So it’s been over 2 weeks! I haven’t drank since the 25th of May and we’re holding strong. I’m honestly as surprised as you are readers, particularly with how stressful things have been over the last few weeks and I love unwinding from a long day with a nice, big, cold glass of white wine.
(Don’t worry my dear, Chateau St. Michelle, I’ll be back for you soon)
The whole point of this was to see what health benefits/changes that I would see and here is the list so far.
Sleeping way better! I’m having much more consistent sleep and I feel like I’m sleeping for longer now. I absolutely love it since I notoriously wake up in the middle of the night and that hasn’t been happening, making it easier to wake up in the morning (which is 5/5:30 for me).
I haven’t fucked up my diet! Usually when I have a little too much wine, I tend to forget about my new health goals and then I’ve suddenly eaten a bunch of garbage and everything has just gone to hell.
Better skin. An unexpected result that I’ve seen is that it seems like my skin is much better! Who would have guessed? (probably many of you, but i digress).
I’m feeling pretty good about all of this so far and I’ll be curious to see if more benefits show up, but with the 25th looming (SEATTLE PRIDE!!!!), I seem to be having more moments of weakness rather than strength.
If I can’t go a whole month, what does that mean about me?
Yes, I have been lazy about posting again, but bright side, I’ve been balancing the rest of my life very well!
Except for one area. I’ve been going a little crazy with the drinks lately.
Don’t get confused, I’m in no way dependent, but when I have partaken in some silly juice, it’s a lot of fucking silly juice. I honestly like the feeling of being intoxicated. You just don’t give a fuck and that can be really nice sometimes.
But what is this doing to my body? Specifically, my weight? We all know that alcohol has hidden sugars and calories that we don’t think about for one reason or another, so sitting down and drinking a bottle of wine with friends without thinking can add up pretty quick when you think about it.
So I’ve decided to run a little experiment.
What type of physical changes will I see if I don’t drink any alcohol for the month of June?
I don’t drink very often during the week, but I do go ham on the weekends and holy shit does that ruin my diet. Will I lose more weight? Will I see changes in my skin? More so, will I see changes in my weekend habits? I definitely plan on keeping updates on how things change and while I probably won’t have a drink tomorrow, I will only be considering changes that occur during the month of June.
I don’t have one specific reason to be doing this besides morbid curiosity. I know that I can go a month without drinking, but I’m genuinely curious about what it will mean for my health. For all I know, this could be something completely mind blowing and I’ll rarely drink ever again! OR! It could show nothing changing and I go back to my regular life.
So I graduated a while ago. I did class, wore the silly hat, walked the stage, and found a career. I thought that I was done with school, but as a young professional, I’ve now found out otherwise.
While I work in marketing, my degree is actually in journalism. I thought that I would work for a wonderful paper or magazine and just write day and night, but then, very quickly, papers and magazines starting shutting down, no longer able to stay in business again the internet. So what is a newly graduated journalism student to do in this scary world of adulthood.
I got into marketing.
Okay, technically I got into administration first. I few many things career wise as stepping stones, starting somewhere until I’ve gained the right amount of skills and knowledge to move onto the next task of position. I figured that administration would give me the experience in an office, as well as improve the communications skills that had been preached to me for the last 4 years. This was how I ended up in the A/E/C industry (architecture/engineering/construction) where I’m fairly sure I will never leave from.
I worked as a receptionist/administrative assistant for a wonderful architecture firm here in Seattle for about 3 years and while I was there, I was exposed to the marketing side of the industry. The fun of company advertising, the artistry of proposal writing, the exhilaration of winning the job. I wanted that. I wanted to experience all of those things for the rest of my career and after months and months of searching, I finally found my position as Proposal Coordinator for my current company.
One of the perks that my company has offered to me is continuing education through a marketing group that I joined and for the last 3 weeks (as of today), I have been working to grow my skills and knowledge yet again.
I’m finding myself in a weird mindset on days that I have class. I’m so excited about the topics and speakers, but the young truant in me whispers “skip… SKIP!”. I always fight the urge and enjoy my class of course.
In high school, I didn’t take notes. Now I do.
In high school, I skipped class constantly. Now I don’t.
In high school, I didn’t care about succeeding. Now I do.
Maybe its just part of growing up, you recognize what’s important in life and what you have to do to move forward. I care so much now about how I do in life and I want to take all the steps that I have to so that I can have the life I want to live.
I’m going to post about my class again once it’s all said and done, but until then I’ll continue to work hard and try to move forward. I refuse to let my old ways hold me back again. I will use what I learn and succeed because of it.
I haven’t written in a while, completely breaking my own rules that I was dedicated to following when I first started to write this blog. Sadly, my moods have been controlling my actions a little bit more than I would like lately and it’s affecting my good habits a bit.
