Category: Health & Lifestyle

Health & Lifestyle

Conjuring Dreams and Nightmares

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

I have not been sleeping well lately, you guys. Since mid-July, when I decided to leave my full-time job, I have been working on a novel. Before I started working on it, I felt a little lost and unfulfilled by my career and was questioning my self-worth too often, pulling up little to satisfy the cavity of what I had to show for my contributions to the world, thus far. I craved a sense of fulfillment that I could actualize and needed to pursue an activity at full-steam that would make me feel like myself again.

My stock on happiness and self-worth had dwindled below the recommended reserve and I felt disappointed in myself for not nurturing my creative strengths, for so long. Even if this novel doesn’t end up making a single penny and even if it is rejected by publishers, it will have been worth the time for what I have gained in self-discovery. I feel like me again, and it’s taken a long time, but for the first time since college, I feel like a writer again. Writing a book has been a dream of mine since I was a kid and now, it is one that I am determined to make a reality with this new project.

When I started working on this novel in July, I had no idea how long it would take to finish a first draft. To be honest, I had little confidence that I’d even be able to do it and worried that the initial excitement of the process would wear off. My mantra became Jodi Picoult’s wise quote, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page,” so I wrote some bad pages to start and then they morphed into a plottable base for a story and a set of characters whom I have grown to love.

As I got to writing, the confidence in my ability to accomplish the task at hand began to grow. I began reading about other successful writers’ routines and habits and was able to ballpark a timeline for when I could likely have a first draft finished. In September, I set a deadline of October 17th for my first draft. Now that that deadline is just around the corner, I am not as afraid of it as I thought I’d be. I have been diving deeper into the world that I have spent the past three months creating and that world is growing more developed each day. So far, it has been a passion project not without its difficulties – both creatively and psychologically.

I like to write mystery. If you’ve every read a mystery, you’ll know that the genre requires some shady characters. I have been putting off writing the details to the darker side of my story for a while, but last week, I finally plunged down the rabbit hole of researching and writing them and have yet to come out the other side.

I have learned that I have two designated writing spaces in our home. One is the chaise seat of our blue couch, where I am writing this now, and the other is at my desk that I also use as a nightstand. I think the concept of a designated writing space can come in handy when working on building a villain’s story arc, however, I think I used the wrong one when constructing mine.

Writing a villainous story arc at my desk right next to where I sleep was not a wise idea. It is hard to sleep easy where you have created a monster. When I close my eyes at night, the stories I have read for research come to mind and the stories that I have created join them, invading the counting sheep’s pasture with dark clouds and ominous sounds, causing them to flee because they too can sense that something bad is lurking there. I get through the battle of sleep, on edge from the start, wondering what evil awaits me in my REM cycle, and let me tell you, it has been pretty creative, you guys.

I’ve always had a talent for being easily frightened. Pair that with a fear of the dark and terrible vision and voila!; you’ve got yourself a bedroom stalker that is actually just a table with a fan on top of it. While I, without my glasses on, am the most likely thing to go bump in the night, my imagination plays tricks on me with evils that aren’t there, conjured from harmless shadows, shapes, and light.

Coffee probably doesn’t help either. Some days, I can’t seem to write a word without coffee so I have coffee and then I have some more to keep going. Something that used to be a slow, enjoyable part of my morning routine has become a crutch for putting words on the page, but I think I’d like for coffee to go back to being a moderated morning indulgence to simply enjoy as I wake up. Writing anxiety-inducing story arcs on two cups of coffee isn’t a blend that hits the spot. For my writing sessions, I think I’ll switch to herbal tea and see if a sense of calm comes easier when it’s time to sleep.

Either way, I think the sense of accomplishment of finishing a first draft will be worth the sleepless nights and that perhaps I could use some toughening up anyway for the rewrite road ahead. But now, it’s that time in the day to close my laptop and take in the ocean view and a few sips of chamomile and honey to help guide me back from the winding depths of Wonderland.

