Category: Mentality

Posted in Mentality

My Journey to a Healthier Relationship with Food and Learning how to Cook as an Adult

Posted on by Scoraluna

I know what you’re thinking: Luna, you’re 26 years old, how the fuck do you not yet know how to cook? And to that I say: I do but not right.

Okay, let me explain. I do know how to cook, as in I know how to handle myself in the kitchen but I don’t enjoy it, so I don’t do it often and if I do, I make sure I use mostly pre-done ingredients so I don’t have to bother with prep stuff.

Now, I don’t think I have to tell you that that isn’t neccessarily healthy and every person ever that has ever looked into healthy nutrition will agree. Although I do agree that eating anything at all is better than not eating, you should pay at least some attention to what you eat, in order to make sure you get all the nutrients your body needs. And although I have already known this for quite a while, it took me quite a long time to also want to fix that.

Since I don’t know what your relationship with food in general is I will put a
trigger warning here just in case.

Although I never had an ED as such, as in I never deliberately did anything to mess up my food intake, I would say that my way of eating was very disordered at some points during my life. There would be days where I would be just so busy that I forgot to eat and some other days where getting something to eat seemed like the worst chore to do (Mental health issues, yeeey). And on some other days I would just be lazy and instead resorted to just have snacks or nothing at all. My stance was always: if there was a way of getting all the calories and nutrients that you need through some other way, while still allowing me to consume food normally, cause I do like food I just don’t like making it, then I would go for that in a heartbeat.

The result of all that: My body got used to it and with that my general feeling of hunger kind of “dissappeared” leading to me not feeling like I needed any food. One meal a day was often enough for me to not feel hungry at all.

Before you get out the bonk hammer at this point, (especially if you know me IRL): I know. I know the way that I was handling that wasn’t healthy and I know that this is absolutely nothing one should ever do. And I also know of the consequences this can have, have experienced them: lack of concentration, headaches, dizzy spells, fatique etc… That’s why I finally wanted to fix it.

Regularly working out and being fed up with being underweight (due to my extremely fast metabolism) and wanting to gain weight helped with that because of course you can’t really have healthy weight or muscle gain, if you don’t eat enough. So I really started paying attention to having three regular meals every single day. I didn’t pay much attention to what I ate, I just ate because getting my body used to 3-4 meals a day again was more important to me than watching out for what I ate.

After a while though, I started noticing that all that energy that I had in the beginning when I got my body used to eating regularly again started getting less again. That, and the fact that I was getting bored of my food showed me that I really need to fix my nutrition, before I would go back to my old habits and just not eat again and so I divised a plan on finally doing this right.

I decided to look for a bunch of resources that could help me with cooking food. Basically my requirements were that they are easy, vegetarian recepies that don’t take too long to make cause I still at this point didn’t really enjoy cooking so I wanted to make the step in as easy as possible. I sat down, did some research, copied some links, downloaded some apps and decided to make a meal plan for every week from now on, because I thought, if I already know what I will eat for the week, I will have an easier time going shopping and actually using the ingedients I have at home.

Since I am only cooking for myself I obviously don’t need to cook every single day because I have leftovers that I can eat and when I say meal plan I also don’t mean plan every single meal every single day but just the main meals that I need to cook because I’ll always have something different for breakfast and the third meal of the day.

After I had looked for all that, I realized that I was missing quite some staples that a normal kitchen should have so the next step was to go shopping. Let me tell you, it was really weird to go grocery shopping and buy all of these fresh ingredients, felt like a proper grown up doing that ^^

And then it came down to cook the first proper meal. It went…. oh, as if I could really build up some dramatic tension here… It went really well. Cooking with a recipe was as easy as anything and although I took longer to make it than I should have, simply due to my inexperience in the kitchen when it comes to cutting things right and organization, it didn’t take too long to make either. And… and this is the best thing about it, it tasted really good.

Since then, which was two weeks ago, I have been cooking regularly and the joy I get out of eating something that I really put some effort into and that is made with fresh ingredients really helps with me slowly taking a liking to cooking. However, I have also decided to not force myself to cook anything big, if I don’t feel like cooking anything at all. Pasta and Pesto for example are still a good option to eat when you don’t feel like cooking at all. Don’t worry, during those two weeks that has happened once, I am really trying hard to not let no-motivation-for-cooking-days become the norm again.

So, yeah, I am slowly but surely learning how to cook properly, getting organized in the kitchen and experimenting with different recipes from all over the place. (I am also slowly getting myself used to spicy food because I really cannot handle that well but that’s another story xD)

Maybe you’re someone who enjoys cooking a lot, maybe you have helped with cooking or even cooked yourself since you were young, but for those of you who are like me and really don’t like cooking, I hope this gave you some motivation to give it a shot. It can be fun and it is an extremely nice feeling to eat something that you yourself have made.

Either way, if you wanna share your experiences, feel free to leave a comment, I love reading those!

