I used to see growing up as just getting older- little (and by little I mean when I was a child) me did not see it as anything else. It was just the excitement of being able to do more. Now as an older individual, I see that growing up is so much more than getting older: it is change; in your identity, in your life, discovering new things. Sometimes it is pain in order to learn. It is getting lost and finding your way again.
I think there’s a real tendency in society to put things off until we feel ‘ready’ or until there’s a better moment. I was recently thinking about moments I’ve really enjoyed or something I was proud of myself for and found that in most of these cases I didn’t feel as ‘ready’ as I thought I would, but I went ahead and did it anyway. That either allowed for self-growth or just for spontaneous moments that make life fun.
Finding my own voice and realising what I stand for was something that took me a while and I think is always an ongoing process. Writing this blog in many ways has helped me find my voice and has given me a platform to share things that are important to me. Learning to utilise it and discovering what I believed in has been one of the biggest things in boosting my confidence and self-esteem, which at one point in my life was very low. Hopefully, this can help someone on their journey to discover their own voice.
I’ve always been someone that likes to keep lots of small which to everyone else is insignificant things that remind me of certain events, like for example tickets from planes, trains, an event I went to that I really enjoyed or really meant something to me. They help form really nice memories, but collecting small ‘memories’ as I call it becomes a bit of a problem when you end up with lots of tickets and items and nowhere to put them. This is why I turned to scrapbooking. In this post, I hope to give you some ideas of what you could include in your scrapbook and create a book that can be a beautiful hub of your memories.
This is a lifestyle which people have claimed ‘changes you for the better’, ‘transforms’ you. But, too often we ignore that this lifestyle takes commitment and that not everyone’s personality fits into this- this will not "transform" and destress your life suddenly and may not even be right for you. In fact trying to follow it can sometimes be more stressful. Happiness isn't correlated directly to this style of living - there are many external factors that influence how happy you are. As you can probably imagine from the title of this post, I’m one of the people that doesn’t quite fit into this minimalist style of living. In this post, I wanted to explore why and explain why it’s okay if you too don’t identify with this lifestyle and shakedown this pressure of either being very consumeristic and buying lots just because it is "trendy" or trying to downsize ridiculously in order to achieve zen.