Health & Lifestyle · Movies · Nostalgic Posts · Reviews & Reflections

Empty Venues

Beth DeFries5 Comments

When I was fifteen, I had the honor of being invited to attend my twin friends’ extravagant sixteenth birthday celebration in New York City. My friends had chosen to take a group of us out to a nice dinner and a Broadway show and afterwards, we all had a slumber party at the Waldorf Astoria. We snacked on decadent Godiva, chocolate-covered strawberries and Twizzlers from Walgreens and once we were all sugared up, we wandered the halls of the historic hotel in search of adventure, movie filming locations, and a ghost girl with a red balloon.

We never did find the ghost girl, but we rode the elevators like John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale in Serendipity (2001) and roamed the glamorous lobby in our hotel slippers and pajamas. I remember wandering into the empty Grand Ballroom, a cavernous hall with box seating all around the walls and a massive, glittering, chandelier overhead, illuminating the room in a dimmed glow.

We walked up onto the stage and looked out at the room, each with a feeling that it was exactly where we were all supposed to be at that exact moment in time. Aside from the Waldorf already having established itself for its serendipitous traits in Peter Chelsom and Marc Klein’s movie, it was something else to feel it for ourselves.

We looked out at the spotless ballroom, the banquet tables and chairs stored away in some closet or basement, the red patterned carpet – vacuumed, and the wooden dance floor – waxed and shining. We were the only things in the room to fill the space, a group of teenaged girls, our souls and energy so immense in the company of each other that the wallpapered walls and towering ceiling could hardly contain us.

I feel very alive in an empty venue. Perhaps it is the minimalist in me or perhaps the possibility that empty venues hold or once held. More likely, it is my love of Cameron Crowe’s movies and the impact they had on my adolescence, namely Almost Famous (2000) and Elizabethtown (2005).

Cameron Crowe has a talent for creating flawed, loveable, relatable characters and for developing relationships between them. He is also able to give empty venues as much life as full ones. His movies push me out to the stars and bring me safely back to the ground with each watch.

My favorite scene in Almost Famous depicts Kate Hudson’s character, Penny Lane, dancing around the floor of an empty concert venue after a Stillwater show has ended. The scene is set to Cat Stevens’ The Wind and captures the sense of clinging to something special extra hard when you don’t want it to end and the melancholy of accepting the fleeting nature of the experience once it’s over. The stage lights glow golden on the wooden floor as Penny slides around the venue alone, balancing on discarded cocktail napkins, while gracefully swinging a single rose around in her hand. It is beautiful, hopeful, and heartbreaking all at once and it reminds me that great experiences would not be so great if they were not so fleeting. Loss is a necessary evil of life. Without it, life’s experiences would hold no weight and coping with it is the first step back to joy.

Crowe’s Elizabethtown illustrates this cyclical concept well. There are two scenes in the movie that depict a hotel banquet hall. There is one in which the room is full of people for a very epic memorial service, courtesy of Susan Sarandon’s exceptional acting skills, Crowe’s incredible writing, and a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird that is literally on fire. There is another in which the banquet hall is empty aside from the main characters, Drew (Orlando Bloom), Claire (Kirsten Dunst), and a cremated Mitch, Drew’s late father, in his urn. The scene with fewer characters has just as much energy and tension as the scene with a crowd and I feel Claire’s apprehension, brevity, and excitement as she marches up to the podium and announces to Drew, “IIIII LIIIKE YOU!” through the echoing microphone, with only a cremated Mitch for an audience. There is so much life in the scene despite the obvious presence of death in the movie and the slow build of the characters falling in love without recognizing it in real time, amid a period of loss, makes my heart swell every time.

I did theater in high school and college and it was always bittersweet to end a show. On one hand, I’d have free time again and on the other, it made me sad to help break down something that I had devoted so much energy to for months, from auditions to strike.

I think I love being in a theater more than I like being onstage. On stage, there is nowhere to hide and it is hot and harrowing under the bright lights. The darkness and secretiveness of the wings and the catwalks were always my favorite parts of participating in shows – the anticipation and the adventure, the whispers, the intense listening for cues through heavy curtain legs, and the intimacy, trust and speed of a quick change or stage transition. In theater, working together makes these changes so much smoother. Theater is art imitating life but it is also so much life behind the scenes. It transforms empty venues to alternate realities and puts them back to their original state afterwards almost as though nothing ever happened.