See you in the next one, til then, take care ❤

~Luna

Follow my Blog

Hi there, and thank you so much for reading this post! If you enjoyed it and don’t want to miss the next ones coming out, please hit the button down below to be notified whenever I post next 😊

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi

If you wanna know, what I do when I’m not writing blog posts, feel free to follow me on any of my socials or come say hi to me when I stream on Twitch. 😊

Posted in Mentality

Procrastination Solution?

Posted on by Scoraluna

All good things come in threes, right? So this is a follow-up post to both “Procrastination Frustration” and “Instant Gratification Station.” In both blog posts I have expressed my disdain for this little thing that seems to rule my life, which is procrastination. I don’t think I have to explain what that is, but it might be interesting for you to hear that I seem to have found a solution that helps me to keep my procrastination habit in check. So strap in people, as I tell you the tale.

In the beginning, no not that far back, but in the beginning of my school career I was one of those children, who always had their shit together. I did my homework pretty much the moment I came home, while my mom was cooking and had the rest of the day to play and do whatever I wanted. That was really nice and boy do I wish it had stayed that way.

But unfortunately it did not. Fast foward a few years and little Luna is now in secondary school. During her time in secondary school, smartphones, where you don’t immediately get a mini heartattack when you accidentaly hit the internet button, are starting to become a thing and little Luna also discovers YouTube… and so the lifelong cycle of procrastination begins. Homework and studying becomes much less interesting than watching people on the Internet make funny and relatable skits and while her English gets better from day to day, her procrastination habit gets worse and worse.

Needless to say, it hasn’t really gotten any better since then but I think I actually have managed to find out why that is the case and what I can do against it, so it happens less often, which is something I wanna share with you.

Little disclaimer here!

Just because these solutions work for me, it does not mean that they will work for you as well but maybe there’s something you can take away from this.

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s just jump right in:

First things first, I noticed that the biggest issue about procrastination is the fact that, at least for me, it barely has any ‘dire’ consequences. I’ve somehow always managed to still get things done on time, although it was hella stressful, of course. Heck, I was even proud of how little time it took me to get something done. And it really didn’t help that my friends were like “Damn, you started yesterday? Impressive that you still managed.” … Yeah… I think you see why someone would almost take this as an ego boost although it was obviously never meant as such. That my sleep and well-being suffered substantially from this act was suddenly no longer important.

So I was thinking of what I could do in order to give myself consequences should I end up procrastinating and I decided on setting myself a hard deadline. Now, what does that mean? It means that I have a deadline every single day, at which I have to stop working, no matter how far I am. It’s like in an exam situation where the teacher says “finish your sentence and then hand it in.” Everything I didn’t manage that day I have to leave it be and see how I handle it the following days, even if that means having to get up earlier. Getting up early is one of the things that I am not so fond of especially, if it means I have to do it for work (I believe hardly anyone is), so this for me is a consequence that I do not like.

So far, this has worked like a charm. The looming deadline every day causes just about enough anxiety for me to actually do stuff and get done before the deadline without pushing me into a worried frenzy. It actually hasn’t been the case yet that I struggled and the prospect of getting up earlier the next day was enough of a downer to actually make me say “yeah, I don’t want that.”

Little additional note here: The deadline only exists, when the reason I didn’t get any work done, is procrastination, other factors don’t count.

Okay so much for the first thing, what’s the second?

The second thing will probably surprise you…… not at all. It’s my phone. Or rather the apps on it. I think it is no secret that our phones are a massive distraction. This is no different to me. So I tried apps like “Forest”, which I have spoken about in a blog post before and while that worked in the beginning, it wasn’t the solution I had hoped for. If you have read, my other post (I know a lot of refering back in this one, sorry) where I described some things that I found helped me cope with feeling burnt out, you will know that I do something I have dubbed “offline hour” every single day, if possible. In said hour I will completely turn off my Internet, to spend some time “offline.” I will use the time for self-care, writing/journaling, reading etc. Something I have noticed during those hours, is how much stuff I can get done in that time because there are no distractions. This had me thinking “okay, if my FOMO (fear of missing out) can handle this, then it should also be able to handle actually working on something, aka being actively distracted, with the Internet turned off.” And surprise, surprise it does.

I have now gotten into the habit of turing off my phone Internet completely, if I really need to focus on something and so far, it has been working like a charm. The extra step that it would require for me to turn on the Internet, plus the fact that I tell some people that I’m going offline, aka I have someone who would ask me, why I am back online already, is enough of a barrier in order not to do it. This means I either have the choice between actually doing something, or waiting until the time passes, because phones without Internet, turns out, are not really interesting.

I thankfully don’t really have the issue with the Internet on my PC distracting me, meaning I am not really tempted to visit any distracting websites but I know that some people might be. Since you probably, like me, have to use the interent for work/study reasons, I can recommend turning off everything else that you don’t need, including any and all messaging programs/websites as well as maybe putting a temporary website blocker (such as Forest, which also exists as a web extension) on sites like Youtube, Netflix etc. Last but not least, in order to not start playing a game instead, should that be a temptation you have, it helps to turn off the “launch on start” options for all game launchers, meaning you have to yet again go through this extra step before you can play. (Even more annoying, but effective, if you disable auto-login).

