves, for our businesses, for our families, for our kids.
All of that stuff. We're doing it so that we can have fun and then we just don't make any space to actually do that. We keep putting it off and thinking, "Oh, that's something that we'll have later when we retire."
Or you know, that's something I'll set up for my kids to be able to enjoy. And I've even noticed myself thinking about how much fun I want my kid to have and how much I want to make that possible for her and how sometimes in trying to set up fun things, it stops being fun for me and it's no longer about the adventure.
It's like I'm this forgotten participant or I'm not even a participant in the fun anymore. I'm just the conduit through which it happens. And I don't want to live like that. And I don't think any of you guys do either.
I think though that it's very easy to become that person who's setting things up all the time and forgetting to be actually there or consider ourselves within that process.
So this week I want to talk about why fun isn't frivolous.
It's not this thing that we're not supposed to experience or that's for other people and not for us. It's actually this really deeply human nourishing, wonderful thing.
And it's important to make some space for it. And I want to put it that way, like making space for fun or allowing fun back into our lives, because I don't want it all so to be work.
I hate when I think of something as wonderful and joyous as a vacation or something. And instead of feeling excited or happy or anticipating all the joy and spaciousness of it, I start feeling compelled like there's so many things I have to do to prepare and worry about what might fall apart when I'm not around.
So many of us have had those thoughts become the more habitual thought than thinking about what kind of delightful thing gets to happen next.
And if we can start weaving in thoughts about what kind of joy might there be today? What fun thing might I want to experience?
How do I want to feel when I do this? And I love that question. Like how would I like to feel? Because it kind of jars me awake a little bit and makes me realize where I might be tight or holding or withholding from myself an experience that I want to have.
So, often lately when I think how do I want to feel?
I want to feel peaceful. I want to feel relaxed. And it's so funny because we think of vacations and summer breaks and all of that about having a break and about having relaxation.
And yet it seems like we spend even more energy on trying to make it into something rather than just experiencing that piece for what it is.
So I want to break down a little bit about how we got ourselves here or how I got myself here and how I'm taking that apart because we shouldn't live like that. We should be having fun in our lives and we need that balance. And I think actually when we get it, we're more enjoyable to be with.
We actually do all those things that we're trying so hard to do better because we have that balance restored like you get your energy fed by doing things that you find interesting and creative and nourishing. So I think...
One of the reasons that us responsible women have trouble with fun is that we really have carved our identities around being reliable and being this dependable person in our circles.
So we become this person that everyone counts on, or we feel like we need to be the one that everyone counts on. And we have a lot of value placed inside of ourselves around being steady and helpful and capable.
When we go to do something fun and take a break from all that, it feels like we're stepping outside of that role.
And then we worry about, well, will everything fall apart? If I step away for a little while, I definitely struggled with this in my early businesses where I thought, man, if I like leave for a week,
Will the whole engine fall apart? What do I need to set in place to make sure that everybody knows where everything is? And they... I just... I think I lacked... a sense of trust that people could find their way if I didn't have it all figured out for everyone in every scenario.
And I think it's an easy leap for me to say that I also felt that way a lot, an early motherhood too, feeling like, hey, if I ever take a break or step away.
Will everything be okay? Will my child be alright? Like, will stuff happen the way it's supposed to? And I had a lot of supposed tos.
And it really stripped me of whimsy and I don't know, just feeling cared for myself.
Like I switched from being someone taking care of myself to someone responsible for other people. And once that happened, there was like this heaviness around it.
And it's so fast how fun became something that was for these other people, for my family, for my kid.
When I was working, like make sure your workers have space to have vacations and have fun.
But I didn't lump myself in with them. I felt like I had to be separate and I just became part of the infrastructure or something.
And I just want to say that wasn't very healthy for me. And it's probably not helpful for any of us when we find ourselves going into that space. And so it's okay when you notice that you're doing it to go, "Ah, okay, this is me feeling pride and value in taking care of people and being responsible and making sure that everyone's taken care of."
And we add in, "I also am worthy of that care. I'm also worthy of having that consideration and to have that space. And probably people want to step in and support me and help me in ways that I don't even know because I haven't even thought to look for that support."
And that's such a relief. Instead of thinking there's nothing, there's no supports there because I think that's our fear - is to have the thought, "Well, what if there are supports there that I just don't even recognize or remember anymore because I've kind of taken that away from them, thinking I needed to do it all myself?"
There is such a huge amount of relief in that.
