High Five for Friday: February 19

Happy Friday! I hope you had a lovely Valentine’s weekend! ♥️ Here’s what put the sparkle in my week:

(FYI: I make a small commission for purchases or clicks made through links in this post.)

• Two Valentine’s surprises, for starters! The first was a galentine from one of my oldest friends: an adorable (and delicious!) homemade chocolate peanut butter cake!

• Then, on Saturday, these guys arrived, a gift from Pops! I love that it’s a whole PLANT (!!), not just flowers, so that it will live on! Well, as long as I don’t kill it…. 😬

• I had to make a Target run on Sunday, and I immediately had heart-eyes for this opalescent glass bottle! (affiliate link) I guess it put the shine in my week? 😁

• I found this friend on my walk on Wednesday! Quite surprisingly, I might add: I had first spotted him last April (he’s the orangey from these posts), but he’s only come up to me twice EVER. And yet on Wednesday, he rubbed up on me and accepted lots of pets! Okay, he did also give me a lil nip to let me know that he’s still ferocious. 🦁😂

I accidentally took this incredibly artsy pic of him and his lil speckle nose!

• Lastly, I got to catch up a little bit with one of my grad school friends, Ashley! (Who I’ve previously gushed about in this ancient post!) She was randomly on my mind, so I texted her, and I’m so glad I did. She’s one of those people who just make everything better, you know? She’s bubbly, kind, fun, brilliant, friendly, so supportive, and hilarious, and I love her with my whole heart, even though our paths don’t intersect the way they did when we would eat cookies and chat all the time instead of reading. The isolation of the pandemic has made it clear how much sparkle certain people bring to my life, so it’s wonderful to connect with them! 💖💖

What put the sparkle in your week? xo

Linking up with Andrea and Erika!

High Five for Friday: February 12

We are way overdue for one of these, aren’t we?! The H54F link-up actually seems to be defunct now, but to me, it will never die. (Much like Cobra Kai! But we’ll get to that.)

Here are five things that have been putting the sparkle in my life!

My blog friends!

It has been so nice to see what everyone is up to, and to talk to gals like Mica, Nicole, and Lisa again! I am so touched to know how many people (in blogland and on Facebook) missed this space! 💖

Fun clothes!

How can you not smile when you’ve got donuts and unicorns on your leggings, huh? And what tops off an outfit better than cozy socks? #PandemicChic

I also recently found these adorable, super-soft plant pants at Walmart! (affiliate link)

Zelda!

My bffl sent me Breath of the Wild for Christmas, and now my life is over, haha. It’s such an incredibly gorgeous and immersive game—and how lovely to get lost in another world right now! I’m really digging the open-world concept and am still just running around exploring, even after weeks of playing!

Obviously, I made my horse a pretty princess and dyed Link’s garb purple!

Cobra Kai!

I don’t know why I didn’t watch this sooner because I loved the Karate Kid as a (karate-less) kid. And Kristin and I even watched the first two eps back in 2019 and liked it! Her bf is actually the one who urged me to watch it when season 3 dropped, and I binged it in a couple of weeks AND THEN promptly started it over again. It’s so much better than it has any right to be. I’m in love with Miguel, Demetri is basically my unathletic soul twin (and I did also love Sam Tarly soooo…..), and this bad-ass montage is one of my favorite moments. (Though it’s from the end of season two, so light spoilers.)

My new blog header!

Can you believe I made it myself? I mean, probably, because it’s not very fancy. 😂 But the color and font are so perfect that I smile every time I look at it! (The “sparkle” font actually looks a lot like my own printy-cursive handwriting!)

What put the sparkle in your week? Let me know down below! xoxo

Linking up with Andrea and Erika!

Where I've been...

HELLO! 👋 When I last blogged in June, I did not expect to be gone for so long! I mean, I’ve been religiously doing the High Five for Friday posts since 2015! 😮

I’ve actually been putting off posting… and kind of dreading it. Probably because I’m out of practice with being vulnerable online. And also because I’ve been dealing with things that are still very much in the slippery, undefined phase.

But hey, here we are. And here’s what’s been going on over the past six months. It seems I might have:

• Agitated depression!

• PMDD!

• The worst vitamin D deficiency both my regular doctor and psychiatric nurse practitioner have ever seen!

(No, wait, I do definitely have that last one, HOORAY.)

It’s like the least fun Choose Your Own Adventure!

