Curated / 21

Well it's been a few weeks since I've done done a Curated post around here! I've missed it :) Over the last few weeks, I've been pretty sick + that's really been taking a lot of the physical and mental energy. But I'm starting to feel on the up and up, which is so nice. Isn't it funny how you always take your health for granted until you don't have it? 

And now I've had a few days to myself since my roommates have been out of town. As much as I love them, I loooove having some time to myself! I've mostly just vegging out, watching TV, working on some new group fitness stuff, and hanging out with my sorority sisters. It's been nice! Here's a little recap of what I've been reading/listening to/etc.

• Your life is always just beginning [Raptitude]
• Committing to a daily act of kindness [The Kardia]
• 3 steps to stay sane and balanced on crazy days [MindBodyGreen]
• The power of prayer [In Its Time]
• What to do if you fall out of your diet or good habits [ZenHabits]
• A vacation wardrop from Shopbop [Anne in Residence]
• 7 great alternatives to photoshop [The Nectar Collective]

You might have missed...

• A letter to an unknown friend
• Faith app: she reads truth
• How to make your twitter feed a source of positivity

Something about the fall weather coming on makes me love the color tan and little booties. I love this combination of the two with these Splendid Hamptyn Booties from Anthropologie (don't love the price though!).

I'm loving this beautiful wall calendar from Letter Me Loved. Every month has a 'reminder of grace'--many of which are lines from my favorite hymns!

I love slightly unusual workout clothing. I used to workout in just shorts and an old tshirt but these days I'm all about cute tanks and leggings. I've especially been eyeing these, these, these, and these.

SEE MORE ON MY PINTEREST >>

This rockin' reminder. Forget the high-powered woman part, all of us easily excuse our successes as luck or coincidence or 'whatever'. But you're earned every bit of it. I know I need this reminder sometimes!

How's your week been? Found any fun stuff on the internet?

A Letter to an Unknown Friend

To you, my fellow student, who gave up on life earlier this week,

I don't know you, friend. I don't know your name. I don't know how old you were. I don't know your favorite color or what food you craved late at night or what music you listened to to pump yourself up before an exam. 

I don't know what you were studying. I don't know what you dreamed for your future, if you hadn't already forgotten how to. 

I don't know what you liked to do in your spare time. I don't know if you liked sports or the arts or social events or anything else. Did you like to go to football games? Did I ever study next to you in the library? 

I wish I did know you. I feel like I did. I understand what it feels like to be fighting things that no one else can see. I know what it's like to feel like every day is a battle, and that sometimes even if you win the battle, it feels like you're losing the war. I think everyone can understand that. 

We've all become so good at hiding everything that's wrong with us. All our doubts, all our fears, all our angers, all our insecurities, and we've packed them tightly, deep down within ourselves where we can pretend they don't exist. 

And because we first try to pretend those monsters don't exist within us, it's that much easier to forget that they exist within others. That's why we treat each other the way we do. I believe that if I truly tried to remember what kind of feelings many of us have to fight off every day, I wouldn't have given that girl a nasty look on the road the other day....I wouldn't have gotten impatient with the staff at Einstein for taking too long to bring me my bagel...I wouldn't get irritated with my friends over petty, petty things. 

I don't know if we ever passed each other or met each other. If I ever passed by you, I'm sorry if I didn't smile at you. If you worked on campus, I'm so sorry if I wasn't polite. If I ever met you, I'm so sorry if I didn't take time to listen to you. If I ever knew you, I'm sorry I didn't show Christ's love to you in a way that made you so confident about your value that you could never forget it. 

I wish I could rewind every interaction I've ever had just in case we met and just in case I could have made a difference in that moment. I wish I could have smiled at you. Listened to you. Loved you. Proved to you that you matter. 

But I can't turn back time and fix whatever feelings brought you to this point. But I can change the future. This is my promise to you, unknown friend. I won't be perfect. I won't always be kind. I won't always refrain from being rude. I won't always love others the way I should. 

But I will try. 

For you, and for people like you and people like me, I will try. 

What are Your Favorite Blogs to Read?

Maybe it's just me but I feel like it's been an odd couple of months in the blog world. I've been flipping through my Bloglovin' feed (add me to yours!) and it seems like nearly 1/3 of all the blogs I follow have dropped off the face of the internet in the last six months. That's crazy!