I have spent many moments in empty venues and have come to realize that in those moments, they are not really empty at all. One person can fill a space with their voice, a dance, silence, love, or even just with their imagination. There is possibility resting in the dimmed lights and the energy of past moments seeps into the floors, hangs on the walls and curtains, and tarnishes the fixtures. Like Stevens and his music, I let these moments take me where my heart wants to go. And even when the time comes to move on, I do not waste it on regret or disappointment, and instead prefer to anticipate what lies ahead.

Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health · Minimalism

The Bully in your Closet

Beth DeFries1 Comment

Growing up, I often had negative perceptions about my body and it took me a really long time to love the way that I look. I hate to admit it, but I still have negative body image perceptions sometimes, though much less frequently. An unexpected side effect of creating a more minimalist wardrobe was learning how to identify some of the triggers for these negative thoughts.

One of my big triggers is aspirational clothing lurking in my dresser or closet – those jeans that fit perfectly everywhere but are so tight in the waist that they inhibit digestion, that blouse that gaps in the front no matter how I safety pin it, or the halter dress that highlights my armpit squishies. I find myself thinking, if I only lost some weight, I could fit into these items comfortably and if I can fit into these items comfortably, then I will be beautiful; I will be enough.

What I have found the truth to be is that when I have lost the weight to be able to fit into aspirational clothing, it has only lasted temporarily and that for that temporary duration, I have been in a state of perpetual hangriness. Starving your way to aspirational clothing also means that all of your other clothes that you wear often and that make you feel good and beautiful would then be too big. Why sacrifice feeling good in a majority of your wardrobe just to feel good in a couple of items that drained so much of your self-worth for so long? Get those items out of sight. The trade off makes no sense to me now and I only wish I had realized it sooner.

When I come across aspirational clothing in my closet, it takes guts to confront the bully hidden in the waistline, zipper, or buttons down the front. I find that I allow my aspirational clothing to put me down for a while before I even notice that it is draining positivity from my daily routine of getting dressed. Once I realize, I work past the guilt of the purchase or the time that it has spent in my dresser or closet, and recognize that I have learned a valuable lesson from it about what does not support my body and mindset well. Then, I confront the item and the emotions attached and oust it to the donation pile. Good riddance!

As a teenager, cultural representations of beauty really fucked with my self esteem. I used to collect Vogue magazine and thought that being beautiful meant being stick thin. My body doesn’t get stick thin. I’m not proud to say it, but I tried very hard to test and disprove this theory. I remember an influential quote of Kate Moss’ from when I was a teenager, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” and now, to that, I say, have you tried the Lindt 78% dark chocolate yet? It tastes better than skinny feels, to me.

I started learning to love my body in college when I was studying art. I took a life drawing class my senior year which involved drawing nude models. These models came in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, and genders. At the end of class, we would walk around the studio to look at the interpretations of the model and it was fascinating to see the variance in the drawings from easel to easel.

Some students drew the models with ideal proportions and some drawings were more abstract, despite us all having learned how to establish proportions and perspective from life to paper. I learned to see the human body as marks on paper, as shapes, shadow, light, and negative space. Even more fascinating was how most of the models seemed completely comfortable wearing nothing, standing on a platform in the middle of a circle of easels and watchful eyes. There was no judgement in the art studio. There simply was no time for it when the professor quickly increased the time of the different poses from thirty-seconds to two-minutes to ten-minutes and on to twenty. The body became scratches of charcoal or pencil on paper and together, those scratches created something beautiful and unique.

My pared down wardrobe has taught me what I enjoy wearing and how my clothes can impact my mood and mental health. When I open my closet, I see color, texture, patterns, prints, and shine. I smile when I get dressed in the morning because I know that my closet it mostly full of clothes that support me in being the best version of myself for whatever that means today. And when I come across something that does not serve that basic function, I thank it for the lesson and say goodbye.

There is no perfect body type. Beauty comes in an endless variety of forms and your form is included in that spectrum; I am absolutely certain of this. If you are struggling with negative body image, you are not alone, and it can feel impossible to feel like you are beautiful and enough, but know that you are. It is difficult to accept others telling you that you are beautiful until you are able to embrace it yourself. 