I will say that even though I don’t have my photographic evidence, I have been walking on the weekends, just in a grumpy sort of way that did not include picture taking.
But on we go….
As I’ve mentioned before in this neverending story, a large reason that I really enjoy my yoga classes are the “intent” that my teachers offer us every class. Sometimes its something fairly broad, like a feeling, but other times it is something more specific, such as the intent offered yesterday.
Apparently Harvard finished a 75 year study about what truly makes people happy, a meaning of life type of mindset if you will. What they found was that it was not money or things that truly make people happy, but instead it is the relationships that we keep in our lives.
I thought about this a lot while I bent and snapped (if you don’t know this reference I highly encourage you to do some research) and twisted and unwound. I don’t have a million relationships with others, but the ones I do have range from general pleasantries every once in a while, to deep, emotional, close relationships. But then I started to go deeper.
What about my relationship with myself?
I never had a healthy relationship with myself, not until recently when I decided to make it a priority along with my other life changes. Its easy to not have a relationship with yourself. We are distracted by things around us and worries about others, not paying attention to what we are doing and how much we can turn into a completely different person then we used to know, without even realizing that it’s happening.
You catch yourself starting to do and say things that you wouldn’t have a year ago. Is it because something happened? Is it based on a feeling? An action committed by another? There are so many reasons it hurts my head thinking about it. In the end I don’t think it matters why we change as much as it does that we know we are, and that we are content with who we are becoming.
My first step was starting this blog. I’ve always been able to think better when I write, process thoughts clearer. I always feel that I can be a more honest person when words are written rather than spoken. I think that it is because of this that I’m starting to find a better relationship with myself. I understand who I am becoming as a person, a woman, and a spouse, and I’m learning to be more honest with myself about all of these things as well.
Along with this understanding and relationship I am forging, I’m starting to learn how to be my own person while still keeping the other relationships that are so important in my life. I am learning that I am my own keeper, completely, when I am honest with myself and that as long as I keep this relationship strong and honest, that I will be happier in all others.
I feel like everyone is good at balancing their lives, but somehow I just can’t seem to manage it…
Wake up by 5:30, make breakfast and lunches, out the door by 7am to be at work by 8am, work non-stop till 4pm, workout, get home by 6:30, cook dinner, clean, spend time with spouse, asleep by 9pm.
It’s all laid out, and for some reason it never all happens and I just can’t get it to work in a way where it does. Something will happen at work, or my work out class will be cancelled, or dinner will take longer to cook than planned. I don’t know where I got the expectation that it was possible to make everything go smoothly in a day, I know it’s rare for such a thing to happen, but I really wish it could. I don’t do well when things aren’t planned or change last minute.
I’ve been known to have a meltdown or two over it…
I think my generation (generation y aka millennials) has an interesting amount of standards that many of us feel we have to live up to.
We see our grandparents, many who have had successful marriages for 60+ years, strong, opinionated, bought houses at a young age, and very family focused. We hear them talk about how hard but wonderful their lives were (my grandparents both grew up on farms) and that you make things work no matter how hard it is.
Then we see our parents, the Baby Boomers. Highly successful career wise, raising families in a time where few people had to worry about money like they do today, pre-recession. They went to college that resulted in successful, high-paying jobs, were able to afford a family and home right away in many cases, and had the outlook that things would stay this way forever many times.
We grew up hearing stories from both groups, were promised that if you work hard and go to college, your life will be good. But things haven’t worked out that way for everyone. Now, many people don’t see a college degree as enough to work for their company and won’t even give you a chance. The housing market is out of reach for many, as well as the rental market as well (at least here in Seattle). More people value free labor over well paid, loyal employees.
I even recently sat in on a seminar where the speaker stated “why hire a coordinator when you can keep hiring interns for free”. The faces of all the coordinators around the room were quite sad.
A lot of people like to say we (generation y) just want to complain and not work, but we’re set to unreachable expectations in a society that is very different then that of our parents and grandparents. For many of us, we don’t know how to deal with not being able to live up to the lives that we were told about, no matter how hard many of us try. I in no way blame the generations before us for any of this, how were they to know that things would turn out so different for our generation?
My happiness is directly linked to how successful I feel my day was very often, which is really sad. I want a specific life for myself, the one I built in my head from the stories of others that I thought would mean perfection, and I’m learning that it probably will never exist, and that has to be okay. At what point do we decide that a dream is unreachable, and thus we must alter our dream so that they can become reality?
I found this interesting video that Buzzfeed posted a few weeks ago, I suggest you take a few minutes to watch it and perhaps it will give some insight on just how much the time that we were born affects us as adults.
