Traveling alone is one of my favorite things I’ve learned to do in my twenties. The experience of getting on a plane, landing in a new town, and learning my way around has become a healing, fulfilling practice. But, like any habit you want to build, it does take practice and some forethought.

I was first introduced to SFK when a friend took me to her live show in NYC — I've been a fan ever since. I sat down with the social media powerhouse writer, creator of Let's F*****g Date, and the Queen of Confidence to talk about how she created SFK in the first place. We deep dive on building an online personality, how creators can safeguard their own mental health, and her current read.

I’ve been off the pill for almost a full year (this October) and there are so many things I wish I would have known before coming off. Unfortunately, wellness and women’s health in general are such hard topics to find information about on the Internet. I read a really great article in the New York Times this week that outlined just how poorly the healthcare system treats women and ways that anyone (but especially those who are oftentimes mistreated by the healthcare system) can advocate for themselves more forcefully.

I used to hate cooking. My lack of confidence in the kitchen went beyond not trusting if I could follow a recipe. When I moved into my first adult apartment, all of these old fears surfaced and made cooking something I had to learn was fun. I started off by leaning on HelloFresh. I would order the 3-meal boxes so that my job was limited to simply following directions. I loved that I didn’t have to shop for groceries and that most of the veggies or meats already arrived ready to cook.

Have you felt the energy shifting around us? I know that everyone keeps talking about this New Moon in Leo — I’m a believer of astrology without ever truly fully understanding what “New Moon in Leo” actually means. BUT, I believe the energy is different around me and that momentum is building for all the good things.

Over the last few months I’ve been reworking my relationship to money. I’ve documented it openly in hopes that it would help others feel less alone if they were learning how to manage their finances too. I’ve learned that an easy day for impulse spending are holidays that offer heavily discounted items you had no plans to purchase before the discount. Amazon’s Prime Day is this July 12th and July 13th and it's hard to ignore or to not want to add a million things to your cart.

This was a short week, after a long weekend in New Haven for a friend’s wedding. I was able to kickstart my summer challenge — I’ll be visiting 17 bookstores in 13 weeks — with a visit to Atticus Bookstore. Most of my week was spent getting caught up on work, after having had COVID the last few weeks. I’m really looking forward to resting and resetting some more this weekend. I’m at the door of a lot of big life and career decisions and this time around I’m trying to pace myself as I think through what’s next. It’s anxiety inducing, but necessary.

I’m knee-deep in prep for the launch of my new podcast, Happy To Be Here, and all that Mental Health Awareness Month will bring with it. It’s an exciting time, but a really stressful time for anyone who works in the mental wellness space. It’s actually quite ironic because in the month that’s dedicated to giving a platform to taking care our mental health, I find it the hardest to keep up with my own mental health routines.

I’ve been sharing on Instagram recently that we started with a new dog trainer once we moved back east. We found Kate LaSala, founder of Rescued by Training, through our doggy daycare and since our first assessment she’s been our trustworthy guide.

The main mountain we’re looking to overcome right now is that Chauncey is not yet able to stay home alone. Any time we’ve tried over the last few months, he’s either completely panicked, whimpered, and cried, or he’s pooped himself out of pure fear. We’d tried all the methods — leaving him out of the crate, leaving him in the crate, leaving him with a kong, etc. Ultimately the only method that has shown results has been Kate’s.

I’ve written three other posts about puppy separation anxiety and puppy blues since we got Chauncey a little over a year ago. The journey with his general anxiety and his separation anxiety have taken us on a rollercoaster that we were ill equipped to ride. Over the last few months especially, as we moved back east, it was apparent that we needed extra help.

Later this week I’ll be sharing a Q+A with our dog trainer and she answers some of the top questions you all had on the subject. I’m hoping both that post and this one (a bit more personal one) will help you through your puppy separation anxiety journey.