Aim to be healthy, not just measured by a number on a scale, but in a way that supports your mental health too. And for the love of all that is good in this world, do it for yourself and your loved ones and try not to let the bullies of social media, pop-culture, or your aspirational clothing dictate what is enough.

Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health · Travel

Baby by the Ocean

Beth DeFries1 Comment

Last summer, while visiting Portland, Maine over the Fourth of July holiday, we went with some friends to a beach in another coastal town nearby called Cape Elizabeth. It was a warm day, though not sweltering, but the shimmering water still looked inviting and we were determined to swim.

We abandoned our beach towels and coverups and approached the water with the knowledge that it would probably be cold. Reality hit with a frostbiting splash with the first steps into the waves. I thought of children by the beach in our shore town back home and of kids we’ve seen on vacation who, determined to jump into the pool first thing in the breezy mornings, would drag their less than excited parents to the poolside to participate and supervise and it made me wonder if discomfort is a learned behavior rather than an innate one.

How is it that a baby by the ocean can be so eager to continue splashing in the shallows even after that first icy touch? In that moment, I wanted a share of that sense of freedom and uninhibitedness, so I held my breath and dove into the crest of an oncoming wave. Submerged and compressed by the cold pressure under the surface, the water invigorated me, stunning my nerves, smoothing my skin, and spreading my hair out behind me.

Breaking through the surface, I gulped the July, Maine air, blood rushing back to my face, cheeks too hot despite the breeze on my chilled skin outside the water. A baby giggled and squealed in the shallows, eager to stay at the edge, daring and alive and oh so happy.

After that trip, I began to will myself to be like a baby by the ocean whenever I was faced with a difficult, but necessary situation. The words became a mantra that helped me through some challenging situations this year and I continue to find myself thinking of them.

The unknown can be frightening, but it was not always that way. The fear develops from the context of our experiences as we grow. Babies seem to approach the unknown with curiosity rather than fear and I envy that in them. I want to stand on the verge of an ocean of possibility, propelled by an insatiable curiosity for the future. I will abandon fear with my beach towel on the sand, excited to dive into foamy crests and come alive no matter how biting the water may be. I can follow the sun, break through the surface, and gulp in the air when I must.

And if you look closely from the shore, you will see me shine and the tide will change. The waves will pull, rise, and crest and I will follow. And for it all, I will be different when we meet again.

Health & Lifestyle · Reviews & Reflections

Little Desks and Little Women

Beth DeFries2 Comments

Yesterday, after going for a run, tackling some errands for the shore house’s rental turnover, and doing some timed writing, I treated myself by watching Greta Gerwig’s adaption of Little Women. Movies about writers have always drawn me in and I don’t know how I let this one go unwatched for almost four years. I have never read Louisa May Alcott’s original story, nor have I seen any of the film adaptions, but yesterday, the March family opened their homemade curtain to a new world and had me hooked.

Jo March and her sisters, Meg, Beth, and Amy found unbridled passion in their interests: writing, love, music, art, and family. They faced financial struggles, loneliness, impulsiveness, heartbreak, anger, and loss, but always found their way back to goodness with the guidance and warmth of their mother, Marmee, the influence of their father-in wanting to make him proud as he served the Union Army, and in the good-natured characters they met along the way, giving and trading hearts and lessons throughout the story.

I read that the set of the March home in Gerwig’s adaption got the nickname of “the jewel box” as it was plain on the outside and held lots of color within. The film’s set designers curated a home that reflected the characters’ creativity, warmth, love, chaos, and closeness. The different time settings in the story and the opposing tones were communicated with light which made it easy to recognize when a transition was happening to reflect the characters’ current state or former.

Jo’s writing studio in the attic was absolutely wonderful and rich with color and possibility. The minimalist in me rebels against my desire for a cluttered writing space, but I won’t give in. Something about books, art, costumes, candles, and miscellany just jog ideas like an uncluttered space can’t. I think I will create a small cluttered writing space in my home to see if it helps brings more ideas to light.

