I feel...happy?

Dear Blog Friends,

Yesterday I stopped in to say "Hey" an write an update on my life. Today I wanted to give another update. No huge news or anything, just something I'm excited about and wanna share. 

So. A couple years ago Sheldon and I moved from Texas to Illinois for Sheldon to take his dream job. We came out of one of the toughest years of our lives and crash landed in Illinois with only the stuff we fit in our Honda CRV. We wanted to make a fresh start. But we were still so broken from the year in Texas where everything had gone wrong. 

Around that time I reread one of my favorite books: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I read that baby about once a year. I love her approach to tidying which centers around "sparking joy" and as cheesy as it sounds, it changed my life. OK. OK. I'm not trying to Marie Kondo evangelize you...or am I? MWAHAHA!!! I only say this because it helps get me to my point. Basically Marie Kondo encourages the reader to dream up their ideal life. She tells you to let your mind imagine the best life you want for yourself. She also tells you to be very specific. How do you want your home to look? How do you want to feel? What things do you want and what make you happiest? 

So there I was back in Illinois the end of 2018 starting out fresh with a new apartment and a new job and I wanted to really do the Marie Kondo method RIGHT. I opened up the last page of my planner (it was this one by the amazing frannerd) and let myself dream what I want my life to be. 

This is what I wrote:

HOW I WANT TO LIVE 

I want to be a city girl. I want bright rooms and beautiful objects. I want to wake up in the morning and feel exited and energized for the day. I want to not feel rushed, but like I have time to linger over tea and scribble in my sketchbook. 

I want a studio space that feels exciting for making thing in. I want each room in my home to feel good: not cramped or ugly or off. I want to feel like there are pockets of beauty everywhere in my home. I want to relaxed and beautiful. I want natural light and freedom from chaotic inner voices.

Peaceful. Soft light. Calm. Subtle colors and textures. 

I am so tired of feeling like things are off and out of place and not being able to settle my thoughts and mind. I feel tired and drained. I want to use my energy to create but I have so little of it. Sometime I feel like the clutter and chaos makes it harder for me to settle into my creativity. I feel anxious and nervous and doubtful. 

Instead I want to feel restful and calm and secure.

I wrote that in October of 2019. I was heading into one of my worst years of depression and anxiety of my adult life and I could feel myself getting more and more flooded. Eventually, in June 2020 I reached my breaking point and FINALLY reached out to a therapist.

The first thing she said to me after I gushed out my reasons for wanting therapy was, "It sounds like you don't feel safe. I want to help you feel safety." Hearing those words felt like opening up the door to getting better. 

Writing out that dream in my planner helped me find focus. I knew I needed something to change. I felt like my life was veering out of my control back then, but I didn't know how to get help. I couldn't work. I couldn't have relationships. I couldn't make art. My mental illness put me in survival mode. Another cheesy-but-true alert: Starting therapy changed my life. When I started therapy I committed the process 100%. I went all in because I was desperate. 

I have come such a long way since that planner entry. I'm still a hot mess. They didn't nickname me The Mess Queen back in kindergarten for nothing! (True story. Although my teachers were referring to my colossal crafting messes, not my psychological turmoil, when they coined that name.) But I think I'm actually close to living the life I described. I'm a city girl. (Well. Technically I live in a village. But I WORK in the city! That counts...) I have a beautiful apartment, which we are finally starting to settle into. And we have an entire room of our apartment set aside as a studio.

I have worked so hard to get here. Hours of therapy. Pain. Healing. Work. But I am starting to see actual results and it makes me so excited. I am starting to feel good again. I think I might be living the life I wanted for myself when I was writing that planner entry. Anxiety Lucy Rose is very nervous about typing out those words, but Therapy Lucy Rose is like, "Yeah! Get it."

Love,

LR

PS

These are just some recent photos from my phone that "sparked joy". I am still getting my footing with blogging again and I'm trying to be pretty loose with it. In other words, not being too perfectionistic or getting in my head but just letting myself make posts.

Life Update.

Hello, Blog Friends. It's Lucy Rose. Just wanted to drop in and say, "Hey." I've been very MIA from Instagram and this blog for a while. It got to be too much for me and I had to cut it off for a while to live my life: work at The Burrito Place, settle into my new apartment and keep working in therapy. I go through seasons when I need to back off from online stuff and focus on my own thoughts and more in-person relationships. 

But in the past few weeks I've been feeling the blogging itch return! That irrepressible need to blast my thoughts into the Spiderverse and let anyone who wants to stumble across them. I don't really have a plan for blogging. No series of posts or ideas for anything structured on this blog. But I thought I would just sit down and start by saying "What's up?" 

I have popped in and out of this little internet space since 2008! That's a hard habit to break. Anyway. Here's what's been going on with me recently. 

-I have now been in therapy for over a year. My mental health has been the strongest it has been in about 5 years. This is super exciting, but also, as someone who has lived most of my life struggling with depression and anxiety, that in itself feels a little scary! 

-I have continued to work for The Burrito Place, but I switched locations to be closer to my house after our faithful 2004 Honda CRV broke down. I biked 5 miles to work every day for a few months until we were gifted a car by an incredibly kind family member. Hi Patrick. I did not know you read my blog. I have grown in my role at The Burrito Place and continue to work harder positions and continue training. I'm proud of this because my hope for working this type of job was to prove to myself that I can work again after my last tough bout with depression in the Spring of 2020. 

-I discontinued The Zine Club. The Zine Club was my pet project for several years in which I published and distributed over 15 zines (self-published booklets) to a base of subscribers. The goal was to complete 24 in total, but I chose to stop, because I needed to focus on therapy and getting well. It was a hard decision to make and I definitely wrestled with shame over quitting. But I am proud of myself for the zines I made and the community of people who helped me make it happen for as long as it lasted.

-Sheldon and I moved. We had been wanting to get closer to the city for a long time. We wanted that proximity in order to keep cultivating Sheldon's career as a painter and my career as a storyteller/comic-artist-type-person. Getting closer to the art scene in Chicago has been a dream of ours for a while and we are excited that our new apartment is on the CTA line and gets us to the heart of the city within a simple train ride. 

-We are doing well. Sheldon and I have been through a tough couple years. We have wrestled with a lot of challenges over the five years of our marriage. We spent a year in Texas helping out a relative with mental health problems. We have contended with my own bouts of mental illness. We have both been wrestling with our ideological identities. We have buried three grandparents. We have both undergone several career changes. We have moved many times. It's been a lot. But in the past year or so we have felt good--stable, even! We are leaving our twenties pretty soon and we are hopeful that our thirties are going to be easier. We are settling into our jobs and our new-ish apartment in our new city. 

I don't know if I will stop back here anytime soon to blog again. I am giving myself permission to blog or not to blog. But in case I do stop in I wanted to catch you up on things. 

I hope you and yours are doing well. I hope you are healthy and safe! 

Love,

L🌹