As I said in my last post, things fell apart in June. I had a pretty bad anxious/despairing episode in which I could barely eat, sleep, or sit still. However… this is at least the fourth such incapacitating episode I’ve had in the past few years, which made my psych NP Liz wonder if I have something called “agitated depression.” It’s on the mood disorder spectrum along with regular depression and sounds like anxiety on steroids—plus a lovely layer of depression.

But the jury is still out on whether or not I actually have agitated depression because Liz had me start tracking my mood. And while the weeks and months that followed weren’t quite as bad, I began to notice that my mood and emotions would go haywire alongside changes in my cycle. Liz says that she often sees people’s mental health issues worsen alongside hormonal fluctuations, so IT maybe ME. But, of course, if you’re having A Really Bad Time when you get your period, you could have also have PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder).

I had begun to think that PMDD was the culprit for me… and then January happened.

January was the first month where my mood/emotions didn’t fall off a cliff. (Like, I continually noted “Shockingly okay!” in my mood tracker.) The only thing that I’d done differently between December and January was introduce vitamin D supplements for my crazy deficiency. I didn’t expect these random gummy vitamins from CVS to actually do much, but maybe they are! I’ve read some articles that suggest a link between vitamin D levels and mood, particularly depression, so maybe we’re on to something here. (I’m going to get bloodwork done soon to find out for sure.) All I know is that I’m feeling better!

So, yeah. A lot of stuff that we’re still trying to sort through!

Not to mention, you know, the whole GLOBAL PANDEMIC thing. 🙃

But I do hope to come back to this space more, as I really miss having this creative outlet and chatting with my dear blog friends!

And…

If you’re reading this and feeling terrible and like you’ll never get a handle on all of your stuff, well, for what it’s worth… now you know one other person who’s going through that too. ❤️

High Five for Friday: June 26

Hi guys! I’ve had several sweet souls reach out and be like, “Hey, where are you? Are you okay?”, so I thought a check-in was probably in order. I didn’t mean to go MIA for the past few weeks. My mental health kind of fell off a cliff, and I needed to focus on righting that. I‘m not 100% now, but I’m doing somewhat better. Basically, the dueling pandemics of racial inequity and COVID have set my anxiety aflame. It’s like all the anxiety I (shockingly!) didn’t have in the spring finally caught up to me. First, I was obsessively poring over every post and article on racism. (I ended up putting time limits on my social media apps to try to curtail this habit, so that’s why I haven’t been very active there either.) Now, I’m also obsessing about COVID spikes and feeling like it’s hopeless and we’re all going to die.

Obviously, there is a FREAKING TON OF THINGS to be anxious and scared about these days. But if your mental health starts to spiral, please please address it. Call a friend, schedule therapy, call 1-800-273-8255 (the Suicide Hotline), something. Or do something like yoga, walking, or dancing to get out of your negative mind and back into your body. I did do some of these things eventually, but had I taken my spiraling emotions seriously sooner, things probably wouldn’t have gotten so bad. My own anxiety seems so stupid in the face of everything that’s going on, plus all that I have (physical health, active employment, white privilege, the ability to afford therapy and medication, et al.)… but discounting and criticizing my emotions doesn’t work either because it only ends up fueling the anxiety and feelings of self-hatred.

I had to actually take my feelings seriously to be able to address and soothe them. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, if something feels off to you, listen to your intuition, honor what you’re feeling, and start tending to those feelings as soon as you can. ❤️

Now, a bit of sparkle! ✨ I am very proud of myself that when I felt crushed by similar negative self-talk this week, I went for a walk. Two weeks ago, I was too panicked and sleep-deprived to get myself out for a walk, so, progress. And on said walk, I met the friendliest cat ever! No psst pssting or kissy noises necessary! 😍

AN ABSOLUTE ANGEL 😭

He actually followed me for a bit as I walked away from his house, and I was kind of nervous that his owners would think I was stealing him!

And then, literally as I was walking away from him, I got a text from our neighbor that she wanted to drop off some cake. Cake?! YES PLEASE! She also invited me to hang out with her and her husband in their yard, which was delightful and got me out of my head and laughing (!!) for a while. A much-needed sparkly night after kind of a rough day. ❤️

So that’s where I’m at. I may post more sporadically depending on how I’m doing, but please know that I appreciate you all and want to keep the sparkle going in some way. I do think we all could use some sparkle right now (since, oh, it feels like the world is ending), but I also don’t want to do so in a toxic positivity kind of way that ignores what’s really going on. So… yeah. We’ll see where this goes!