I have read and heard from other writer friends that making a dedicated writing space can feed the frequency of your writing and that it is essential in getting you to get something down even when your brain is like an art gallery between installations without another artist lined up. Right now, I am sitting on the blue couch in the living room with the sunlight streaming through our triptych view of the ocean. It is certainly a comfortable space, and perhaps will serve as a dedicated writing space, though lately I am floating around trying to find just that.

I have a very little desk, currently tucked away against the wall, that I sometime use if I feel like writing on the floor beneath the window. Sitting on the floor is a quirk that I do when I need to feel more grounded. I often sit on the floor at large gatherings with family or with friends to feel less anxious and more in-control. I guess that’s strange, but I don’t know; it just feels right and I tend to follow my gut. I like writing under the window at my little desk and sitting on top of the empty gray and white braided oval throw rug that I placed there not long after we moved in. The round shape of the rug is calming and it looks very warm and inviting in the sunlight and warm and inviting inspires cozy writing for me.

The warmth of the day is beginning to seep through the drafty window and summer is in full swing outside. I feel pleasantly lazy and truly happy and don’t know where the day will take me, but will keep an open mind. Like for the March girls I met yesterday, I am fulfilled by simple pleasures and know that whatever may happen, there is a happy ending in sight.

Mental Health · Poetry

Fortune Favors

Beth DeFries2 Comments

My mind is a deconsecrated cathedral turned into hipster apartments full of whimsy, mismatched decor, and white-washed walls.

The Madonna weeps over a modern record player with the Abbey Road B-side scratching on repeat in a studio kitchen,

Majestic in her broken panes of stained glass, cemented together with black composite.

She is beautiful and her suffering-an art.

She is womanhood and childhood and loss.

Taken for granted,

Rent-stabilized cost of losing a savior

for location location location.

The stations of the cross taken down,

Their shadows left behind beneath un-frescoed white walls to make room for mass-produced art from Target.

My creativity, removed from its sepulcher during construction, is haunting the rooms, evicting the mundane tenants who are satisfied with the status quo.

The times they are a changin’,

Rearranging priorities and preferences,

The colors-more vibrant, the words-more bold.

I write on the walls with lipstick and crayon, like Harold in his purple world

With a grown-up twist.

Unformed and malleable,

Full of possibility and light,

I grow and glow.

I illuminate past the confines of the bulbs in the IKEA pendant fixtures,

A mixture of grace and insanity come to life in a way that finally pulls the room together.

Free to curate slowly with care,

My soul revived with abundant self-worth and self-love,

Absolutely enough 

and ready to take on the neighborhood market – Upscale and laid back with an unbeatable view of  the future.

I grip my grasp on happiness with a firm hold,

finally bold 

And recognize that “can” is a word in my vocabulary again.

Survival does not depend on compromising on dreams and

Split seams can always be mended.

Everything will extend beyond fine.

Unraveled thread, re-wound.

Possibility abounding.

I am me. I am she.

I am mine.

Mental Health · Poetry

The Mountain

Beth DeFries2 Comments

In my dream, I married a mountain.

And sprouted up from its rocky terrain as grass and trees and wildflowers,

Contouring its stony face with sparkling waterfalls and trickling streams.

I was the flora and the fauna and the dirt.

I was the beautiful parts of earth – on the mountainside.

The birds, the insects, the goats, and the sheep;

I was the fish in the streams – the moss on the trees.

All sprouted from me –

and all for the love of the mountain.

The mountain gave little in return except the surface on which to grow,

And in my dream I grew weary of creating beauty alone.

The grass grew brown, the flowers wilted, and the animals grew hungry.

The mountain’s sorrow built and a storm brewed and lashed with heavy rains.

The mountain shook with great sobs and my land began to shift and slide.

Down – down – down the mountainside.

Buried in the mountain’s grief,

Concealed in soaking rubble,

A heap of beauty on the ground

Torn apart and strewn around.

That is until the storm clouds parted and the heavy rains ceased.

Quenched with sun and released from the mountain,

I gathered my debris.

My twigs, my leaves, my petals and seeds

My bones and blood and the survivors of the fall.

And reworked it all into something new.

