Tag: mindset

Posted in Mentality

How past experiences made me HATE physical exercise and how I no longer do

Posted on by Scoraluna

Hey, listen! I’m here to tell you that working out can definitely be fun and is something you should aim to include in your life at least somehow, but that the reason you don’t like it, might lie hidden in your past experiences.

No, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some sort of insperational blah blah about how working out or doing sports is healthy for you and you should be doing it, if you wanna keep your body in a good working condition. Heck, you’re probably confronted with that every single day on some sort of social media platfrom and I’m pretty sure you also know that it’s true.

Nope, I am here to tell you that the reason why you might think “Sport ist Mord”, which is a German saying that basically means doing sports is like murdering yourself, might be because of your past experiences with physical exercise. Let me explain what I mean by that.

I feel like everyone knows that past experiences shape us as to who we become as a person, right? However, I feel like sometimes we underestimate, how much influence past experiences can really have on our lives. For me, it took me years to realize that the reason why I used to hate physical exercise and especially ball games has to do with my school days or more specifically PE class during my school days.

If you know what I look like from my socials or my streams, then you’ll know that I’m quite short and for the longest time was quite thin and weak. This should already give you an indicator that that used to make me the perfect candidate to be bad at most things involving physical excercise but now imagine a Luna during puberty and basically being a whisp of a girl. Yeah, as you might guess correctly, I wasn’t very good in PE.

That lead to me always being one of the last ones, if not the last one, to get picked for literally anything and the group that I ended up in, was always unhappy to have me because I was basically dragging down the whole team in their eyes. I was the weak link. I detested that feeling but it made me detest PE as a whole even more.

Having teachers that weren’t encouraging but instead criticised you for not being able to do some stuff in quite a harsh way or, even worse, made fun of you for not being able to do something didn’t help either obviously. The only thing I was decent in, was running, especially sprinting, but since we didn’t do that often, and if we did running then only as stamina training, which I was then again not that good at, there wasn’t really anything that I enjoyed about PE nor something that I could prove myself in so to speak.

Running was also something I did, when I needed to turn off my brain for a bit, so I often went for a run in the afternoon after school and it felt good… until I got told by a doctor that I shouldn’t go running because it was causing me to lose even more weight than my already fast metabolism was causing me to lose and instead should do some other sports. Instead of trying to find something else, I felt like the only part of physical exercise that I really enjoyed just got ripped away from me and just stopped althogether out of frustration.

And then there was the changing room situation. Being as scrawny and small as I was, I wasn’t really traditonally “female” looking. I don’t think I need to explain what that means, I feel like you have all the information you need regarding my looks back then. Well, now imagine you’re in a changing room with a bunch of girls, most of which are already starting to develop curves, and on top of you already feeling self-concious because of your body, you also have to deal with comments from them about your physique, which weren’t necessarily always malicous but they still hurt and made me feel even more uncomfortable.

Needless to say, it was the cocktail of all of that that used to make me hate PE in school but it extended to hating physical exercise overall.

Coming back to the present, I am still underweight but slowly working towards a healthy weight by cooking healthy and nutritous food, working out three times a week, building strength and muscles and actually enjoying physical exercise again. I’ve found a routine and exercises that work for me and I’m actually looking forward to the times when I can do a workout again. Sure, there will always be days where I struggle with the motivation to do so, but I feel like everyone deals with that from time to time and I don’t fall back into that “Sport ist Mord” mentality anymore.

So, for me, it was all about realizing that, finding what works for me, and building a regular routine that made me able to go from hating physical exercicse to genuinely enjoying it again.

Maybe, while reading this, you’ve also realized that you’ve had similar experiences like that and if you have, I’m sorry. But on a positive note, you might just have found a reason, not saying it is the reason, what was stopping you from trying to find something you enjoy.

Also feel free to share your experiences regarding this topic in general, if you want to. I love reading your comments and I will try to get better at answering them quicker, sorry about that 😅 .