And while I miss reading a lot of those blogs, I certainly understand that if blogging is a hobby, it certainly can take the backseat to other things in your life. In the two and a half years I've been blogging here, I've taken plenty of breaks, some of them even a month or two long. It's necessary!

That said, I'm cleaning out my feed a bit and looking for some new blogs to follow along with. And I would love your suggestions! I figure that I like my blog and you (probably) like my blog, so you and I probably have similar tastes in blogs. 

So share your favorite blogs with me! Or just let me know where you find new blogs.

3 Reminders for When You're Sick

My boyfriend H visited me in Florida this past week and it was so so good to see him. I haven't seen him since August so I was so happy that he came to see me. That being said...he brought a nasty cold with him, which I of course caught from him. Thanks for that, babe. 

And so I'm already on life since I've been spending all my time with H + now I have to deal with being pretty sick. It's not a good place to be, right? I know we've all felt this way before and been in this situation. So here are just a few things that I'm trying to remind myself + that you may need to remind yourself sometime!

A break or a nap might be the most productive thing you can do. I'm the kind of person that will just work and work and work half-heartedly when I feel sick. I feel like I have so much to do that I can't take a break so I just keep working and not really getting anything done. Know the feeling? Sometimes I have to just remind myself that an intentional nap or break can be the thing I need to do before I can really get anything done.

Choose tasks you can still do. If you're sick, maybe let your intense workout slide down to a gentle walk. It's okay! Feel free to postpone what you can and just do what you feel like you're able to do. Pushing too hard will only put a bigger strain on your body and keep you from healing.

Prioritize where you use up your energy. It can be hard to deal with having much less energy than you're used to all of a sudden. Naturally, you're not going to be able to do everything you might have planned, so it's best to consider what tasks need to be done sooner and which tasks can really wait until you're feeling back to your old self.

What else do you tell yourself if you're sick? 

On Forgiveness When It Totally Sucks

Recently, I was trying to sell a ticket to one of my school's football games. Students get discounted ticket but I wanted to sell it for more. Tickets were going for six times as much as we paid for them, so I figured if I could get double or triple, I'd be very happy. To me, it would be an excuse for a little shopping trip or a few meals out with friends. 

However, as I was chatting with people trying to find a buyer, I met a girl who didn't like the price that I was hoping for. But she didn't just not like the price. She decided she didn't like me. And she made that very clear to me. She attacked me with her words in all the places it hurt. 

She told me I was selfish.

She told me I wasn't a real Christian. 

She told me I wasn't a kind person.

All things that I regularly worry about myself. I'm human + it's easy to feel like I'll never be good enough. It's hard to have someone confirm those inner doubts to you. 

But then I remembered:

This girl doesn't know me. And I don't know her. She doesn't know what kind of impact her words are having on my heart, but I don't know what kind of an impacted heart those words came from. I can't imagine what kind of sadness and stress someone must be living in to lash out over the price of a football ticket. 

And so I'll pray for her. I don't mean this in a proper Southern lady way where I actually mean that I'll gossip about her to my small group (although I admit, I did vent about the occurrence to some friends). I mean that I'll actually try to love her. 

I don't want to. I want to reply with all of the angry, defensive words that appeared in my brain scarily quickly, like a reflex. 

But I will try. Because if Christ died for me and my sins, the least I can do is forgive a girl who's trying to wade her way through all the hurts in the world just like I am. 

And ticket girl? In case you're reading this...let's get lunch. I'll pay. 

Goal Getters / October

Hello, October! It's safe to say this month didn't exactly turn out how I planned it, but that's totally cool. It was a good month all things considered, but a loooooong one. It feels like forever ago that I moved in and started my semester--and that was just a week before September started! Let's review my goals from September...

+ Time management. I think I did about as well as I could have! I had a crazy busy few days last week. Friday morning, I had two exams and a speech and then had to leave straightaway to go to a wedding a few hours away, with only about a few hours to get there. It was definitely stressful, but we made it work. It was really nice to see my family and relax a little bit with them. 