And then I awoke to you.

Grief & Loss · Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health

Star Matter to Dark Matter and Back

Beth DeFries1 Comment

I began to minimize my faith in religion back in 2012. It was a very confusing and draining time in my life, brought on by my great aunt’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer a year earlier.

After her death, I was not the same person and I felt the cavity of her absence to my core. In attempts to be happy again, I talked to Mike almost every day, despite living in different cities. I watched dozens of DVDs from my university’s library, escaping into Singin’ in the Rain, Finding Neverland, and Ever After, to name a few. I bottled up my grief – wrote stories and essays about loss for class assignments, and pulled myself up from piles of blankets and sweatshirts on my dorm room bed. I took a trip to Florida and met Mike’s aunt and uncle for the first time and they took us to Disney World. It all helped a little, bit by bit, but I still felt lost. I prayed to God and to my aunt each night, longing to be heard. I cried till my nose grew raw with the salt of grief each time there was no response, and after a year – I stopped praying all together.

I slowly came to terms with an understanding that she was gone permanently and I that couldn’t talk with her anymore, only to her memory. I rationalized the unlikelihood that there was really a heaven, to the point where such a concept did not make sense to me anymore. I began to view Jesus as a good, self-sacrificing, historical figure who lived by contagious ethical values and began to realize that his mother, Mary, may have just been a young girl, newly married, and uneducated in matters of sexuality.

I began to stumble across my aunt in dreams, but she was different – not the person I had known. Something was always off about her. I’d be dreaming that I was walking around the corner in our family shore house and happen upon her standing there, wordless, in the middle of the kitchen, lit only by the bulb inside the refrigerator, her back to me. She never spoke to me in these early dreams. She was child-like, but looked even older than she did just before she died. She seemed happy in the dreams, but always with an air of infantile innocence about her, as though she were a newborn old person.

To not be able to speak with her was painful, and to fear her was worse, because at the time, all I needed to know was that she was still there if I needed her, that I could somehow break through the curtain between the realm of the dead and the living. I just didn’t know how yet.

I gained more of an interest in the science of the how the universe works and an appreciation for quantum theory a few years later, recognizing in them new ways to describe what I once called faith. I marveled in the idea that most of the elements in human bodies were formed in stars and gained an appreciation for the existence of humanity as we know it. I grew fascinated by the concept of time and how it works differently in the vastness of space than on Earth. At one point, I felt overwhelmingly small and helpless, a miniscule person, afraid, on a miniscule rock in an infinite stretch of something my brain will never fully comprehend. I learned about energy, the duality of electrons, and Schroedinger’s theory and wondered how many versions of each of us exist in infinite alternate realities, if at all. I wondered if my aunt was still alive in one. Or if I was dead in another. I began to appreciate my reality more and was fascinated by the mystery and possibility of it all. I started to feel comfortable with the unknown again. I still feel small, but also part of it all, and not alone. I am but one compilation of star matter trying to make sense of dark matter(s) and accepting that it’s ok if I can’t.

Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health · Social Media

Winter for a Wallflower

Beth DeFries1 Comment

I have been casually thinking about further minimizing my use of social media and quitting Facebook for over a year now, but I did not seriously consider deleting my account until November of 2022 while visiting a friend in California. We sat in a dive bar in Venice at some late hour of the eastern pacific night, drinking pints of beer and spilling about life.

“I’m thinking of getting rid of Facebook,” I said too loudly with fortified, liquid confidence.

“Yeah; you and everybody’s parents are the only people who still use it,” my friend joked bluntly.

While factually untrue, it did make me recognize how many of my friends no longer use Facebook as a social platform. I felt like a searchlight had locked on me, shining a harsh blue exposure up from beneath my chin, preparing me for some on-the-fly campfire story that I wasn’t even sort of ready to tell. Sitting in that high-top, busted-pleather, half-booth in Venice, my feet dangling above the sticky floor, the seed of an idea germinated and I knew with certainty that someday I would extricate myself from social media’s entangled roots. Two days ago, I finally felt ready to approach that “Delete Account” button, knowing that it was the right move for me.