I didn’t mean to pull together a starter kit on creativity and artistic development, but I’m glad I did. Whether I was listening to Matthew McConaughey or flipping through Lisa Congdon’s imagination, these books helped spark something inside of me that had been dormant for a long time — my desire to fail. McConaughey has a whole section of his book dedicated to telling tell me all about that one time he had to throw “it” all away in order to get the kind of roles he wasn’t getting naturally asked to play. All of these books help you define what “it” (how you see creativity now vs how you want to see it) is and then offer up a roadmap that challenges you to grow.

Oftentimes being stagnant within our creativity comes at the heels of a some success or major “aha” moments. We’ve found something that works well and we stop trying to understand how to make it work better. I’ve been writing and creating content for 8 years now and I’d forgotten how to study the craft. I’d grown to the point of assuming that I would always be typecast for the kind of writing or content creation I was known for so there was no point in pushing my boundaries, but then this year something shifted for me.

The last two months prompted some unexpected, but welcomed changes in my day-to-day life. The biggest physical change is by far moving back to the east coast (we’re living in CT now!), but it’s the smaller changes that I’m noticing have shifted more of my mood and perspective on life. After letting go of some of the more energy-sucking habits I’d been holding onto, I feel less tense in the shoulders and less spiraling in my thoughts. I hadn’t realize how things like Twitter made me feel on a daily basis because I’d been on it for so long. I’d gotten used to the sense of dread that came with doom-scrolling and felt like that’s just what my day had to include.

I didn’t go into kicking the below habits intentionally. Life getting so busy, so quickly, forced me into having to prioritize moving and more immediate work needs and left me little time for anything else. Now that we’re in our new home though and I’m getting time back in droves, it turns out these are habits I don’t want to pick up again.

Before we got a puppy in 2020, my boyfriend and I spent just as much time traveling as we did in NYC. Our work required us to travel often and visiting family meant getting on short flights regularly. While I know I don’t want to go back to the level of travel I was doing pre-covid, I know travel will still be a part of our lives and we considered this when getting a puppy.

Our move to Portland was the first time we went on a plane with Chauncey and he did so well. I had the benefit of having his emotional support animal paperwork completed which allowed me to take him out of his carrier and cuddle him, both for my support and his.

Over the last few months at least 60% of my Google searches have included the words “puppy” and “separation anxiety.” When we first got our mini-dachshund he didn’t present anxious. He was vivacious, hilarious, and super cuddly. He still is all of those things, but in addition over the last year he’s struggled with both social anxiety and separation anxiety.

After talking to many vets, his overall experience isn’t that strange for a puppy who has been brought up in quarantine times. We are the only humans he interacts with regularly and for a long time in his puppyhood he didn’t even have the chance to really interact with other dogs.

We have lived in Portland now for more than half a year. Time has moved both so quickly and so slowly.

For context, moving across the country to Oregon from New York last fall wasn’t a decision we made lightly as a family or for me on a personal level. Leaving New York was the first time in my life that I’ve lived somewhere other than New York City. We left behind our friends, the environment our careers thrived on, and my family. All of this aside, if I had to sum our move up in one sentence it would be — the best decision of my life.

I’ve had a lot of big conversations lately about the importance of showing the process, not just of the extreme hard moments, but also of the moments when you’re building so that the hard moments don’t hit as hard.

Whether you’re navigating your mental health or grief, it can get hard. Days that randomly surprise you with all the feels usually aren’t the same days when you’re objectively learning what makes you feel better. Who has the bandwidth for that when you’re just trying to survive?

One of my cousins has this personal tradition that to me always seemed revolutionary — every holiday season she buys a gift for herself. Wild.

Coming from a family that’s so centered on others and never coming in contact with the concept of self-care until I was much older, she was my prime example of how happy it could make you to give yourself a gift. Once I started having more room in my disposable income to treat myself during the holiday season, I took my cousin’s tradition and made it my own.

Gift guides during the holidays lean more towards what you can gift others in your life, below you’ll find a list of wellness products or other suggested acts of self-care that can help round out your own holiday self-care plan.