And I'll probably revisit that in a few minutes. Just talking about all of the fun things that I look forward to doing this summer and that I want to do with my family, by myself, with my friends.
All of that becomes more possible and more fulfilling and more fun when I believe that everyone around me is capable, that I don't need to do everything for everyone, and that they just want to join me as a person, not as a structure, that they want to spend time. And that's what I want too.
And then I have to laugh at myself for every thinking that I was the structure of this force that didn't get to participate.
And I want to say that I don't think any of us are really thinking that. We're not holding ourselves above or separately on purpose. I don't think that we're trying to say that we're better or that we believe that we're better for not having fun.
But I do think that there is a cultural narrative around earning and around providing and around always showing up and exhausting ourselves that is so saturated, that it's everywhere around us. It's very hard to pull ourselves out of that and look around and realize, wait, what if that's not real?
I'm saying it now so that you hear it. What if that's not real? What if you're a participant in your life and you don't need to be all things for everyone all of the time?
Just having that little thought in there creates a little bit more space and a little bit more breathing room. That allows us to go, "Well wait, what if having fun and doing things that we want doesn't have to be earned?"
Oh my goodness. That, it almost feels impossible sometimes.
I feel like we've been conditioned that we need to get everything done first and then we get a reward.
And I'm going to, now that I've said that, be more aware with how I'm conditioning that in my kid.
Because I think we teach it young and I've been teaching it young too, which is we're going to do fun things, but first we need to clean the house. We're going to do fun things or eat this nice salad. I don't know, she doesn't want to eat a salad. She wants, you know, ice cream and Yaso bars and all that stuff.
And usually my response is you can have it, but we need to eat this first or we need to go here first or we need to clean this up or you can have that, but do do do.
What if not everything has to be earned before you get to enjoy it?
And I think that some of this grows from a good place.
Obviously in raising my daughter it's not that I never want her to have fun, it's that I also want there to be some sense of responsibility, some sense of things that should be cared for and tended well, such as her room, you know, like we need to take care of the bathroom and the bedroom and do homework and put everything away.
Those things are important for everyone to function, but won't I frame it in a way of 'Now it's kind of this burden or this cross you have to bear and then when you finally get that done you get this other thing.'
One, I think it kind of diminishes the reward. Like you have it set up. And at least this has happened for me that if I say, if I get all this done or, you know, manage to succeed incredibly well at this very hard task, then I get to celebrate and go do this or spend this money or have this vacation.
There's some sense of almost sadness around it, like you finally reach the point that you get it.
But you're not as excited about it anymore because you spent so much energy trying to figure out how you were worth it.
And I think maybe that's what I'm wanting to do this summer is kind of decouple worthiness from having fun.
And just say having fun is kind of a human right. Maybe I should have more of it and maybe you should too.
This is fascinating because as I'm talking about it, I'm realizing how many layers I have myself inside of myself that kind of want to keep me away from just
having a wild and crazy time. Or even thinking that it has to be wild and crazy. Like what is it that makes us want to have to earn all of these things?
And I also think that having fun and it requires us to relax a bit.
And this comes back to the trust that I was talking about recently. It's not trusting that if you stop tracking everything for a few minutes, that it'll still be fine. Or not trusting that if you take a break, you'll remember where you were, it'll be easy to get back in.
I think all of us build up a lot of beliefs and tightness around this in part because we kind of reinforce it a lot.
Either we never give ourselves a chance to try it out at all and discover for ourselves if it's true or not.
Or, we've accumulated so many experiences of it being kind of true, that if we stop managing everything, that things kind of fall apart.
So here's how I'm managing that for myself. One of it is that I want to allow that not everything has to go exactly the way that I dictated in my mind in order for it to be okay.
That has been hard. I don't want to sugarcoat that or say like, oh, it's so easy. Just decide that you don't care. And it's not that I don't want to care.
I still want everything to go extremely well in my life and I want things to be easy and I want things to go.
I don't know, in an organized way that I appreciate.
And I'd like everyone to participate that way. And I'm realizing that I don't get to dictate that for everyone around me.
I'm a participant in my life and there's things that I want or need to happen, but not every single thing that I want or need to happen has to involve everyone else, or needs to be, I guess, at their mercy, or if it is, maybe I need to modify my expectations.
I'm working on all of that because... loosening up for me and allowing myself to just enjoy good moments. It feels more important to me now than maybe it did a few years ago. I would say like a couple of years ago,
I would have said yes, fun is great and we should have more of it and everyone deserves it.