And there you have it, the fix to my procrastination problem. Obviously, everyone’s is different and you might have other reasons and issues as to why you procrastinate. However, if you do think that any of these tips or methods might help you, and you do end up giving them a shot, let me know how it goes for you in the comments.

Until the next blog post, take care ❤

~Luna

Follow my Blog

Hi there, and thank you so much for reading this post! If you enjoyed it and don’t want to miss the next ones coming out, please hit the button down below to be notified whenever I post next 😊

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi

If you wanna know what I do, when I’m not writing blog posts, feel free to follow me on any of my socials or come say hi to me, when I stream on Twitch 😊

Posted in Mentality, Tips and Tricks

Coping with Social Situations without Headphones

Posted on by Scoraluna

This is, as promised the follow up post to my “Of Emotional Burnout and Social Anxiety” post, where I promised to tell you about the way I cope with social situations in which I can’t wear my headphones.

A while ago I was just wasting time and procrastinating on other things I had to do by browsing Instagram when an advertisement caught my eye:

Live life at your volume.

For someone who was at that point constantly overwhelmed, stressed and feeling like everything is just too much all the time, this sounded like an absolute blessing. However, sceptical as I was I just saved it and decided to look at it at a later date. Really shouldn’t have done that. Even imagining how much of a relief I could already have had, if I had looked into the advertised product sooner… well I won’t go into that otherwise I’ll just get angry at myself again.

Either way, fast forward a few months… yep, you heard right… months and I’m on my way to a holiday destination and a good friend of mine and I are talking about noise sensitivity, promted by the people surrounding us. During that talk, we realize that we’ve both been seeing the same advertisement and decide to have a proper look into it together during our holiday. We both end up ordering a pair after we decide what we want to use them for and we’re excited to see how those really work and if they will deliver what they promise

When we get them delivered, we try them out immediately. The first thing we notice is that with the type that we’ve chosen, it is legitimately possible to still have a conversation with both of them in our ears but everything feels filtered. As if someone had given us a volume control for our surroundings. Everything seemed less overwhelming at once and I’ve never felt so relieved to no longer have the constant need of drowning out unwanted sounds with other sounds; more specifically music. (Although that is still my prefered method and will always be but sometimes it’s not posssible and it is still a relief that I no longer need it in order to not feel overwhelmed.)
From then on they have become a permant fixture in my life. I never leave the house without them anymore, they are always on my keychain.

I got the chance to test them out in many situations since then. Both for reducing backround noise and reducing noise as a whole as well as using them as proper earplugs when trying to sleep by putting the lil mute thingy in. (I have since then ordered a second pair that’s specifically designend to be used for sleeping and blocking out sound completely for future situations but I didn’t have to use them yet.)

For example, we decided to go to a pretty lively bar/club while I was on holiday and there were a lot of people there. As a result, it was loud and the music that was playing wasn’t helping with that fact. So I put my Loop Earplugs in and everything just got a lil more quiet. It was an absolute blessing.

I’ve also already used them at Uni in order to block out the background noise of people shuffling, rustling, basically anything that would distract me from what I’m actually supposed to be doing, which is listening to the person speaking in front.

Needless to say, daily life and noise has become a lot less overwhelming since then.

I have also recommended them to a lot of people since then and they’ve all been extremely happy with them. So, if you’re now curious to check out the website yourself you can simply click here.

Before I end this blog post I want you to know one more thing: Yes, this is an advertisement and yes, I am affiliated with Loop Earplugs, and the link is an affiliate link, however I want you to know that it was me that looked for whether or not they had an affiliate program and I have not been approached by them, simply because I am so happy with them.

As a result everything that I have written is 100% genuine and my own opinion.

The only thing that remains to say is that if any of the things that I have mentioned have in some way shape or form spoken to you, give them a try, you won’t regret it. They even help you figure out which ones suit you best by asking you what function you hope the Loop Earplugs fulfill.

So, if you do decide to get some, feel free to let me know in the comments how your experience with them goes.

For now though take care. Till the next blog post ❤

~Luna

Follow my Blog

Hi there, and thank you so much for reading this post! If you enjoyed it and don’t want to miss the next ones coming out, please hit the button down below to be notified whenever I post next 😊

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi

If you wanna know what I do, when I’m not writing blog posts, feel free to follow me on any of my socials or come say hi to me, when I stream on Twitch 😊

Posted in Mentality

Of Emotional Burnout and Social Anxiety

Posted on by Scoraluna

Hello fellow people on this earth, I am back and a lot has happened. My mental health has gone from bad to worse and then to better again and now I would say we’re somewhere between okay and good. But let me start from the beginning.

Once upon a time… okay we don’t need to go that far back but let’s indeed go back a few months. As you may or may not know (you would know, if you watch me on twitch) my mental state was pretty fragile for a while after that stressful time last year. A lot of canceled plans, streams, events… you name it, I probably canceled it. I was constantly feeling stressed, overwhelmed and like everything was just too much. I felt like a rubber band that was being stretched too far, ready to snap at any given moment.