I prepared for my departure as I saw fit. I wrote down birthdays. I notified my Facebook community of when I would leave the platform, giving family and friends the opportunity to reach out if they wanted to keep in touch. Most importantly, to me, I saved pictures from my account and Mike’s, revisiting old memories that I’d not looked at in years. With my memories harvested and stored away, I felt ready to continue on my journey and leave Facebook behind.

I pulled up the login screen four times on Wednesday, without thinking about it, and it became clear to me that this might be a tough withdrawal process. Social media caused a lot of easy access to distraction for me and I finally felt it was time to fight off that distraction to pursue creative hobbies and make time for healthier physical and mental practices.

Wednesday morning before work, instead of scrolling through my Newsfeed while mindlessly chomping on my cereal, I sat in a chair by the window and watched the sun rise out of pink clouds over the Atlantic, enjoying each crunchy bite. This morning, I felt inspired to do some writing on this post which I have been struggling with for the past couple of days. Already, I am feeling more grounded in my own life. I am happening upon inspiration during times when I would not have noticed it or pursued it due to scrolling on social media, and I am feeling the wispy roots of my creativity beginning to take hold again.

For years, I nourished a carefully edited portrayal of life for an audience of friends, family, and people I’d avoid on the street. I had grown like a flowering vine, clinging to my wall, not easily torn away. But now it is winter with spring in sight, and I am ready for sprays of wildflowers to bloom again.

Cozy Posts · Health & Lifestyle · Minimalism

Too much honey…

Beth DeFries2 Comments

Hello again friends; I know it’s been a while.

I’ve been struggling to get back to writing, unable to give confidence to any particular idea. Right now, I am just typing and sipping a glass of Malbec, hoping that each word (and my grape juice) will help tug me out of Rabbit’s doorway and into a post worth your time and my own. Thanks in advance for bearing with me and I’m sorry if this is absolute stuff and fluff.

I admit that sometimes, even after reducing the amount of items that we have in our home, the laundry basket still overflows, the entryway table hides beneath the camouflage of grocery receipts and sheathed credit card offers, the throw blankets rest in crumpled piles on the new, blue sofa, and there are shoes seemingly everywhere.

No matter how many steps I climb to get closer to my own ideal of cozy minimalism, I think I’ll always gravitate towards a messy reality. I could have three things and at least two of those would somehow find their way to the wrong spot the next day. I need to learn to accept that.

My mind is a curious, cluttered place that doesn’t match my curated home. I struggle to cope with the mental mess a lot of the time, sometimes leaving the door open to too many thoughts and baseless insecurities, allowing them to sneak in amidst the darkness like unwelcome Heffalumps encouraging self-doubt to take the reins and to make the sensible parts of the oversized, aspic-walnut in my head go numb.

Alas, I run on.

When I am down, I am not able to express what I am thinking in spoken words, and words are supposed to be my rescue ledge. Their abandonment is greatly unappreciated. Sometimes my brain thinks faster than my words which leads to stumbling over them and then a deeper lack of confidence. This is why I need to get back to writing. I know that I am capable of intelligence, confidence, and true expression on the page. I can use my own words as a map to navigate my own creative woods.

When there is clutter in my physical environment, it is difficult to decompress, relax, and feel cozy. I crave cozy constantly and when it’s not there, it’s easy to get lost in my composited mind. Cozy wraps me up in welcoming, warm snuggles and tells me, “You can fucking do this.”

I find cozy in empowering conversations with my husband, family, and friends, in warm cups of tea with too much honey, in dry red wine, and in stretched out sweatpants and squashy coral pillows. I recognize how incredibly lucky I am to have people in my life who love me and to be able to curate a home that fosters my happiness to the best of my ability. In theory, I should never want for more and yet sometimes, I am an absolute Eeyore. In the words of somebody, somewhere who Mike and I quote all the time (most likely the writers on Psych), “That don’t make no sense.”

So here is my attempt at diving back into my pond of words, hoping for a little black rain cloud to float on by with a heavy rain that will irrigate my potential and grow my creativity. I am sorry if it doesn’t last, but I would like to give it a shot. With my strong support system, I know I can never be stuck for long. “He-ho, e-o, there she goes!“