For me personally, having lost my brother in 2024, so we're coming up on two years. That to me makes me feel like,
Why would I not have fun and enjoy the life that I have? Why would I delay experiencing something amazing with people that I care about or just taking that break or making that connection?
I used to feel like there's always infinite amounts of time and to an extent I still feel pretty hopeful like there's lots of time around me.
But I also don't want to put off good things as a reward for dealing with bad or stressful or annoying things anymore. I'm now looking at it as there's a balance of like annoying things that I have to do and nice fun things that I want to do.
And I'm allowed to have both of them rather than feeling like I have to deal with the heavy side first and then deal with the fun side. I'm much more willing to intersperse them and go, "Hey, I'm gonna do this fun thing and it might cause me to have a little bit more stress or delay over here."
But to me, that's a perfectly fine trade-off because I'm realizing whatever is difficult or stressful for me, probably will still be difficult or stressful for me even after I've had fun.
In the same way that whatever is fun for me will probably still be fun after. Why would I think that the hard things diminish if I get them done first? Like, there's always more stuff to do.
Anyway, that certainly has been on my mind, and I think...
There's also, hmm, this thought of wanting to take time for myself. If it's like away from other people. If I want to do something fun or take a break, that feels selfish. That one's harder. And I think it's because for sensitive people or empathetic people or hyper aware people.
We're always aware of how others are feeling and if they're feeling included and what's going on. So even when we're off doing something for ourselves or making that time, the brain is still going.
And wondering how are they managing? Are they having fun? What's happening? How can I make it better for other people?
So for me, there's been a lot of, I don't want to call it work, but it is a little bit.
In unlearning that dependency, I guess, between what I think someone's feeling and me. So it's me uncoupling my responsibility for how everyone's feeling and doing in unhealthy or unreasonable ways.
I think that also was picked up early in life and just through movies and television and radio and everything is that growing up I felt like as a girl or a woman, like my responsibility is to host the party. My responsibility is to bring everyone together to make sure everyone's having a good time.
And it was explicitly and implicitly there. Make sure that the surroundings are great, that everyone's mingling, like make sure everyone's having fun, at your own expense, even if you're not having fun. That's not the point. The point is for everyone else to have fun. And I've come to realize like, I hate that.
I don't want to have to live like that. I don't want people coming to any gathering that I have, thinking that that's how I feel about it is that I'm just putting myself out to entertain people, so I don't do that anymore.
I don't know if I ever really did, but I certainly am conscious not to. I'm like, I'll just be me. I'll be me happy, I'll be me sad, I'll have you over, I'll be honest about what's going on, and I will trust that you guys can entertain yourselves as well and that we're all cool hanging out together.
So those are ways that I've made fun a lot more accessible for myself. And I've been a lot more reasonable about what I expect or demand or set space for. So for me, personally, I prefer a lot more small, fun things. I'm getting really annoyed with using the word "fun" by the way at this point. It feels almost like a made-up word because we've said it so much.
So I'll say entertaining or nourishing or creative. I want to go out and spend more really lovely moments in nature and I find that
super nourishing and sometimes I find it hard to do because I feel like I should be working or cleaning or setting something up for the household.
Maybe I should be coordinating the next event or working on the next gathering or whatever it is that's going on in our family life or for my business.
When that happens, I remind myself that the day has hours.
Not all of them need to be work focused, not all of them even need to be family focused. And it's actually safe and it's okay to take 10 to 20 minutes an hour even to go for a walk.
To spend time in the garden, to do things that genuinely make a smile happen spontaneously on my face. So now I'm starting to point out to myself when I'm out on a walk or if I'm out and I'm like even reading my garden.
When I noticed that I'm smiling and I wasn't meaning to smile, like I just noticed that it's happened spontaneously, I go, "Ah, this is it. This is what fun is. This is what feels good for me."
I'm allowed to really be present for that and I don't have to rush through it because sometimes when I think about, for example, going out and spending time doing qigong for 20 minutes, I'm like, "Oh, I would love to do that." I feel like I rush it and I don't enjoy it as much, in part because I think I need to immediately move on to the next activity, which is probably like putting the dishes away and sweeping the floor and making sure the cats fed. And all the things that I now tell myself, I'm like, "You're gonna do that anyway."
If it happens in five minutes from now or 20 minutes from now, it doesn't matter. You're gonna do it. So you don't really need to stress about that right now.
Maybe it's okay to take that 20 minutes and just enjoy that I'm outside. And the breeze is blowing and the sunshine is on my shoulders and I hear birds chirping.
