Ways to Fill a Notebook

As far as stationary goes, notebooks are one of those things that are incredibly easy to collect. So many are so gorgeous, and they give us a feeling of productivity and organization. Seriously, one of the easiest ways to feel like you have your shit together is get a new notebook. It’s a blank slate, a new start, and the world is your oyster. But sometimes, we just collect so many that we don’t know what to do with all of them. We buy them because they’re on sale, because “what if I finish mine?”, or because we think we’ll use it one day.

Here’s the thing: I am a crazy notebook person. I am also one of those people who loves to over-engineer my organizational systems. So I have a bunch of notebooks, but I also have a lot of uses for them. Here are some easy ways to fill a notebook.

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Learning from Blogging Failures

Back in July, I started a pretty ambitious project as an inexperienced and disorganized blogger. For the Month of Masks I aimed to use one mask every day for the month of July, with weekly check ins here and daily check ins on my Instagram. And I did not last even two weeks. I did the daily check ins for a while, and then got behind, and I didn’t even get to week two of the weekly check ins. As far as blogging challenges go, this was a miserable failure.

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5 Reasons Why You’re Not Productive

We’ve all been there: you spend the whole day doing what you think is work, only to reach 7 pm and realize that you didn’t really do anything. The next question is why you’re not productive. You didn’t actually complete any of the tasks on your to do list, but you feel like you did so much!

Here’s the thing, you probably did a lot. A whole lot. You just didn’t do what you should have been doing. You did what you thought you needed to do to in order to do what you planned to do. But that’s both a confusing sentence and a confusing plan of action. I would know, this is the state of my brain half the time. But, the good thing is, these are usually caused by similar patterns, and they’re fixable. So here are five possible reasons why you’re not productive, and a couple things you can do to fix it.

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Consumerism in Blogging

In the blogging sphere, something that has been coming up a lot more lately is the question of consumerism. How much we as bloggers specifically are buying versus how much we’re using. Our actual need for things verus our imagined need, which in reality is simply want. Consumerism in general is a big part of society, but the blogging world in particular is an interesting way of seeing it in depth and up close.

The why, and the how have been hard to pin down, beyond the fact that we simply live in a consumerist society. Why do we as bloggers, in particular, see this so much? How are we affecting others? And is there anything that we can do about it?

A quick note: this isn’t written from a place of judgment, as I’ve had my own fair share of issues with this. All I want to do with this post, is start a conversation. If you like buying things and are comfortable in your consumption, that’s absolutely fine. This is just looking at why some of us may feel the way we do if we are uncomfortable with our personal consumption, and how we might be able to relate to it in a healthier way.

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5 Meditation Tips for Beginners

Meditation is one of those words that conjures up this mystical idea, and apparently has a ton of benefits (according to people)! It sounds amazing, it sounds good for you, and it sounds relaxing as hell. But it’s not that easy, the whole sitting quietly with a perfectly blank mind in a room so quiet you could hear a pin drop. That probably sounds a little bit… extra. And here’s the thing: it is. Most beginners lose interest really quickly, and frankly I don’t blame y’all.

Here’s some good news, though, for anyone that just can’t seem to sit and do nothing and think nothing and be nothing. Meditation can be fun, it can be dynamic, and it can be all these things with all the alleged health benefits too. For anyone that has wanted to try meditation, but can’t seem to make it work for you: here are five meditation tips for beginners.

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A Tour of My Personal Filofax

With the influx of bullet journal posts, including one I wrote myself, I decided I’d show you guys my Filofax set up! I used to use a typical bullet journal, which you can see in my post about it, but I decided last fall to switch to a Filofax. I may explain why in a later post, but long story short: I wanted something more flexible. Like physically. You’ll see what I mean.

Let’s get into the breakdown, and I’ll take you for a little look-see on how I generally have this set up, plus what you can expect inside the dividers. Get ready for pictures, y’all.

agenda, planner, organization

the filofax domino, personal sized, in fawn (my absolute favorite color)

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How I Use Tarot for Self-Care

When someone mentions tarot, there are a lot of thoughts that come up: fortune telling, divination, maybe a goat. The association is usually very mystical, and hard to grasp. Tarot reading, and cartomancy in general, is a very old practice that is steadily getting more popular. It used to be that the purpose of a tarot reading was to tell the future, to contact spirit guides, or the dead. This was at one time a purely magical practice. But, as it becomes more commonplace, the uses for reading tarot cards gets even more diverse. Many readers still use it for those purposes today, but that’s not all anymore. Now it’s also for healing, for psychospiritual development, for introspection. You can even use tarot for self care.

In my early teens I became very interested in tarot cards, magic, spirituality. I started trying to learn tarot when I was fourteen, but stopped. Now, ten years later, I’ve come back to it, and it’s become an essential part of my self-care practice, not just my spirituality. Especially since I’m wanting to work more on self-care this year, this is a way for me to fuse the two. There are a lot of ways to do this, so let’s check out a few of my favorite ways.

the hierophant, judgment, the high priestess, tarot, tarot cards, celtic cross, amethyst, tarot spread, tarot cards

My current favorite deck is the Mystic Mondays deck, isn’t is absolutely stunning?

