Saintly St. Ana

In an attempt to be more responsible with my spending/shopping I've started using some new (to me) methods when it comes to purchases. I've unintentionally started following a couple of minimalist bloggers and I've come to notice that their intentional shopping and lifestyle in general is pretty inspiring. Do I think I could ever be a minimalist? Hell to the no. I like my stuff. I'm the kind of person who attaches meaning to objects which makes it hard for me to get rid of things. But the idea of simplifying at least some parts of my life is really appealing to me. I think the main area of my life that I'd like to simplify is my closet. As you may or may not know, I've been working on downsizing my wardrobe for a while. I've been selling and donating clothes on a pretty regular basis for about 6-8 months now and I'm seeing the results. But somehow I still have way too many clothes. While I've been able to part with a good chunk of clothing I st...

The past couple of weeks have been kind of cray to say the least. My grandpa was dealing with some serious health issues that essentially turned everything upside down. He's now (thankfully) back home and starting on a long journey of recovery. Now that everything is relatively settled down again I've had a chance to process how and why his health issues escalated so quickly. I've now realized that a lot of what happened to him could have been prevented through proper diet. This was a real wake up call. These health issues aren't only his; they run in my family and have the ability to trickle down and affect me as well. This illustrates my new found love for citrus on the Whole30. Previous to one of the major events of my grandpa's stay in the hospital I had made the commitment to go through another round of Whole30 . Having had success previously with this "nutritional reset program," I knew how many benefits I could get from changing my diet alon...

Drawing. I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's one of those things where if I feel at all pressured to do it, I simply won't. P.S. I'm really a toddler. Jk, but for some reason I've always had that (toddler-like) approach to it. I think all of us love to draw when we're little, and it totally makes sense! We finally learn how to hold a pencil, control our extremities,  and it keeps us occupied for like 10 minutes which has parents everywhere rejoicing. It involves dogs/flowers/dinosaurs/other "kid stuff" and probably tons of colors. It's a skill set above coloring (finally, am I right kids?!) that we can master before learning cursive. Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that I loooooooved drawing when I was a kid. Aside from reading and eating Cheetos, it was like my main thing. Fast forward to approximately 10 years later: I went to college and majored in art and I was like forced to draw all the time. I hated it. Something a...

It's so weird how time seems to speed up and slow down whenever it wants. I'm still in shock over the fact that 2015 is coming to an end. Where did that year go? What did I do all year long? Aye, that's a question for another time... The whole year seemed to fly by, but these past few weeks have especially seemed to slip away from me. I think that's kind of how it happens every year. The "holidays" are always rather overwhelming for me. Prepping for family time and trying to make Christmas lists definitely stresses me out. That combined with the fact that the sun sets 30 MINUTES AFTER I GET OFF WORK makes time seem irrelevant. So here I am, end of November, still trying to think of the perfect gift to get each person I love. It's obviously pretty unrealistic but I like to think that one year it might happen... I don't have the time (okay, maybe I do) or money (definitely don't have the money) to get everyone sentimental and personal gifts...

One of the craziest things about depression is that it can sneak up on you out of no where.  Last week I was writing a post (obviously unfinished) about how I felt like my mental health was finally on an upswing, but in the blink of an eye I felt like all my progress and confidence were lost. Over the weekend I entered a deep depression and it felt worse than any of my lows in recent memory. It was triggered by a rather insignificant event and instead of being able to pull myself up and out of a negative thought process, I was sucked in to a dark place that lasted over a day. It was probably one of the longest and emotionally draining days I'd had in a while. Luckily, I woke up on Monday morning feeling mostly back to my normal self.  I was alone for most of Sunday which was really, really hard. It's hard to come out of something like that when you're physically and/or emotionally alone. In order to keep myself going that day I looked up some ways to help deal with...

We are living in a material world and I am a material girl. Madonna knows what I'm talking about. I don't really consider myself materialistic. I like to think that I value real interactions with people and life experiences more than I do objects. But at the same time I'm pretty sentimental and that makes it easy to attach emotions to objects, therefore making it harder to get rid of them. I believe this started early in my life so I'm gonna tell a little story. If you don't wanna stick around for story time feel free to skip ahead! I was always the kind of kid that tried to keep everything. My poor mom had to sneak into my closet when I wasn't around and try and throw out little bits of junk at a time so I wouldn't notice. Like literally junk. I used to collect the cardboard centers of toilet paper and paper towel rolls (I have no idea why). I also had several pencil boxes full of pens and pencils I thought were cool, but were usually broken. There wa...