Here's what the tack room is looking like at the moment. :)
Today is May 30th because I’m writing this as close to the deadline as I can, but that means that today marks one month of blogging!! This is a big milestone! It’s definitely already starting to feel a little less novel and a little more difficult, but I’m excited to keep going! Since today is a big day, I wanted to do some reflection on one month of blogging.
I started off the month with “Get Used to Yourself.” This was just something I had been thinking about and journaling about recently. I have a lot of similar ideas floating around in my head a lot of the time, but I had nowhere to let it out. I often feel like I might have something to say that someone might want to hear, but I never know how to get the word out. I had also had an itch to start an old school inspired personal blog just for fun and I guess the two pieces just stumbled together and clicked perfectly.
I had high hopes for myself in “My Health and Wellness Goals for May.” My three goals for myself were to have at least the beginnings of a consistent sleep routine, prioritize eating more whole foods, and get some sort of intentional movement in every day. I’m happy to say that I am doing better with eating more whole foods fairly consistently at least for the last week or so. I was able to go grocery shopping, prep some vegetables for breakfast, and have quick and easy options for if I’m running late. I’m also making an effort to eat more fruits and vegetables when I need a snack and drink more water, which I didn’t even realize I had been doing so horribly at. As far as sleep, I haven’t necessarily made any big strides, but maybe a few tiny steps. The Alarmy app has been relatively helpful in the morning, but the recent development of being able to use my tack room has not been good for my bedtime. So I’m working on how to balance all the things I want to do, which includes sleeping at least 8 hours every night. For movement, I’m like right on the precipice of starting back up. Now all four of my closest friends are working out, so I definitely have to quit slacking. I just bought two kettlebells that are here in the tack room, and I have my yoga mat in here too. Once I get my projector up and running, I can put on yoga videos or any other workout video I want to. And then I wouldn’t even have to go to the gym until it gets too hot to work out in here. There’s no reason why I couldn’t be using the kettlebells already. Mentally, though, I would say I’m doing so much better than I was at the beginning of the month, so I’m still feeling optimistic about being able to continue taking even bigger steps toward these goals.
The next piece, “Signs: Spirals” was really fun for me because it was my first research-based piece and I got to explore something that I’ve been really interested in recently. I always wish I spent more time sitting down and actively seeking to learn more information about things I care about and this has been the perfect way for me to be able to do this. I really enjoyed writing this one and I was so excited to continue this type of writing with more of the Signs series.
The 6am Wakeup Challenge makes me laugh because I actually made a TikTok that said “Day 1/7 of Waking Up at 6am,” and that was the only video in that series. I’ve been trying to think of how to give myself more time to write well in advance of each due date, and doing another 6am Wakeup Challenge might be just the thing I need. We shall see.
Signs: Hawks was another fun one in the Signs series. I am just so in love with the hawks that live all over my county, but especially the ones closest to my house. I loved learning more about their symbolic meaning. I just get so much joy every single time I see a hawk. That’s all I have to say there.
I actually had to go back and see what I even wrote for my May Goals Update. I don’t know if anyone else feels the same way, but May seemed like a long month to me. I wrote about the experiment my mom and I were doing with changing the time that I take my Lexapro at night. We terminated the experiment after just a little over a week. I felt like I was actually more tired, even though I had been taking it earlier, which doesn’t make any sense. I’m back to taking it right before I go to sleep again. I would say I’ve been doing better about not binge eating at night, mainly because I couldn’t even remember the last time I thought about it until I went back and read about it. I loved that I actually made the menu for myself and included it in the post. I want to do more like that in the future. I really need to print it so I can actually use it, which I have not done directly, but that list did guide my shopping trip for the vegetables and things I’m eating at the moment, so it’s still been helpful.
The graduation recap was fun because it was just a fun narrative style piece about a major milestone and accomplishment in my life. That was almost two weeks ago and I’m making plans with one of my best friends to take some graduation pictures, since I didn’t do them before the ceremony. I’m excited to see what we come up with together.
Then there was my first serious opinion piece about why porn is dangerous to people, couples, and society, from the perspective of someone who frequently consumes online pornography and has no intention of stopping anytime soon. This is something that is really important to me, as I have lived through the consequences of porn misuse, and I feel that people need to hear about the direct relationship between what we consume and our reality. I was so excited to write and post this, but it felt very vulnerable at the same time. I’m so glad I didn’t let that stop me. Even though nobody has seen it yet, maybe one day someone will and maybe they will think it’s important too.
Signs: Hummingbirds was kind of the foundation of the Signs series, but out of the three I have done so far, I would say it was the least fun to write. Part of this was because the search for information on them was so different than it had been for Spirals and Hawks. It was just a bit of a more frustrating search than the other two had been. The other reason was because I had started the research days in advance, but then not really touched it until the deadline started to inch closer and closer, which put unnecessary stress on me and made the writing process much less fun than I had hoped it would be. That was my first clue that I truly do need to put some systems in place for me to be able to write in a way that is both fun for me and of a certain quality. Both of these goals require time.
That brings us to this post, that I am still writing over an hour past the time that I normally like to have things finalized and posted by. I’m pretty deep into another opinion piece, and a political one this time. That was going to be my post for today, but it needs a lot more time and attention before it’s going to be ready to go out into the world, and I had been toying with today’s post being this exact reflection anyway, so everything aligned just the way it should.
There are big things to look forward to in June on this site! Beginning Herbalism, a book discussion and review, a lesson in time management, and hopefully the true blossoming of my fitness comeback. Stay tuned!
So cheers to one month of blogging! I’m looking forward to many more. I’ll probably do another recap like this at the end of month two so I can compare how things have changed just in that short time as I continue to get the hang of this. Onward and upward!
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