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5 Myths About Bullet Journaling

It’s January, and we all know what that means. New Years Resolutions. Yeah, those things. A big one floating around this year is starting a bullet journal, mostly for the sake of organization and productivity. Which is absolutely fabulous! But it also comes with the inevitable tweets about how daunting it is and the drooling over the “aesthetic” spreads. Some people are totally wigged out over the perceived effort, and others are jumping in with watercolor supplies.

With all that in mind, I wanted to do a quick post clearing up some misconceptions about bullet journaling. There are a lot of things that keep people from trying it, and I think it’s because social media has kind of developed an idea of what a bujo “should be”. It’s such a flexible system, and it’s important to know what it really is before jumping in.

Bullet journal

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My Themes for 2018

 

It’s that time of the year again, New Years! We are in the first week of the new year and like clockwork, you see two major kinds of posts: “Resolutions, hell yeah!!!!” or “Resolutions are stupid!!!!” And everyone can agree that resolutions usually don’t go to plan. If it even makes it to the end of the month. Frankly, there’s already a lot of content out there about why resolutions fail, so I’m going to leave that alone.

The other day I posted my my 2017 year in review, all about this last year. And while it wasn’t the year I thought it would be, it was the one that needed to happen. Being able to look back on the last year has really shown me where I want to go for this next year.

2018 resolutions

 

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My Year in Review: 2017

I think we can all agree that 2017 was a weird freaking year. In some ways it felt like the world was falling apart, honestly. I can frankly say that this year wasn’t what i was expecting, in any way, shape, or form. I’ve grown a lot, but I’ve also fumbled more than I would care to admit. This isn’t the year I wanted so much, but it was the year I needed.

There was so much going on in my life, in terms of trying to manage everything, and it felt like I didn’t have a handle on everything that I wanted to. In some ways I really succeeded, but in others there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

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10 Things to Stop Saying to Vegetarians or Vegans

For anyone that’s been openly vegetarian or vegan/plant-based for any length of time, you’ll know that there are often occasions where conversations can get a little… unruly. Whether it’s from concerned parents, curious friends, coworkers that are projecting, or internet trolls, everyone seems to have an opinion on it. Some of it is incredibly well-intentioned if poorly delivered, and some of it is just flat out antagonistic for some horrible reason.

If these have been said to you and you’ve been annoyed AF, I feel ya. If you’ve said these, maybe reconsider. These are mostly unnecessary, and are easily avoidable. Some of them even can be reworded to be interesting conversation starters! Others, however, are a little less salvageable.

Grab a coffee and buckle up, buckaroo, it’s gonna be messy.

Vegan, vegetarian, plant-based, veggie, pescatarian

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Going Cruelty Free Can Be Tough

I’m going to start this off by saying that this isn’t in any way to say I regret going cruelty free. This has been an incredibly important step in my life as a makeup enthusiast, animal lover, and spiritual being and it’s one that I have found rewarding and grounding. But there are some challenges and frustrations that one deals with when they make a lifestyle shift like this one. We still aren’t in a place in the world where cruelty free is the norm, and it’s a movement that has a lot of traction to gain still. The world is not structured in such a way to accommodate for it in a way that makes life easy.

Is it easier than it was ten years ago? Hell yes, absolutely, But it’s still more of a fringe movement, and when you’re on the outside edge things can be a little rough. And when you’re still new to this lifestyle, habit and old comforts can sometimes make it tough.

Challenges of going cruelty free

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Photo Editing: What’s Going Right and What’s Going Wrong

There are a few hot button issues floating around the online blogging community. Among these are cosmetic procedures, buying followers, bots, and also photography. Everyone’s worried about their own quality of content, and also concerned about what everyone else is doing. The latter deserves its own post, but there’s something to it that isn’t bad. We learn by observing, and when you scroll through Instagram long enough, you start to see some shit.

Every so often, the topic of photo editing in particular gets dredged up from what I can only assume is the ninth circle of hell. Usually in the form of a complaint. And it’s still a hot topic in terms of society, which it rightfully should be. But there’s a lot of context to these discussions, which sometimes gets lost. And sometimes, the context doesn’t matter at all. Opinions are often either extreme, or completely neutral. And honestly, that’s pretty interesting. Something as seemingly innocuous as photo editing can cause a bit of a riot.

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Rebranding and Me

One of the hardest parts of going into blogging was deciding how I wanted to brand myself. How I wanted to tell my story and how I wanted to present myself and my content. We hear a lot about originality, about authenticity, about standing out. The first piece of advice, or one of the first pieces, we’re ever given is: come up with a name that is you. And to be honest, how I previously named this blog and presented this blog didn’t feel like me. Yes it had my name and had the general idea of what I wanted to do, but it didn’t feel like me.

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Going Cruelty Free

Something I’ve been hearing about for a couple years now was the cruelty free movement. Like a lot of people, I naively believed that animal testing was some far off issue reserved for China, or only the most diabolical super villains, or for 1960s psychological tests. But unfortunately, it’s still a widespread practice that is poorly regulated by government agencies. But as I did my own research on the matter, I came to the realization that it is very real, and very present.

 

cruelty free

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