After a while I felt like something was seriously going wrong in my life. I started noticing things like myself being constantly anxious when around friends and family alike, which was something I used to only experience in social situations with strangers before. I also started to have a hard time doing simple things like going shopping or going to pick up a package without being super anxious or needing like days to prepare in advance.

Long story short, I noticed it was starting to affect me in my daily life and quite strongly so. I have always been a bit socially anxious but I’ve always managed to cope with it. At that point I no longer was able to, and a rule that I had set myself was that I would look for help incase it ever startes influencing my daily life and stops me from doing things. So that’s what I did. I got help and it got better. We figured out that my social anxiety probably started getting worse and developed into a disorder because I was rarely leaving my place and that that was because I was lacking the energy in the first place. So I realized that it was all connected like a weird hell cycle: Constantly stressed out and no time for myself led to me not having any energy and no longer enjoying things. That led to me canceling plans, meaning I didn’t subject myself to social situations which in turn made the social anxiety get worse and worse which made me more stressed out and …. I think you get the gist.

Fast foward a year to now and I am slowly beginning to recover. About a month ago I told my roommate “you know what? I finally feel like I wanna do more than the bare minimum again” and that was such a huge feeling for me after I had felt so empty and without energy for a long time. I’ve also changed a few things in my life. I have restructured my day just enough so that it has a lose structure to keep me from feeling like I am just drifting along, I’m trying to add some habits into my day like meditation, regularly working out and going to bed and getting up at a regular time and I call “offline-hour”.

Offline hour was really something I wanted to implement into my daily rhythm simply because a lot of my life happens online. During offline hour I turn off my Internet for an hour. No social media, no chats, just time for myself. Whether or not offline hour consists of me actively doing something or just chilling and listening to music for an hour doesn’t matter. This is my time that I am taking to turn off from the day, so to speak. And believe me when I say you cannot imagine how incredibly rejuvenating this hour is for me, it gets my mind to slow down and stops it from going what sometimes feels like million miles an hour. It’s pure bliss.

I also, believe it or not, may have finally found a solution for my pesonal problem that I have with procrastination. I will write a separate blog post on that soon because it’s really something I wanna share with you.

Alright Luna, that’s all fine and well you’ve found ways to no longer be burnt out but what about the social anxiety, how is that going?

I’m so glad, you’re asking, dear reader. As shitty as it might sound but the only way how you can beat social anxiety is by subjecting yourself to the situations you’re the most scared of. So I did. I went shopping although my heart was racing and I was constantly fidgeting around. I went to that gathering although my head was telling me a billion good reasons not to go and instead stay home where it’s safe and we don’t have to deal with anxiety symptoms.

However, just because you should subject yourself to those things, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it with stabilizers. I used to get massively overwhelmed by a lot of people and their noise, so I used to only enter stores or places with a lot of people with my headphones on. Works totally fine when you’re alone, not so much when you’re with someone or rather you’re meeting up with people to go somewhere, where a lot of other people are too. So that was always a bit of an issue. But thanks to my instagram algorithm I have found a solution for that too. I want to give you a proper review of that solution though also in another blog post because it deserves it. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long.

But yeah, needless to say, I am doing much better. Of course there are always things that can still be improved, bad habits that can and need to be broken but I am making progress and I’m so incredibly happy about that. 😊

The last thing I still wanna say, if you’ve made it this far, is “thank you”. Thank you for sticking with me, thank you for being patient with me, thank you for taking the time to read this and thank you for listening to me. I’m not writing these posts because I want pity or anything the like. I’m writing these because I want to be open about mental health related topics. I want to be open about how it easy it can be to slip into something like this and I want these topics to no longer be taboo topics no one talks about because we all have to function. We don’t. It’s okay to take breaks, it’s okay to say no and it’s okay to look out for yourself, to take care of yourself. In fact, it is not only okay, it’s a must.

So please do me and yourself a favor and do so ❤

And now I will go, offline hour is about to start. We’ll read each other in the next one.
Take care.

~Luna

Follow my Blog

Hi there, and thank you so much for reading this post! If you enjoyed it and don’t want to miss the next ones coming out, please hit the button down below to be notified whenever I post next 😊

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi

If you wanna know what I do, when I’m not writing blog posts, feel free to follow me on any of my socials or come say hi to me, when I stream on Twitch 😊

Posted in Mentality

Dealing with Writer’s Block and Overthinking

Posted on by Scoraluna

A blank page. Cursor blinking. On. Off. On. Off. On… Fingers switching between resting on the keys and restlessly thrumming on them but no words are filling the page.

What I just described is a part of what it feels like to have writer’s block. There are either too many ideas but no clarity of how to write them or simply too few and your mind feels blank, as if there are no words in it.