Take care, everyone that’s reading this, til the next one ❤

~Luna

(PS: Let me know, if you got the reference in the introductory paragraph 😁)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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Posted in The Path to Self-Improvement

Day 4 – Rock Bottom

Posted on by Scoraluna

This day… was certainly a day… Oh, who am I kidding, this day was an absolute wreck, for both of us ironically, but I did want to include it, so you can see that not every day goes as well as you think it will.

Nighttime, Getting Up and Morning Routines

Joan: “I gotta be honest. I feel like I already kinda failed the challenge a bit [please insert gif of Alfred here]. I didn’t wake up at 8 AM but overslept about half an hour. I attribute this to my bad sleep tho tbh. I went to bed at midnight, fell asleep at around 1 and woke up around 5 the first time (?) and 6:30 the second time (???). Nevertheless I still got my morning routine done and felt a bit better after completing it. Maybe my body is already kinda accustomed to my new rhythm (now watch my body screw it up for week two 😅).”

Me: Not gonna lie, I now know what people mean when they say that a ruined morning kinda equals a bad rest of a day, but let’s start with the morning. I got some annoying news from my university that sent me on a treasure hunt through the whole flat in order to look for something that I haven’t looked at in three years . Didn’t find it and got super worried about what that meant, only to find out that it wasn’t that important at all… 😒. That whole ordeal led to me not being able to do my morning routine at all, which made me realize how much I’ve already gotten used to it.

Mood

Joan: “I wasn’t in a bad mood per se, but I felt kinda disappointed in myself for not waking up on time (I know it’s a bit nitpicky but still. Sometimes I felt kinda aggravated and even lashed out a bit because of minor inconveniences but overall I wasn’t death on two legs (please tell me there is a Queen fan out there that gets it 😅). I just felt kinda discombobulated.”

Me: The best way how to describe my mood for that day is: all over the place. It started out with being angry and annoyed and only got to somewhat neutral after some meditation in the afternoon. I also wasn’t really satisfied with anything I did. In short: I didn’t handle my frustration well at all.

Productivity

Joan: “As my energy was kinda absent today, I decided to postpone the two lectures I had today (they are asynchronous) and spend some time working on my Bullet Journal and on my guitar skills. This helped a bit with getting out of my funk.”

Me: Thankfully, I didn’t have much to do at work as my productivity was extremely low and I only did what was absolutely necessary.

Sleepiness-Level

Joan: “Yeah so sleepiness-level… IT’S OVER 9000 (too cliche?). No but seriously, I basically felt sleepy the entire day and even after my morning routine and the creative break, that didn’t change a lot. I’m really looking forward to going to sleep tonight and hope that I won’t wake up that often again.”

Me: Honestly? Couldn’t have said it better than Joan already did. I almost fell asleep several times during the day and felt extraordinarily exhausted as well. Don’t really know, if the weather or the general lack of motivation are to blame here but probably a combination of both.

Motivation

Joan: “Not a lot of energy for me also equals not a lot of motivation. I didn’t really feel motivated to practice guitar or to Bullet Journal, but I know that it helps when I’m having a bad day so I decided to do that nonetheless.”

Me: Looking at the rest of the parameters today, it’s safe to say that my motivation was also kinda trash. I did get dressed and put some make-up on in the hopes that it would improve everything a little bit but while it helped a little, it did not do a whole lot.

So yeah, this was a indeed a day. But I hope that it helps you understand that not everything always goes according to plan and that there can be bad days. You can still learn something from bad days tho, so I’m kinda glad I do get to experience both the ups and the downs of this challenge.

Please make sure you stay safe and healthy and I’ll “see” you in the next blog post. ❤

~Luna

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More Posts

Down below you’ll find any previous days that were published at the time of this post’s release 😊

  • 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 […]
  • Day 3 – A lil bit of both
    I know, I know, “wow Luna way to keep the title vague” but honestly, I don’t really know, how else to describe this day xD Nighttime, Getting up and Morning Routine Joan: “Waking up was the hardest so far today. I only really fell asleep at around 2am so that may be the reason why […]