Have you ever done something that you knew was going to suck but you did it anyway? That made you suffer but you go back day after day? That makes you feel like you’re becoming Zach from The Try Guys while you do it, but then you come out looking like fucking Eugene?!
This is hot yoga and I am a yoga masochist.
I started going to yoga when I was in middle school per the request of my mother who didn’t want to do it alone. The tiny studio in the corner of the crappy gym was not exact a selling point to a 12 year old, particularly one who was blooming into her teen angst early, but I did love the exercise. It was calming and everyone was fairly intense about not being too close together so you always had room to move, and fall in my case.
Throughout the next 15 years, I would continue my on-again, off-again affair with yoga, from skipping it every day that I could in high school (asking an anti-social 18 year old to do yoga at 8am every morning just won’t work out for anyone), to trying hot yoga for the first time while trying to past the lonely nights when my husband worked until 1am. I constantly fell out of love with yoga, but I have always come back to it, time after time.
When I decided to start my journey of changing my life and myself, I knew that I wanted to go back to hot yoga and really dedicate to it. Having had so many injuries to my back, ankles, and shoulders, I knew the heat would be like pouring unicorn blood on my joints and perhaps keep me going back over and over. I ended up trying a studio near my work and after getting past the first few classes and feeling absolutely horrible, the endorphins kicked in and I was able to appreciate much more than just the workout that I was getting.
My teachers don’t just lead us through moves and positions, but teach us so much more. They discuss respecting ourselves and doing yoga with an intent, whatever that may be. That the energy we put into our practice can also be energy we put towards other things and have the same positive feeling and results. That we can learn to love and take care of ourselves so that we can love and help take care of others.
As someone who never learned growing up how to be emotionally supportive of myself, learning these practices now is teaching me to be better and care about myself more. I don’t think I would be trying as hard as I am to make my life better if these ideas hadn’t been presented to me. It has given me the tools to love myself and be proud of myself now, as well as who I will become in the future.
So as I stated earlier this week, I wanted to challenge myself this weekend and make my outdoor adventure something big. Since my husband also had the day off (we rarely have one off together), we decided to wake up early and go out to Tiger Mountain in Issaquah, Washington.
Even though I was born and raised in Seattle, I have never gone out to Tiger Mountain, let alone hiked any of the trails out there. As a thick girl, hiking uphill, which most of Poo-Poo Point trail is, was definitely an adventure and I think that I went through every feeling on the way up.
Now I have no idea where Poo-Poo Point got its name from and I don’t really feel like doing research right now, but my husband looked up some information and it is rumored that it has something to do with the logs in the water when there was logging on the mountain (I’ll let you use your imagination). I definitely felt like I needed to take a picture of the sign just to prove that I’m not making up the name.
By the halfway point (shown on the map above), I definitely was not feeling super happy. Hauling 250 pounds up a mountain is not easy! I made myself a promise before we started that I wouldn’t give up, I want to change my lifestyle and my attitude towards life and part of doing that is not giving up just because something is hard for me. With all of that being said, selfies were not part of the photo series at this point.
Now one thing about not having done this trail before is that I also didn’t know what the end point looked like. I was not disappointed.Â
It was one of the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen in my life. When you officially reach the top of the trail, initially all you see if a bench, trash can, and a bathroom. After following the sound of voices over a small hill, we were met with the above view and people sitting eating and talking on the side of the hill. It really did feel like we were sitting on the top of the world. Seeing everything below and being able to see how far we had really come was completely overwhelming for me.
I in general have a very self deprecating attitude towards myself that I try to hide fairly well from others. I never in a hundred years thought that I would be able to hike that far, let alone that high up, and be so happy in the end. Not only did I find my love for nature again, but I also found a new level of confidence in my ability to complete challenges that I set for myself.
With the trail being fairly popular, I found inspiration in very strange places, but one specifically being a young woman hiking the trail with he baby strapped to her. HOLY CRAP! As a woman entering my late 20s and contemplating children in the future, I can only hope that I am that badass.
Also, there was a little frenchie puppy that wiggled its little ass all the way up and it was both amazingly adorable and encouraging. If a powerful little puppy could do it, so could I!
With all of this being said, hiking will definitely become another large part of my life, whether I go alone or with others.
I can’t focus and I’ve had a hard time doing so over the last few weeks. I’m the type of person that takes great pride in getting shit done, whether it be in my personal or professional life. I believe that everything should be earned and love when things I do and create make other people happy and make their lives easier.
Remember that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Andy pulls off the amazing Harry Potter book magic (which probably lost another person their job, lets be honest) and it fucking amazed Miranda so much that she even started to smile? Ya, I want to do that, I want to be the person who makes Miranda Priestly smile.