To be fairly honest with you, I don’t know what this post is going to be, nor do I know, if I will even publish this. I just have the need to write something, anything at all, because it feels like I can’t at the moment. What I’m writing doesn’t feel good enough, not worthy enough, not cohesive enough to be on the Internet and be read by you. Words too shallow, sentences and paragraphs not long enough. I just need to prove to myself that I still know how to write.

Should I publish this, it is not to arouse pity or make you feel like you have to reassure me. It is simply to show what I think many writers, no matter the type of content they produce, go through sometimes. Some more (often) some less (often). And I would also say that depending on the individual, the experience is different for each and everyone.

So, now we know what the problem is but how do we deal with it? Well, I think the best way how to deal with writer’s block or rather, how I always deal with it, is by writing. Ha, ha, very funny Luna. Yeah, no, I am serious. Just sit down and write. Don’t focus on your project, the text that you’re supposed to be writing, but just write. Open your notepad, Word or whatever program it is you’re using to write, or simply grab a pen and some paper or a notebook and just write. Whatever comes to your mind. Your current thoughts, recount your day, a conversation you had with a friend and what you think about it. Just write. Produce words.

It can be so freeing not to focus on anything specific but just open your mind and let anything that comes to mind flow onto the page. It’s basically what I am doing right now. I just sat down and wrote. Not thinking about anything specific, just letting the thoughts that are currently bothering me be those thoughts and as I am writing, it feels like the text is writing itself. I’m not really worried about structure, cohesiveness or anything else, I’m just writing, with no goal in mind.

Sometimes we worry too much about what we’re writing, how we’re writing it and what people will think of it. Heck, today it took me about 20 minutes just to formulate a single email because I was overthinking it and double checking everything. Sure, some people would call that professional, it’s just something you do, if you wanna make sure that there are no mistakes, but I would say there is a small line between being throrough and exact and being pedantic. Like, I overthink every single sentence that I write. Is the tone right? What if it is misconstrued? CAN it even be misconstrued? And so on and so forth. It’s exhausting, really.

Realizing that sometimes writing can just be, well writing aka the act of putting words down and doesn’t in and of itself come with any rules or requirements, can really help take the strain off of things.

I think I will publish this, even if it’s just to show you this process that I and likely many others go through from time to time. Who knows, maybe it helps some of you to feel more confident in your own writing. Maybe you realize that not everything you write has to be absolutely perfect every single time and maybe, just maybe it’ll help you to be a little bit kinder to yourself, just as I am being right now.

Take care and stay safe, everyone ❤

~Luna

Follow my Blog

Hi there and thank you so much for reading this post! This was a little bit different to what I usually write like, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. If you don’t wanna miss any new posts coming out, make sure you click the Subscribe button down below to be notified whenever I post next 😊

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi

If you wanna know what I do, when I’m not writing blog posts, feel free to follow me on any of my socials or come say hi to me, when I stream on Twitch 😊

Posted in Mentality

Instant Gratification Station

Posted on by Scoraluna

This is, in a way, an add-on to my other post. Check that one out, if you haven’t already. I think I’ve mentioned instant gratification briefly in my other post but I’ve recently noticed how bad it can actually get.

Motivational issues are nothing new to anybody I would think. It’s just one of these days where you feel kinda “meh” about the things you have to do and procrastinate on them by doing other things. Yeah, that’s what your day usually looks like, if you’re procrastinator. However, I have these days where I go and procrastinate on things that I actually want to do by doing other things that I also like but do everyday anyway.

There are exactly two reactions that one gets when they describe this issue to someone else. It’s either “oh, yeah, I do that too” or “eeeeeh….what?”. Let me explain it to the ones that had the second reaction while reading this: This means that I want to, for example, play a video game sometime during the day and I have the free time to do so but I end up being on my phone instead (like being on Pinterest for ages, anyone else?) until it’s too late to actually still play said video game and I end up being salty because I didn’t get to do the thing that I actually wanted to do…. Aka. I didn’t have “proper freetime” because being on my phone is something I do every single day anyway, like that doesn’t count as freetime, what are you talking about?

Or to give you another example: I will sit there and watch a movie that I haven’t seen before and I am actually curious to know what will happen but I want to know it right then and there and so I take out my phone and google the fucking plot summary instead of normally watching the movie like any other person would…

Yeeeah, I’ll give you a moment to take that in…

It is so absolutely and utterly stupid that I don’t even know myself how I can justify that in any way, shape or form. I don’t think you can. But the main problem is: I feel like it’s getting worse and worse. We basically have constant entertainment at our disposal. The Internet is filled with things that we can discover and oh yes… look… the approximately 6000th pin that I can save to one of my many boards, don’t mind if I do… Now, where was I? Dammit, got distracted again.

It’s so easy to fall into this trap of instant gratification, even if you’re actually looking forward to something else. Because why turn on the PC and start a game, when I have my phone right here, next to my cozy and warm bed, and I don’t even have to properly move in order to get it? And I would say that, as someone who is already succumbing to instant gratification when procrastinating on the things I have to do, it’s even easier to succumb to it in every other situation as well.

