Pensive Procrastination

I was going to work on writing a new short story to share with you all here but I hit a couple of road blocks. The first being that I genuinely am not sure where exactly I want to go with this story. I get the premise but sometimes it feels a little too...anecdotal to me and I get a little stuck. It feels TOO obvious to me the message I'm attempting to share and I feel like that makes it a little bit boring (for lack of a better word). I believe that a story can communicate something basic that we know but don't "know" in a way that makes it really sink in for us. That's why I love short stories. I'm also an image person in terms of understanding something, if I can somehow picture it things make a lot more sense to me. I guess that's to say I'm a very visual learner. However, I do think that sometimes the power of a story can be lost if we feel like we're being talked down to in some sense? I'm actually not sure I fully believe this but it is

The other day I saw this post on Instagram where it was highlighting all the hilarious ways our children might let us know they love us. Most of the descriptions were ones that if someone else did them we probably wouldn't think they were that cute or we would be offended. One of the ones that stuck out to me was "Sits on your lap and closely inspects your face while pointing out all your flaws". At first I laughed because I have definitely experienced this side of children. The blunt and brutally honest side. I don't know how many times I had campers tell me that I had circles under my eyes or that I looked tired. I had campers honestly tell me that I just didn't look very good that day as well. It's a fun world to navigate, though considering the fact that I never wore make-up and rarely showered the fact that I didn't get that many negative comments is a positive to be considered! However, after laughing at this image it got me thinking...maybe there

Guys, it has been one heck of a week! Basically all of us ended up getting sick and now we are quarantined until the kids symptoms disappear. Thankfully everyone seems to be on the mend and spirits are much brighter than they were on the weekend. I have not had much downtime in which I could think or write so I figured I would grab this chance to come on here and say, "Hi"! This is an aside and something I know I should already have learned, however, I have always struggled with where to put the punctuation at the end of a sentence like the one above. Do you put two sets of punctuation, for example "Hi!". OR just one like I did above? I was never particularly good at grammar, as I struggled to grasp all the rules, so I have never really applied them. I can actually remember learning grammar in elementary school and thinking, "I really do NOT get this." Then I never really felt like the basics were taught again so I just learned by trial and error and tho

I'm not sure if I'll actually end up posting this because the fact that it was written on my phone just goes to show the informality of it all. I just had some thoughts swirling around in my head and since I hadn't written today I figured I should just grasp them and see if they go anywhere. If you've ever watched multiple movies with me (that you haven't picked) you're likely to notice a few themes. One of them being that I don't set the bar particularly high, I'm not necessarily looking to watch something that is going to win Oscars. Another theme is that I absolutely love "coming of age" stories or teen drama. On the embarassing side this includes High School Musical (which perhaps is neither a coming of age or a drama...) and on the slightly less ridiculous side it's movies like The Edge of Seventeen, To the Bone and Boyhood. As I was watching another Netflix coming of age/teen romance movie I got to thinking about what it is that I

Originally when I started typing out this post I was going to follow along the same lines as yesterday but as I opened it up again to work on it I thought it might be nice to do something a little lighter and more chill. So I've opened up my tab that has some suggested writing prompts and I'm going to go from there. If I had a huge following of you on here or Instagram I could do one of those polls, "What question number should I answer 1-28?" But alas, I don't have the time, dedication, nor desire to become famous on Instagram so I can do those kinds of polls. So you're just stuck reading whatever tickles my fancy in the world of writing today. The one for today's date is actually really interesting so I think that I will write on it. Partly because it does slightly follow along with what I was writing about yesterday and the day before. The question or prompt is "Describe your ideal friend. Do you live up to this description in your friendships?&q

Since my blog post that I wrote the other day on authenticity I've been thinking more about a couple of ideas that I think I touched on near the end. One of the ideas being that each emotion is never experienced purely on it's own but in symphony with all of our emotions. In counselling this idea is sometimes called parts work. It's the idea that there are parts of us, which can be related to emotions but also about ourselves in general. In relation to emotions this means that while a part of me may be feeling sad, and perhaps largely and overwhelmingly so, there is also a part of me that feels joy or happiness. Perhaps the easiest way to explain this idea is through the word bittersweet. It's a word that many of us know and have felt in our lives. Bittersweet is actually the mixing of emotions, us experiencing more than one emotion at a time in a clearer way, one that most of us can identify without a whole lot of searching or seeking. This might be because it's a

I had originally intended to write a post about stories that changed me, but for some reason I just couldn't seem to write. In fact, I'm still really struggling. That may be an obvious statement considering the fact that I haven't written anything since Monday. I sat down each day with the computer in front of me but found I just couldn't come up with anything. Sometimes a down, melancholy mood is just what I need to write but I've been finding that I'm lacking in energy or... flat...which leads to me not being able to write at all. Originally, I thought that I could just share how I'm doing and what I'm experiencing, however, I didn't want this to become my personal journal just out here in the world of the internet. Also, taken out of context of the other more positive emotions I've been feeling could make how I'm doing seem a bit darker than it is. Thinking about all this has me reflecting on authenticity and openness. I used to have t

Hello Everyone! I decided to take the whole weekend off. I figured that the point of this was truly to challenge myself and get myself back into writing...not to make myself dread writing and hate it. During my undergraduate degree I was originally doing a double major in English and Psychology (two of the most useful majors to have if you want to do something right out of university...*wink*). I found that I began to hate English, a subject that I used to love and find great joy and comfort in studying. I would often save my English homework to do after my other homework so that I would have something to look forward to. I loved looking deeper into a text, looking at symbols and analogies and other things that were "hidden" when you weren't looking closely for deeper understanding. All of a sudden, in my second year of doing a double major, English seemed dull and dead to me...it was like everything felt over-analysed. I couldn't just read something to read it and en