editor letter – MeeshyD

daily diary, deep thoughts, editor letter

So many updates…

August 20, 2017

Hi friends. I have missed you. I have so much to share. So much. I’m going to break it up into a few different topics, below:

Home

Living in Oakland is better than I hoped it would be and, trust me, I had really high hopes. The mixture of the physical beauty, the perfect weather, the progressive spirit, the close proximity to the boys and the feeling of being in alignment with my life hopes and dreams is something I just can’t describe. My soul has found its home. It’s not without its stresses…we can barely pay the bills living here and sometimes the grind of that brings me down. I’m also still commuting, which is its own beast. Still, it’s so worth it and I am so grateful for the opportunity to be here.

Money

As I mentioned above, it’s stressing me out. I think I’m going to stop telling myself this story about being bad with money and find a financial planner that can help me sort things out. I hope to own a house someday in this beautiful town and I am just not on that path right now. What’s worse, I don’t even know how to get there. Time to call in the professionals!

Food

Over the past several months, I’ve been feeling my heart pulled toward veganism. I’ve finally gotten the hang of vegetarianism and this is the next step. For me, it’s hard to love my dogs and other animals so much and rationalize eating other animals that are sentient. It doesn’t add up. I still totally believe in intuitive eating and am working to integrate this personal belief into my intuitive eating practice. It’s not super easy, because sometimes I do feel deprived even when eating vegetarian. I eat fried chicken and hamburgers sometimes and I’m trying to give myself grace through it. I know that I’m causing way less suffering through my imperfect attempts at veganism and vegetarianism that if I hadn’t even tried at all. Last week, I started a 30 day vegan challenge, which I am documenting on my instagram stories. Follow along if you’d like. I’ll be sure to post some updates here as I go along, but overall, I’m learning that it’s really not as difficult as I thought it would be. It basically comes down to good planning. If you know me, I’m not the best planner, but I am trying to learn.

Community

Living here in what I hope to be my permanent home, I feel so compelled to contribute to this community. I’ve started volunteering by meeting with an English learner at Cal who needs a bit of help with conversational English. I’ve only had one session so far, but it has been a total pleasure. I haven’t volunteered much in the past few years and it’s time to change that. I don’t have a ton of time in my schedule, but this is one small step I can take for an hour a week.

Happiness

On paper, my happiness should be higher than it ever has been. I’m living in Oakland!! A lifelong dream. I have a wonderful boyfriend and his two beautiful, sweet kids in my life every day. I am eating vegan and I am volunteering and I have great friends and family in my life. It’s all SO good, but I have noticed myself feeling really down and negative. Instead of focusing on the good in my life, I notice myself attracted to the less-than-perfect parts. My commute bums me out, our money problems stress me out and I am fixated on my career and whether or not I am pursuing my life’s purpose in my work. Overall, I’m diagnosing this as a lack of contentment. I thought that living in Modesto was the source of my unhappiness, but now I’m realizing that it’s my own brain. I’m on a mission to fix it. Of course, I don’t expect to be 100% happy all the time, but I can cultivate a practice of contentment that I don’t have now. I’m going to start reading the book, The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything tonight. I heard about it on a podcast last week and I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll report back.

Culture

Seriously, what is going on? We are in crisis right now in America and it is scary and sad and demoralizing. There is so much wrong with what is going on in our world and it feels overwhelming to know how to speak out and act out effectively. Do you have links to resources you’d recommend? I need to learn more and do more.

Writing

I’ll close with this. I was listening to the Dear Sugars podcast on my way home last week and it really changed my perspective on writing. I get so caught up on this writing thing and whether or not anyone reads and whether or not I’ll have any success that I don’t do it right or consistently. If there’s one thing I know for sure, I am a better, happier person when I’m writing and it’s the one thing that I know without any doubt that it lights me up inside in a way that I’ve never experienced elsewhere. I’m done chasing the success of it. I just want to write my truth, document my life and my thoughts, and forget about success or patrons. It’s not the measure of worth I’m going after. Can you keep me accountable to this, friends?

Photo from DesignLoveFest.

editor letter

Editor’s Letter, #2

October 2, 2016

These days, I’m thinking a lot about vegetarianism. I’ve flirted with it in the past. For me, it’s all about the animals. I can’t help but thinking that it’s not necessary for them to die just so I can eat. Added to that, the popular instagram page has introduced me to the horrors of factory farming. Don’t google it if you don’t want to see it. You just can’t unsee it. It’s truly horrific, at least for me.

On the other hand, I believe in intuitive eating. Through therapy, I’m working hard every day to strip away my rules with eating and just listen to my body and give it what it craves without shame. Sometimes my body craves meat.

It’s a bit of a rock and a hard place, really. Ethically, I believe in vegetarianism. Personally, I don’t want to establish another set of food laws when I’m working so hard to undo years and years of shame around my food choices. The path forward for me, at least right now, is to tell myself and others that I’m exploring vegetarianism. It’s all exploration. It’s not based on rules and regulations. Every time I get hungry, I try to check in with myself. I ask myself what my body is craving. I wonder if meat is on the agenda. Sometimes it is. Yesterday, for example, I had a chicken wing and some bacon in a wedge salad. Today, meat hasn’t been on the agenda yet. It’s all an ebb and flow.

It’s so easy to get caught up, thinking that life is so black and white. The reality is that most of life exists in the grey areas, a delicate balance between competing ideals. For me right now, the personal choice of vegetarianism has a lot of shades of gray. I’m trying to be comfortable with that, knowing that I probably eat with my vegetarian ethics about 75-80% of the time and it feels completely intuitive. I love food so much that it’s not hard for me to find satisfaction without meat, especially if I’m the one cooking. For the other 25% of the time, I trust myself to eat what my body is currently craving, even if that involves meat.

I’m finding that things don’t need to be as fraught as we make them out to be most of the time. We just need to do the best we can with what we have.

-Meeshy D

I took a lot of inspiration from this post on intuitive eating + vegetarianism. It’s well worth the read.

Image via designlovefest

editor letter, Uncategorized

Editor’s Letter, #1

November 30, 2015

For years now, the idea of blogging has been a wrought topic for me. I want, desperately, to write something of value and share my thoughts with others, but every time I gain some momentum with blogging, I get scared, lose steam or peter out in some way or another.

I recently read the book Big Magic, which I enthusiastically recommend to anyone with a creative impulse in their body. In it, Gilbert argues that the point of creating is simply to create. It’s about discovering the pure joy that comes with creation, it’s about saying yes to ideas that the universe brings to you, it’s about embracing your natural inclination as a human to contribute beautiful things to the planet. Put that way, it makes sense why I would feel this irrational attraction to the format of blogging. It’s the way the universe has given me to express myself at this point in time.

Thankfully, the point of creativity isn’t to make money. Gilbert argues that believing that the universe should give you creativity and that it should also provide you a handsome living for sharing your creativity is a flawed assumption. The money might follow the creativity, but it never leads it. Simply put, pursue your passion for creation and worry about the money later, if at all.

So, I’m officially reclaiming the space I’ve created in this blog as an opportunity for me to share my creativity with anyone interested in following along. It’s not about earning money or creating a name for myself. I simply want this space to be a reflection of all of the things I value and love in my own life. I want it to be a space chock-full of beauty, design, food, travel, and my personal stories all wrapped up in a well-written, authentic voice. I hope it is a fun, informative break from the everyday and I hope it inspires you to lead a full, creative life as well.

Thank you for reading along. Cheers to yet another go-round on the blog.

-MeeshyD

Image source: Design love fest