I started a podcast last May just as Mental Health Awareness Month kicked off. It is one of the most fun projects I am currently a part of. On each episode I get to talk to experts, authors, creators, and coaches (most of them friends or people I’ve admired in the space forever) for an hour and then share that conversation with you.
Read MoreIn addition to this being the year I get a better handle of my finances, it’s also the year I learn to love books and reading again. Over the last few years, really through the thick of the pandemic, I got my heart burned by publishing. I worked on two different book proposals that never made it across the threshold and learned a lot about the back end of the publishing world that made me a bit jaded.
Read MoreRecently I published a piece on how having a good morning has very little to do with your morning routine and way more to do with setting yourself up for success. Morning routines and daily or weekly schedules are very similar. In order to ace them, you need to pay attention to your unique needs instead of trying to fit yourself into a one-size-fits-all approach.
As more of us continue to work solely from home, especially as COVID variants become more prevalent, there are a couple of shifts that you can start making today, if finding the right schedule for you has felt impossible.
Read MoreLet peace stay. These three words have been heavy on my mind lately and also hard to swallow. I had a lot of ideas of who I was and the kind of life I had to live and very few of those ideas were full of abundance and even less were full of peace. In working to challenge many of the limiting beliefs I have about myself, I had to answer the bigger question of “what do you do once you’ve challenged the lie?”
Read MoreAre you overpacking your self-care routine? I don’t think we ask ourselves this question enough. I’m editing an interview I did with Rainesford Stauffer, author of An Ordinary Age, and it’s one of the main topics we discussed. The economy around personal development has become so fruitful that everyone from big brands to smaller influencers (like me) are conscious of how much money comes in and out of pushing products, or lifestyle choices, or a routine that honestly may not really make sense for your real life.
I’m incredibly aware that the lines between self-care and consumerism are overlapping more than they ever have. It’s prompted me to revisit how and what I share with my community. I choose to embrace a less is more approach in my own life because less is more manageable, more intentional, and less driven by the comparison game. I rotate what my “less” is regularly because I’m always trying new things and that’s the process I’ve chosen to share with you all.
Read MoreOver 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.
Read MoreI have to be honest - the title is clickbait, mostly because I don’t actually think you can “fail” at journaling, but I do think that most of us think that we do. I have stopped and started journaling so many times over the last few years. Each time I started for a different reason and stopped for a different reason.
The most harmful perspective we can own when trying to journal is that there’s only one way or one reason to do it. Each of us are navigating so many different lived realities at any given moment, if journaling is a tool we’re using to navigate those times then it’s bound to be as unique as our circumstances are. It can feel like because there’s a label for it “journaling” that it should be as structured as “eating” in that you do it at a specific time and for a specific amount of time.
Read MoreI am drowning in the dark gloomy days of Portland. At the top of my list of things that are currently hurting my mental health, creativity, and overall quality of life are gloomy days I cannot control. On the right side of a column is a long list dedicated to all that is helping me in this exact moment.
One of the ways we trip up when assessing our quality of life is to measure it up against the ruler of what used to make us happy or to only notice the things that used to make our days harder. While those details are amazing to have in our back pocket as context, the only way we’re going to address our right now is to notice our right now.
Read MoreI forgot how to date myself. My long days in coffee shops, wanderings into little shops, or traveling (oh man, traveling!) were all replaced by couch time and more couch time. It didn’t happen all at once - it happened across an entire year.
I was looking through the pictures in my phone and at the top of 2020 it’s image after image of a daily life I miss so much and that is still whiles away. I won’t be back to London any time soon. Working out of a different coffee shop every other day won’t be a part of my regular routine for as long as COVID is a part of my regular routine.
Read MoreIn an ode to 28, I’ve published two posts that I think pick up where I am right now in my life. The one below is the lighter one. If it feels like I wrote it while listening to Taylor Swift’s “Long Story Short”, well, it’s because I did. It gives you a snapshot of where and how I’m trying to build most of my days.
This essay on Medium is the same but different. It speaks more to all the work I need to put in to get to a place where I can even write things like the below.
Read MoreOne 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.
Read MoreI thrive off of people watching. It’s one of the top reasons I love to travel. It’s why working for myself has always worked for me.
The ability to jump from one coffee shop to another has never felt rootless, quite the opposite. For me, my lifestyle has grounded me in what’s important — my ability to notice the world. The last time I sat at a coffeeshop to work without any worry of COVID was in February when we spent most of it in London.
The last few days I’ve been extremely melancholic and just very aware that not only did I miss people watching and the freedom of working from anywhere, but I was suffering as a result of it.
Read More
