Life
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Untitled Musings, Pt. 1
Valentine’s Day. National Random Acts of Kindness Day. National Love Your Pet Day. The shortest month is packed with days devoted to showing love and kindness. And yet… showing that to myself has been hard. Years of self conditioning had me believing that I don’t deserve love, kindness, and respect, least of all from myself. One year ago today, an evening with four people and four bottles of wine ended in what I now consider hitting rock bottom. One moment I was fine; the next, the bottle of wine hit me and every negative thought I’d had over the previous several years bubbled to the surface and out of my…
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Good Riddance, 2020
T minus 3 and counting down to the end of this dumpster fire year. At least in a few hours we can all rehash the joke that hindsight will, quite literally, be 2020. I’ve been trying to write a post for days, for weeks even, and am honestly torn between having too much, and at the same time nothing, to say. Usually, I just write from the heart, but have been feeling this slow building pressure which has now reached its boiling point and is about to spill over. All throughout December, I put off finalizing something, until now – hopefully getting it in just under the wire. This year…
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Learning to Love the Legacy I’ll Leave
Recently, a compliment was passed to me through the grapevine, regarding my writing. Not only did it come out of the blue, but since I haven’t posted anything for close to two months, I was unclear (yet pleased) where this had come from. Almost daily, since my last post, I’ve tried to write something. Anything. And for at least the first half of October, I did. Nothing I expanded upon, nothing finished, nothing to the standard or caliber I wanted it to be, but still, it was something. Something to get the thoughts out of my head, and hopefully out of my mind. One year ago, a guest blog I…
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How To Stop Overcomplicating Life and Learn To Focus On The Things That Are Meaningful To You
I haven’t posted, or even written anything not resembling stream of consciousness, for about a month. July was split between devoting my energies towards trying to please someone who cannot be satiated, leaving little left over for me; the other part was spent trying my damnedest to muster up that little bit of energy that was left, in hopes of moving forward along a path which would be beneficial to Future Amanda. A month ago, I began taking a mindset class. I knew it was time to course correct, again, because for years, my mindset had been slowly declining. Even the work I had done throughout the previous year didn’t…
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A Limiting vs. Growth Mindset
Six months into 2020 and it still feels like a bad joke. We’re halfway through the year where I promised myself that I would finally ‘put up or shut up.’ While in the beginning, my path wasn’t completely mapped out, I didn’t think that where I am is where I was going to be. I also didn’t envision dealing with a pandemic. Who would’ve ever believed that their nightmares would suddenly become reality? That disrupted every plan I had in the works. It brought forth obstacles that, in the beginning, I couldn’t even fathom. But this is not news. Everyone has been affected by this situation, in one way or…
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Progress Begins on the Other Side of Comfort
What’s the point? The seemingly existential question of life, it’s also a question I’ve been asked regarding this blog. What’s the point? The goal? The endgame? Why am I doing this? The answer probably needs to be condensed, more concise, but the why is so layered. It started as a way to do something for me. A form of self-care, if you will. So many thoughts in my head, competing for attention, that I needed a place to get them out. For at least one year, I had debated starting a blog, and people were so supportive of the idea, that I finally decided to actually do it – instead…
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Going Against The Grain
If you haven’t already read part one, please check it out here. It started with a phone call. Tackling things on my own hadn’t exactly been working out, so I needed a new way to stay on track and be held accountable. It didn’t take long to find and reach out to someone whose words really resonated with me. Someone who made sense of things in a way I couldn’t. Someone who showed me that things didn’t have to be so bleak. During that initial phone call, I laid out everything that I knew needed to change, including my lack of direction in knowing where to start. I was (perhaps…
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My Life Wasn’t Broken; My Thought Process Was
It was hard to notice the changes that had taken place, because day to day, little seemed different. I was tired, but it was more than just that. Everything was always being viewed through a pessimistic lens, and it was starting to wear on me. I was completely exhausted. Drained. Depleted. Constant feelings of negativity had left me feeling trapped, with no way out. It had become so easy to blame bad days on any- and everything external. For too long, I let outside factors affect me to the point where they had completely rewritten how I viewed things (that must be where “we see things as we are, not…
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Time Marches On, With Or Without You
During a rare, recent moment of motivation, I was clearing out my drafts folder – because honestly, who needs 100s of drafts cluttering up their mind and space? Nestled between outdated to-do lists, random notes, and calendar reminders, I came across a half-finished post: 3 Things I Learned After One Full Month Inside. Written exactly one month ago, it was after we’d been on lockdown/quarantine/stay-at-home orders/whatever you choose to call it for a full calendar month. It was also a few days after my self-imposed daily writing challenge ended. It had two main points, some random tangents, and… that’s it. An abrupt end; unfinished, raw, and barely fleshed out. At…