It’s insanely frustrating and the only real solution is to just stop doing it. There is no magic potion, no productivity tool, no “try this and all your problems will be a thing of the past” voodoo trick that will solve this issue, the same goes for procrastination. It’s all just mentality. That and the fight against the weaker self that you have to do over and over and over again until you finally come out on top for good.

sighs But hey, who knows maybe this year will finally be the one where I beat procrastination and everything it comes with for good – yeah, let’s all laugh together.

Anyways, I am gonna go now and make sure my procrastinating, instant gratification loving ass has less to procrastinate on. Take care everyone! ❤

~Luna

Now reading through what I have just written, it almost seems as if my phone was the problem, but psssssh… let’s not go into that shall we?

Follow my Blog

Hi and thank you so much for reading this post! If you liked it and you wanna see more, please make sure you hit the subscribe button down below, so you’ll be informed when I post next! 😄

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi!

If you wanna know what I do, when I’m not writing blog posts, feel free to follow me on any of my socials or come say hi to me, when I stream on Twitch 😊

Posted in Life, Mentality

2021 RECAP

Posted on by Scoraluna

Starting to stream, receiving a huge boost, finding new friends through streaming, increasing my work hours, losing my job… So many things have happened…

Hi, I’m back! 2021 definitely was a roller coaster from start to finish. Strap yourselves in folks, this is gonna be a long one.

So I recently cracked open my, admittedly very failed, Bullet Journal for 2021 (the last spread I did was April…but let’s not talk about that now shall we? 😅) and realized that almost all of the things that I wrote at the very beginning of the year, the things that 2021 should be filled with, 2021 has actually been filled with.

Happiness, ideas, togetherness, positivity, hugs, luck, laughter, growth, opportunities and many more…

But there were also multiple things that went less than ideal. So let’s start the recap, shall we?

As you may or may not know, I started streaming last year in April. Pretty much along the same time, I opened this blog and began writing blog posts. Was, unfortunately, not really able to keep up with it, but more on that and why I’m hoping to change that again in a bit. Pretty soon after I had started streaming, I was insanely lucky to receive a huge boost, for which I will be forever grateful, and suddenly there were people actually watching and caring about what I did. It was an incredible feeling and I was extraordinarily happy. So happy that I wished I could do it all the time. However, I was still working part time and had even recently increased my hours, because I had actually managed to get myself a bachelor’s degree and wanted to focus a bit more on working instead of uni. Didn’t mean that I wanted to stop focusing on uni completely, but at that point we had summer holidays, so stuff worked out, but boy was I naive to think that it would continue being that way. (Spoiler: It didn’t.)

Summer holidays also meant I had more time for being social, which was great, considering I had actually found new friends via streaming. Didn’t think it was actually possible to get this close with people you’ve never met in real life, but the internet, chatting and video phoning did it’s job and we knew pretty quickly that we wanted to meet in real life. All of that required planning and since I was the only one that was working every single day, we had to plan that around that somehow. It worked out, but it certainly wasn’t ideal, however, it wasn’t as if I could have just taken time off anytime someone was coming, so it was what it was.

As the summer faded, work became more and more demanding, which is not a surprise considering more hours meant more responsibility, and I quickly realized that I probably wouldn’t be able to continue as things were, but I tried. I tried to squeeze everyhing I could into the day: work, stream, blog, other socials, uni, workout, social life, at that point also a relationship and free time/time where I took care of myself. Needless to say, it didn’t work out and multiple fights, mental break downs, lost sleep and lost weight, due to simply not having the time to eat, were the result of the lifestyle that I was living, but I tried to keep going. My friends became more and more concerend about me and my health and tried to make me see that I was already at my limit and wouldn’t be able to continue, but I was stubborn.

Then came September, October and the beginning of November. Now, sorry, I know that sounds all dramatic and stuff, like something along the lines of “everything changed when the fire nation attacked” but it was sorta dramatic. At the end of September I lost my, what I thought was a stable job, due to economical reasons. This was a first for me and I knew that I had 6 weeks in order to find something new. I wanted to give Twitch a chance, but doing that meant that I had to see whether or not I could make it work. So I increased my stream hours, while simultaneously looking for a new job, because I didn’t think it would work out financially otherwise.

The next one and half months were hell. Uni had picked back up and that meant that I had even less time for the stuff I was doing. So there I was, trying to manage a week with about 12-15 hours of streaming, 15 hours of work, about 2-3 hours of uni each day, doing organisatory and bureaucracy stuff for the stream, trying not to fry my social life completely, being there for the people who needed me, trying to keep my relationship from completely breaking appart and doing the bare minimum to keep my soul from leaving my body, in order to find a more responsible vessel… Yeah… I don’t think that I need to tell you that this is definitely not something you should do.