Have a great weekend! Be kind to yourself. xo

High Five for Friday: June 5

Hi guys! Things are going to be a little different around here this week because my voice doesn’t need to be heard right now. So, to amplify black voices instead, here are five posts by black creators that I enjoyed this week, followed by several action steps you can take to support the Black Lives Matter movement.

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New guide alert! Please read (swipe) 💗 First, I want to offer my deepest gratitude to the 10,000+ 🤯 beautiful humans who have joined me on this journey of compassionate inner work and outer action, and to those who have been here from the beginning and in between 💗💗💗 The ways you all have showed up for my work and the black community has been overwhelming. If you are in this online community and safe space, I know you are well intentioned and want to learn and do the work. ⁣ ⁣ That being said, I’ve been getting a lot of messages from white people (who want to be genuine allies), sharing that they are nervous and afraid to “say the wrong thing” when trying to learn, show support, or have difficult conversations with black people and other IPOC. This guide is to encourage you and equip you with the tools to step out of that fear and engage in REVOLUTIONARY CONVERSATIONS (defined in the swipe) ❤️⁣ ⁣ First, do not let your fear keep you silent. It is a million times better to SAY SOMETHING and be open to being corrected/educated vs saying nothing at all. Remember, these confrontations are GROWTH opportunities for us as human beings and opportunity for validation and solidarity on the receiving end. But I do empathize with the discomfort in this ego dismantling. This opportunity to dismantle ego and open our hearts and spirits applies to ALL of us and manifests in different ways. But in this case, I am providing resources in relation to race, and you can alter these tips to fit any other uncomfortable conversation that you would like to enter and engage in openly. ⁣ ⁣ ⁣ I was lucky enough to engage in a revolutionary conversation yesterday and it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced. I hope that you too can experience something as emotionally and spiritually stunning as a revolutionary conversation that results in peace, honesty, understanding, and genuine unity. ❤️❤️❤️ love you all BIG TIME. Your efforts to DO BETTER are appreciated and seen. We are on the path to evolving our society. #BlackLivesMatter #IAmWorthyOfPeace #WeAreWorthyOfPeace #RevolutionaryConversations

A post shared by Haile Thomas (@hailethomas) on Jun 3, 2020 at 11:40am PDT

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racial gaslighting 101 〰️

A post shared by OGOR (@ogorchukwuu) on Jun 2, 2020 at 4:13pm PDT

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Think about this before you post a selfie of yourself enjoying a glass of vino or feeling yourself in your wfh fit. Think wisely about the space you are occupying on the internet right now. Is what you are sharing helpful? Is it in support of the people out there who are suffering, grieving, protesting or looking to do better? We need all hands on deck right now. We are talking about hundreds of years of systemic oppression. What’s happening in the world right now isn’t just in response to what’s happened over the past week. People are responding to the millions of lives that have forever been impacted by a system that has been built to disenfranchise them. Your selfie can wait.

A post shared by Avery Francis (@averyfrancis) on May 30, 2020 at 7:32pm PDT

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✨Sit with it. We can’t grow and change if we stay comfortable. Get uncomfortable. It may feel itchy, sticky and jarring. Until it’s not. • Shout out to the newcomers here and the folks who have sat through some difficult posts and haven’t unfollowed or blocked me. You will be the ones to create change if you’re willing to take risks and sit with the discomfort that arises. • #sitwithdiscomfort #getcurious #buildcapacity #createchange #blackdietitian #centerthosemostmarginalized #diversifydietetics #fatpositivedietitian #allfoodsaregoodfoods #eatingdisorderrecovery #weightstigma #allbodiesaregoodbodies #bodiesintheroom thinking beyond #haes #intuitiveeating #bodytrust #antidiet #dietculture #antidietdietitian

A post shared by Jessica Wilson, MS. RD.She/Her (@jessicawilson.msrd) on May 28, 2020 at 2:54pm PDT

And one article that I especially urge you to read if you have strong feelings about the inappropriateness of the riots and/or the phrase “Black lives matter.”

Possible action steps if you feel so compelled:

GoFundMe for George Floyd’s daughter Gianna

GoFundMe for Breonna Taylor’s family

Justice for Breonna Taylor petition at change.org

Where you can donate money for protestors’ bail funds (by state)

Take care of yourselves this weekend. xo