+ Get a week ahead on posts. Yeah, no. This is where the goals kind of started to go downhill. Part of time management is realizing which tasks are not essential and cutting them out when necessary. And to be honest, blogging isn't essential, as much as I love it! So oftentimes, if I'm busy, it's the first thing to go. 

+ Plan a letter-writing challenge. This is coming! Stay tuned.

+Try out biphasic sleeping. Did it for a week. I don't think it's for me right now. Enough on that.

+ Practice calligraphy twice. Nooooope. 

+ Work 25 hours in the lab. I've been waiting on my supervisor to finish growing some samples to me so this didn't happen, but not my fault.

+ Get to know my sorority sisters. I did do this one though! Love my girls. 

Yeah....maybe that was a few too many goals for one month? Obviously I didn't do so hot on most of them. Let's look ahead to the month of October (even though we're already a few days in).

+ Set hourly goals, share them and HIT them every week. I'll share a little bit more about this soon, but basically every week, I set goals for how much time I want to spend on each area of my life, but I've been slacking on them a little bit lately. Look for a both on this soon!

+ Find a Bible study plan that works for me. I've been doing a Bible-in-a-year plan and I just plain don't like it. It makes me rush through the Bible much more than I want to and I just didn't feel like I was getting what I wanted out of it. I'll be looking around the internet and Bible study books that I already have and trying to pick out a new one to follow for a little while. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

+ Find a new place to tithe. Since I'm currently visiting around different churches, I've realized that I've majorly been slacking off on tithing and have a few months worth of income that needs to be tithed. I think it's okay to tithe to a parachurch organization since I don't have a home church, but I want to find one that fits my beliefs and helps achieve what I want done in the world! I'm particularly interested in education (especially for women) in developing countries as well as organizations that do business/job training and that kind of thing. Let me know if you have a favorite organization or charity!

+ Revisit goals once a week. The tricky thing about doing goals once a month is that....I kinda forget they exist sometimes. And that's oftentimes why I don't reach them. I'll be revisiting these goals probably every Sunday and I'm aiming to post midway through the month and update y'all on where I'm at. 

What are your goals for October? Any favorite Bible studies or charities to recommend?

3 Steps I'm Taking to Eat More Mindfully

You know what I'm really, really horrible at? Not eating ice cream five times a day just because I feel like it. 

You too?

That makes me feel better. 

It's really really easy to get in that habit of eating whatever you want, whenever you want, without thinking about the consequences. I've definitely learned the hard way that there are consequences to that kind of thinking (i.e. getting fatter than you want to be), but it's still a really easy trap to fall into, right? So over the last few weeks, I've been trying to eat more intuitively, focusing on what my body really wants at a given moment in time. Here's what I've been working on:

1. I decide what I want to eat before go to get it. 

If I'm bored or want a snack for whatever reason and go to the fridge or the pantry, you know what I eat. I eat everything, that's what. I'll decide that some pretzels sound good...but then after the pretzels I'll realize that what I really wanted was some leftover quesadilla...and then after that (half the time) I'll realize I was just thirsty and needed some water. 

So instead, before I go into the kitchen, I'm trying to think about what I really want at that moment. Is it ice cream? Is it some fruit or crackers? Or really, am I just thirsty? Or maybe I don't really want food at all, I'm just bored. If I really want ice cream, I'll usually have some, but only if I'm sure it's going to satisfy me. Make sense?

2. I think about how the food will make me feel in the future. 

This is actually sort of two-pronged--you have to think about how a food will make you feel mentally and physically, because those are two different feelings when it comes to food. 

Mentally, there are some foods that I've labeled so thoroughly as "bad"foods (whether justifiably or not) that if I eat them, I tend to feel bad about myself and it actually affects my food. And while I probably shouldn't be labeling my foods in that way, it's something to consider. If I'm going to feel upset at myself for eating a food, it's probably just not worth eating. Likewise, physically, there are some foods that I love but aren't worth the nasty feeling they leave in my stomach (I'm looking at you, Panda Express).

3. I'm becoming less afraid of hunger.

Oftentimes, if I know I'm going to be busy for a few hours, I'll eat a big snack, just so that I don't get hungry later. But that's really not how I'm trying to do things. There's nothing wrong with feeling hungry for an hour or two--if anything, it makes it easier to be in touch with how your body is feeling. 

Do you try to eat mindfully? Any tips for me?