Relief came with a talk that I had with my parents, who told me that for now I don’t have to worry about finding something new. That I should give Twitch a chance. That I should cut back at work to do the necessary but not more and also cut back at uni, since I have a degree already and can always focus on uni again, once the other things are sorted out. I am so insanely grateful to them for being as supportive as they are. Yes, I may be 25 years old and no longer need the approval from my parents, but knowing that they do support you is just absolutely incredible. From then on things began to be a bit easier. It was still stressful but the insane pressure lessened. Unfortunately, my relationship did end up falling appart, but I’m not gonna elaborate on that any further. It just didn’t work out, because we had different views.

For the rest of the year I fell into a somewhat comfortable rythm. Doing uni, which sadly started being online again, so my motivation for that flew out of the window never to be seen again pretty quickly, and streaming in between. And for a while that worked out pretty well. However, towards the end of the year and beginning this year I started to notice that something wasn’t right. I felt frustrated and angry with myself and didn’t even know why for some time. After a while I realized that it was, because I wasn’t being as productive as I’d liked to be and that wasn’t happy anymore with the quality of the content I was producing. Granted, I was also dealing with some health issues, but my mentality plummeted and I felt drained more often than not. On top that I felt like I wasn’t improving anymore. I had lost my fire and had gotten too comfortable. I had completely stopped producing any sort of other content other than stream and I had gotten bored of myself, my own content.

All of this I realized with a clarity when I woke up one day, after a horrid night’s sleep, and my head just started screaming at me. All of my insecurities, self-doubt and every negative thought I’ve ever had about myself were there all of a sudden and they were so loud. After I had finally found a way to make them quieten down again, I knew with a clarity that this wasn’t how things can continue. I needed to change something. What those changes are gonna be exactly, is at the point of writing this post still up in the air. I’m hoping to use this week to clean up some “constuction zones” that are currently open, reorganize myself and figure out not if but how I’m gonna continue this adventure I’m currently on.

However, one of the things that I already know that I wanna change, is to create other content besides streaming again, including blog posts. The plan is to do at least one a week, even if it’s just someting I ramble about and it’s less elaborate than this one right here. Some of the other things that I wanna work out is my own health – mentally and physically. I can’t just stop taking care of my body any time things get stressful, so I also need to find preventitive measures to make sure that all of the negative things above don’t happen again, and, on top of all that, I need to find a way to realistically decide, what I can promise others and myself, as to not keep feeling like I’m disappointing people and myself.

So yeah, that was my 2021 and the beginning of 2022. I know that it was a long post, so thank you for taking the time to read. It feels good to be back to writing and I’m hoping that I will be able to keep up with it.

Time to show you what I can do once I have regained my passion!

But for now, see (read) you in the next one! Please stay safe and healthy! ❤

~Luna

Follow my Blog

Hi there, and thank you so much for reading this post! If you enjoyed it and don’t want to miss the next ones coming out, please hit the button down below to be notified whenever I post next 😊

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi

If you wanna know what I do, when I’m not writing blog posts, feel free to follow me on any of my socials or come say hi to me, when I stream on Twitch 😊

Latest Posts

If you enjoyed this post, you might find some of these interesting as well 😊

Posted in Mentality

A Laywoman’s Guide to Meditation

Posted on by Scoraluna

Where to start, why I think everybody should at least try it once and what all of that has to do with no longer wanting to give a fuck about everything. Put your seat belt on peeps, this is a long one xD

So, if you have read my “The Path to Self-Improvement” series, you probably already know this, but for those who didn’t: I’ve started meditating regularly during the past month.

I’ve always wanted to include meditation in my daily routine, simply because the few times I did try it, it always felt nice. However, I always struggled with keeping up with it or finding time for it every single day. That has now changed, thanks to the challenge that me and my friend Joan did for two weeks. I have included meditation into my daily routine and, in fact, have already noticed that I miss it, if for some reason, I don’t have time to do it on certain days.

Now, I am certainly no expert, probably not even intermediate yet, when it comes to meditation, but I wanted to write this post nonetheless because I noticed that it can be confusing af to know where to even start and there are a bunch of things that I find are important to know, regarding the topic.

How do I know, if meditation is for me?

Honestly, I think everyone can and should at least try to give meditation a shot at some point in their lives. In my opinion you can only know, if it is for you, if you have tried it. I mean, I guess if the concept of sitting still and focusing on yourself for a few minutes doesn’t appeal to you at all, then that’s also okay, of course. However, even then I’d recommend to at least try it once, you might be surprised.

To Guide or to be Guided that is the question…

…and probably a major one that you are likely to ask yourself at the beginning of your meditation journey.

Guided meditations are programs or videos where someone quite literally talks you through the whole process. They are most often targeting a certain topic and help you focus by telling you to pay attention to your body and your breathing. The benefit of such meditations is that it is easier to stay focused than it would be, if you didn’t have a voice that keeps bringing you back to the task at hand, when your thoughts inevitably decide to take a stroll.

Non-guided meditations on the other hand are great, if you just want to sit down and relax for a little bit without having to focus on anything. They are fantastic for “emptying your mind”, so to speak. However, while some people might immediately get the hang of it, most people, including myself, struggle to keep their mind from wandering during meditation, especially when they are only starting out. So it can be a quite hard to just sit down, focus on nothing and have your mind quiet down.

