Sneakers n' Shakes

I’ve been feeling pretty disconnected from myself lately and haven’t been loving myself to the best of my ability. This inner separation ended up making my anxiety worse and the small things I could normally brush off were getting to me a lot more. So I set off on a self-love mission. Much like a glow-up week, I’ve been trying to focus my actions on self-care in many different ways. The goal is to relieve my anxiety and reconnect with myself. So today I decided to share my journey and what has helped me! My body: Before I could even begin to sort out my life or emotions I really needed to take care of my body. And by that I mean 10 hours of sleep and eating full meals.  Getting proper rest especially was an essential step for me, I physically felt better which allowed me the brainpower to focus on my emotions. External Stressors: There are many different ways to help de-stress and relieve anxiety, especially for things out of our control. Personally, going to the beach helps me put...

If you’ve always wanted to scrapbook but aren't sure how to start or feel intimidated or overwhelmed by the aesthetic scrapbooks you see online, this blog post will walk you through how to get started with minimal cost or investment. There are a few ways to scrapbook depending on your motivation for starting. Is this something you want to do as a way to hold memories? Or just aesthetics? Or maybe a bit of both? I think the easiest way to start is if you focus on scrapbooking memories since you will already have a lot of the materials you will need without needing to buy extra things like stickers or washi tape that fit a certain aesthetic. 1: Junk Journaling Junk journaling is a pretty popular replacement for journaling but also a great foray into scrapbooking.  The concept is simple: keep old receipts, ticket stubs, tags from clothes, or any other pieces of paper from the activities you do and tape them into an old journal. In junk journaling the goal is just to stick everything i...

We’re halfway through the year now with the end of June approaching so I figured I’d outline the mid-way checkpoint I like to do around this time. There are both physical and mental aspects to this process that I’ll outline out. Of course, these are just things I do and some of them might be different for you so please use this as a guide and not a staunch list. Let’s start with the mental: In the beginning of this year I outlined the beginning of my bullet journal setup so let me run through what the midway point looks like. 3 reflection questions: -What are the highlights of the year so far? -What are the accomplishments of the year so far? -What have I struggled with/overcome this year so far? These are good questions to look back and evaluate everything that has already happened. It’s easy to forget the previous months so this is an ode to them before we turn our attention forward. 3 forward/planning questions: -Are there any goals I want to add moving forward based off of my curre...

Often times I overcome writers block by writing about writing. If I’m writing fiction, I’ll make the plot about a writer struggling with writers block. If I’m writing my blog, well then I write about blogging. So this month, in an effort to find a topic to write about I’ll be detailing out the bts (behind the scenes and not my favorite kpop boys unfortunately) about how I run my blog. Now it’s apparent that my blog is far from successful but it does bring me personal fulfillment to put together a post and make my monthly update. I’ll go into more of that later but first let’s start at the beginning. Blogspot: I chose to start my blog on blogspot over creating a site on Squarespace or Wix because it was honestly the easier option. Blogspot is completely free to use and pretty intuitive to figure out. Since it’s focused on blogging, posts are super easy to put together. You don’t even have to buy the domain right away if you don’t want to invest any money and are trying to get st...

This month I thought I’d share three  of my makeup favorites with you all! I have a few products I swear by that I’ll list out in this, so hope you find something in here that you like! 1. My life changing makeup item was the Too Faced, Born This Way sculpting concealer. It is the perfect concealer to use if you don’t want to pair it with foundation and just want to do a quick touch up to your face. I was able to shade-match really well to my skin tone so I can directly apply, and its slightly heavier consistency covers up the darker circles underneath my eyes (which is what I really needed it to do). I also apply the concealer to my eyelids (a pro-tip from the girl working at Sephora who told me about it) and it evens out my eye area so much and can even act as a sudo-eyeshadow in a pinch. (Though I always like to set it with a real eyeshadow). 2. The Elf Liquid Camo Blush was recently released as a dupe for the Rare Beauty Liquid Blush and boy does it deliver. Only one dot of the...

In honor of Women’s History Month, I thought I’d share some books I’ve read recently written by women about women and, mostly, for women. When Women Were Birds: Fifty Four Variations on Voice  by Terry Tempest Williams A mix of prose and poetry Terry intertwines her life, conservation efforts, and her mother’s death into a story that reads like a well written journal entry. She combines what it means to be a woman, the earth we all live on and our connection with it and each other, interweaving the concepts much like the graceful flight of a bird.   A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf A classic from 1929 when women were allowed even less than we are today and yet the concepts still hold true. Woolf talks about fiction and writing and how it relates to women in what feels like a long string of consciousness thought making this already short read go by even faster. There’s almost certainly an analysis on the past and the relationship fiction and poetry had with women,...

“Alexa, start a timer for 15 minutes” is how I’ve started writing this blog post. I’ve been struggling to figure out what to write about for this month’s update and haven’t really been able to come up with anything, but conversely, I’m not sure if I’ve really sat down and tried either. It’s hard to get myself to start writing when I don’t really know what it should be about. A friend of mine told me about a technique she uses to get herself to start doing something, which is to set a timer for fifteen minutes and just start with the objective to get as much done in those 15 minutes as possible. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with a list of to-dos and it’s hard to feel like you have the time to properly dedicate to those things. But the beauty of this method is that it gets you going and you realize just how much you can accomplish in fifteen minutes. It’s a good way to tackle a few things everyday instead of everything all at once too. At the end of the fifteen minutes you can ju...

5 AM is not a time I normally see. A liminal space that’s too “morning” for staying up and too early to be waking up. Light enough to not feel like night but dark enough to feel like morning, it doesn’t quite feel real. Perhaps it’s fitting that it’s in this pocket of time I’m reminiscing about what my blog post should be for the beginning of this year. A natural conclusion would be a monthly setup post to supplement last month’s yearly set up. Or maybe I should try a challenge and log my experience? I’ve been reading a lot lately, should I do a review? My favorite book (in the four I’ve read so far) has been The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. The book feels a lot like 5 AM. Too nonfiction to be fiction, yet too poetic to simply be facts. Experiences color the pages yet there are no images to fill in. What speaks to me the most if the way it makes you feel. As if you’re on the cusp of something great only to realize that what’s ahead has been with you the entire time. Whimsy is ...