And man, I finally get to enjoy that outside this time of year and not be inside because it's crushingly cold and wet and brutal outside.
And that's one of the things that I appreciate about living where I do in New England is that you have all these seasons.
When the season shifts and it becomes really nice, I want to enjoy it.
And I think that is the crux of what I'm getting at is like the energy shift.
We hit this period just before summer arrives and we want to take advantage of it so much.
And I want that for all of you too. And I know that it can be so difficult to just let go and have fun. So I want you to know that it's okay if that's where you found yourself as well.
That sometimes we just have this big expectation in our head about what we're supposed to be doing.
And it's okay that we have that, but it's also okay to recognize it and go, "Well, wait, what if that's just something I've told myself?"
And my experience can be different from that and that's safe and it's okay. I am going to enjoy so much this summer building safety, building space for myself to enjoy all these things that I really love in my life.
And as you know, the garden is a huge one and you guys, it's so luscious right now. It is wonderful out there. Everything smells good. Flowers are happening. Everything got planted perfectly.
Even the marshmallow experiment, which I thought had gone terribly awry, has like a sprout that I did direct sow because I couldn't remember which plant I had planted in my indoor plantings.
And I just said, "Okay, I'll keep these two, but then I'll plant one for real, like where it's going to live."
And it's coming up and it looks great and I sing little happy songs to it every day. So something as simple as that is me embodying joy, joy in my life. And that's what fun really is.
So all of that I want you to remember isn't a performance. When you find genuine happiness and joy in your life, you are so allowed to have that.
It's not because you're entitled to it, although of course you are, you didn't have to earn it, you're just naturally worthy of having these moments of connection and peace and relaxation and awesomeness.
And as we're ramping up into the craziness that is the summer, I really want you to hear that, that however you're experiencing it is fine.
Next week we're going to talk about how to hold this buildup of energy and expectation and stress and be with it in a way that lets us regulate ourselves a little bit better.
The summer solstice gathering that I'm hosting on the 24th is all about us getting together in a live space to talk about what's going on in our lives, all of the things that are happening around us.
Because there's the want to do more, there's the societal like, here is everything, just go do it. And then there's the simultaneous demands of like, guess what, all the kids are home and like everything is just inundated with people and all those places that you wanted to go, guess what? Everyone else also wants to go there at the same exact time.
So there's a lot of conflicting energies and I want us to be able to really look at that and break down for ourselves.
What's the reasonable expectation? What do we actually have to do? What do we not really need to do at all? What do we want to do and how do we make space for that?
And how do we really move through the summer in a way that feels great this year rather than us just going through the motions and getting run over by lawnmowers? Because sometimes that's how it feels.
So I said it. All right.
Next week I'm going to talk about this solstice energy and we'll talk all about what's going on.
Have a wonderful weekend till then. Find those moments of fun and pleasure and joy and connection in your life over this next week and throughout the summer.
Know that I am cheering for you and so grateful for your connection.
Every person I hear from fills my heart. Thank you so much for trusting me with your words and connecting and talking about where you are and what's going on.
I love you. I will see you next week. Take care until then.
Related Episodes: Navigating the Shift from Winter to Summer Energy
As we move deeper into the season, the energy shifts from the rest of winter to the rising momentum of summer. These episodes help you understand how to channel that energy without burning out or losing yourself in the process.
- Ep 30: When Your Energy Suddenly Surges (Late Spring Energy Explained) – Understanding the intensity of late spring and how to ride the wave without crashing.
- Ep 23: How to Use Spring Energy Without Burning Out – Practical strategies for activating your energy without accelerating into exhaustion.
- Ep 21: Spring Anger: Why Irritation and Frustration Are Signals for Better Boundaries – How to use rising energy to set the boundaries needed to protect your growth.
- Ep 10: Wintering — The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times – A grounding look at why rest is essential before you can truly enjoy the return of energy.
🌿 Want help building rhythms that work with your energy instead of fighting it?
The Living in Rhythm Starter Kit offers grounded tools for nervous system support, emotional regulation, burnout recovery, and understanding seasonal energy shifts more sustainably.
🌿 Looking for a deeper, live experience this season?
I'll be hosting a Summer Solstice gathering on June 24th — a space to slow down, reflect, and work with this energy in real time. We'll be exploring how to hold the buildup of summer energy, set boundaries, and move through the season without getting run over by the chaos.
You can learn more and save your spot here.
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