But why is that?

Well, I can of course only speak for myself and what’s going on in my mind when I try to quieten it down, but I tend to think about a lot of random stuff. Starting from all the stuff that I need to do that day, over what’s gonna be for lunch, all the way to what I saw on social media the day before. What usually happens then is that I wonder why I can’t focus and start to focus on why I can’t focus and that I should be able to and suddenly the whole calm and serenity is broken because now I am judging myself for not being able to focus… yeah… you get the gist xD

So I have very quickly realized that guided meditation is the way to go for me, and I’m very happy with it 😊

Where to start?

When it comes to non-guided meditations, that question is easy to answer: either look for some quiet background music you enjoy and that isn’t distracting to you or do it without any music at all. You’ll figure out pretty quickly what you prefer, I’m sure.

When it comes to guided meditations, however, the question get’s a little bit more complicated to answer. There are a ton of different apps and programs out there that offer you guided meditation, such as Headspace or Calm, to only name two, and at least I felt a bit overwhelmed by all of the possibilities in the beginning.

I found that the easiest way to see, if meditation is something you want in your life is by looking for guided meditations on YouTube. There are so many out there, targeting so many different topics and it’s genuinely a very good place to get started.

If you then want to switch to an app for whatever reason, I can recommend reading through some reviews and maybe looking for some comparisons between the different apps; or you can of course also download them yourself and check them out. Most of them do have some free features after all.

Why should you meditate?

Meditation has many benefits and most of them you’ll find out for yourself once you give it a shot, but for me there are two that stick out in particular. One is the fact that no matter what mood I’m in, meditation helps to improve it. Even if it’s just by a little bit but does help.

The second major benefit that I see in meditation is that it helps me focus on myself for a little while and not on my friends or family or strangers and what those might think of me. It helps me to shut those thoughts down for a bit and just focus on what I want for myself.

So, now what does all of that have to do with no longer wanting to give a fuck about everything?

Well that’s easily explained. Meditation forces you to focus on yourself instead of others. Depending on what you go for, you might even tackle certain topics that bother you and you might find that they become much easier to deal with, the more often you concern yourself with them.

So, if you’re someone like me, who used to give too many fucks about too many things, meditation can help you to center your thoughts and make you aware of what really matters. I personally realized that I was spending too many thoughts and too much energy on things that didn’t really matter instead of focusing on a few things that I wanted to matter. It helped me to take a step back from my life and reevaluate what I really wanted to spend my energy on in the future.

Of course, and I think that needs to be said as well, meditation is no miracle. It’s a process. And a process takes time and there will be better days and worse days. Old habits die hard after all and sadly, nothing will magically solve itself. However, I have noticed significant improvements in my life since I included it in my daily routine and that surely has to stand for something, right?

Have you ever considered including meditation into your daily life or maybe you are already doing it and want to share your own experiences? Let me know in the comments 😊

As always, stay safe and healthy, and thank you to everyone who is supporting this blog in any way, shape or form. You’re all incredible and I appreciate every single one of you ❤

~Luna

Follow my Blog

Hey there, and thank you for reading! If you liked this post and want to read more of them in the future, make sure you hit the button down below, so you’ll never miss, when a new one comes out 😊

Join 41 other followers

Come and say Hi

If you guys wanna check out what I do when I’m not on here blogging, then feel free to follow me on any of my social media accounts and/or come and hang out when I stream over on Twitch every Wednesday and Friday at 6pm CE(s)T 😊

Latest Posts

If you enjoyed this post, you might find some of these interesting as well 😊

  • Putting myself out there
    On Tuesday the 21st of April 2020 I did something that I was really scared of. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, decided to put myself out there and did my very first stream on Twitch. I know, right – crazy! I still can’t believe I actually did it. ^^; I was extremely […]
  • Procrastination Frustration
    Most of us know it, many of us do it: procrastinating. Including me, so in today’s post I want to talk to you about my experiences with procrastination and why it annoys me so much. But before we dive deeper into my personal story and experiences, we first have to answer the question: what even […]
  • Prologue – The Path to Self-Improvement
    Before I write anything else, I want to thank every single one of you that has so far liked, subscribed or supported this blog in any way, so thank you so much! It means so much more to me, than you can imagine! ❤️ So, there is no need to mitigate here: 2020 has been […]
  • Day 1 – The First Step is Always the Hardest … Or is it?
    Monday marked the first day for our “path to self-improvement” challenge, but before I go straight into our “findings” as promised, I want to first explain, how we decided to gage things. It was clear to us that we needed some way of judging this whole thing, so we have decided to, besides just writing […]
  • Day 2 – Good Habit Central
    Day two of our challenge was filled with us picking up a lot more good habits and a lot of, let’s call it, “new year, new me” vibes (even though it’s obviously not the start of a new year, but I’m sure you know what I mean). Getting Up and Morning Routines Joan: “Getting up […]