But now I seem to be going down in this rabbit hole of shiny things that won’t let me keep a thought longer than 10 minutes. Even writing this post is hard and writing is my favorite thing to do! It just makes me feel like garbage.
I know that I’m way too hard on myself sometimes and its a big reason why I’ve had so many personal issues in my life, but I can’t help it, its just how I am. I want to be perfect. I don’t even know what that means honestly…. I’m so critical of myself for things that I think are wonderful in other people that I don’t even know what perfect means, just that I want to be it.
I feel better about everything when I’m able to focus. Its nice to be able to take the time to process each thought and problem, to deal with everything in a logical order and then not have to give it a second thought later. Now everything keeps coming up at once, like waves that are just crashing down on me and I’m slowly drowning. I can see myself coming closer and closer to the anxiety covered rocks and I just have to figure out which way is up.
The reason that I started this blog was to motivate myself and gain some insight on my feelings and thoughts. Sitting here now, taking the time to write something and think, I feel like the best way above the water is to just calm down and let myself float to the top. The last 2 weeks at home and work have just been insane with so much to do and a pressure I put on myself that I am the only one that can do it all. The only time I haven’t thought about deadlines, dishes, laundry, and cooking has been when my friends come over and for those few hours, I can focus. I’m able to have conversations where I’m completely present and happy.
I think I just need to find a way to get some guilt free relaxation.
So every Saturday night, I play Dungeons and Dragons with my best friends. While attempted to actually move forward in our campaign last night, the fact that we hadn’t seen each other in a few weeks took over and we all just ended up talking the whole night. Topics ranged from YouTube videos to work to politics, and eventually, to mental health. Thus we come to my topic to today: an overview of my life with depression and what it means to me now.
While I wasn’t diagnosed with depression until I was a teenager, I thoroughly believe that I’ve had it since before puberty. Growing up, I felt a certain amount of pressure to look and act, and that I just couldn’t live up to these standards (whether I set them for myself or someone else did). While some people can come to terms with this reality and flourish from this, I was not one of these people and found myself being eaten away by these thoughts and other problems arose because of this.
A lack of self respect. Isolation. Anger. Eating disorders. Poor grades. Clinical anxiety. A desperation to feel anything.
It took me a long time to work through many of these issues that were resulting from my depression and sometimes I still struggle with them, but one major thing that I have gained from this is perspective. Looking back on my life, for as short and tumultuous as it has been (I’m 26), I’ve realized some interesting things.
While many suffer alone when they have depression, I found myself drawn to others with the same issues that I was facing and took solace in this. No one spoke of the issues that they were feeling, we were young and probably didn’t even know what was happening with us, but it was a very strong connection and brought us together. I am still close friends with many of these people to this day. While my darkest days were some of the worst, moments within them with others also made them some of my best and this combination has formed me into the person I am today.
The thing about depression is, when you start to make it out to the other side, you realize that it forms you and makes you so much stronger than you would have been otherwise. I in no way claim to be better, I work daily to stay healthy and sane, but I understand what is happening and have the mechanics and knowledge to push through what happens, and have support from others like my mother and husband to help me on those really bad days.
I’m not sure what I hope to gain from writing this, perhaps just a better level of honestly with myself or maybe greater insight into something that has taken me over 10 years to understand. Either way, I will continue my chronicling of this ever changing me.
Due to the fact that I am alone a lot on the weekends, I feel that it is only appropriate for me to call workouts on these days my Lonely Workout Series. This is not to gain pity or something ridiculous like that, but I don’t believe in glossing over things and want to be up front on this blog.
Today’s adventure led me to Lincoln Park in West Seattle. I didn’t live in West Seattle when I was younger, but most of my friends did and thus I was raised there by my friends in my formative years. If you’ve never been to Lincoln Park, put it on your list. I’m completely biased but it is such a wonderful place in Seattle and as long as you’re fine with the possibility of being taken down by a happy labradoodle (this did happen today), its a place for you.
While I only ran all of 1.5 minutes, I did walk the whole park and that did make me feel like I accomplished something, especially since before I got to the park, I had just been laying in bed with my cat, a trend you will probably notice after a while. Being out in the fresh air and exploring the woods, which make up a large part of the park, made me feel so happy to be there and helped me remember a very pure reason why I loved being outside when I was younger.
Lincoln Park 4/8/2017
How do Instragramers make this shit look pretty?
Lincoln Park 4/8/2017
I definitely think that I will be making this a consistent activity in my weekends now, especially going into Summer. Along with that, hopefully some brighter pictures will show up to, today is very stereotypical for Seattle weather.
Ever Changing Me 