Today was just the loveliest day with my favorite person. We started with late brunch at Joe Bean, which was having an event that involved tasting many different brunch options and sipping on a lot of different beers and drinks. I had my first sprobomb, which has been a long time coming. 

After we spent a few hours in the conservatory, which is arguably my favorite place in Rochester. Honestly it makes my heart so happy to look at a perfect collection of beauty from all around the world with the person that makes me the happiest. 

Sam and I have taken to spending Sundays getting breakfast and coffee and driving around, exploring the city of Rochester. One of my resolutions for the new year was to take better mementos of small things and to take more pictures, so I figured posting them here would be a good idea. 

We started with brunch at Voula's, a carefully hidden but perfectly endearing greek spot where Sam's roommate Dom works. After we were full of both the sweet and the savory, we drove to the Record Archive to spend one of the gift cards I got for my birthday. After wandering around for a while and flipping through piles, I settled on a David Bowie rerelease and the new Banks album. 

2016 was beautiful and sad. It was definitely a fully saturated year dripping with emotion, with intent, with both the gory and the glorious. 

I started the year in a rampage of self destruction. I wasn't making anything, working a job that had an okay pay rate but made me feel depressed and stagnant, in a very new but extremely idiotic relationship with a person I didn't like or respect. I woke up every day and trudged through the shit I was dealing with over and over again because that's what I thought my life had to be. Through the support of my friends and my family I gained enough respect for myself to break up with my partner at the time, quit my retail job, start working jobs that fulfilled me creatively, took a year (almost) off of dating to understand myself better, and started Little Lamb Studios. I made things, I understood myself, I explored my feelings outside of therapy, I learned to be happy on my own. I came to full terms with my past long term relationship that ended in 2015, packed it into a box, and stored it away in my mind. 

I did yoga, I exercised, but these things seem inconsequential in comparison to the leaps and bounds I grew in my mental stability this year. For the first time in my adult life I was alone in Rochester, with my best friend in Seattle and no romantic partner or interest and I was happy. Masking depression with companionship has been a shitty coping mechanism I developed in college and I think this year I finally shook it. That being said, just two months shy of my year mark of being single on purpose, I met a guy and I'm smitten in ways I've never been before. I could talk about every wonderful thing about him for paragraphs but the best thing about it is that we make each other better. He doesn't hold me still or hold me back, he makes me a better maker, person, and woman. 

Here are the things i'm going to try to be more thoughtful about in the next year. I know people think resolutions are dumb, but time moves in cycles and it's good to look back and see your growth from a specific point onward. 

-Be more authentically true to myself. 

I find sometimes that living in my hometown and with my parents I feel the urge to fall back on being a person I grew out of in order to appease people. At the end of this year I finally got the guts to dye my hair pink again and I'm determined to keep doing things that make me feel comfortable in my own skin, even if not everybody loves it. Keep getting tattoos, dying your hair, and wearing weird swan dresses future Mary. 

-Make at least one thing for myself once a month. 

I have a hard time balancing needs and wants. I have an ever expanding list of things I want to make for myself but I always come up with reasons why I don't have time to be working on things for myself. This leads to me making spur of the moment "treat yo self" purchases which hurts the big picture money plan. If I plan out those treat yo self moments ahead of time, it should help save money and improve my relationship with making things. 

-Keep Saving!

I've been using the app Qapital to save money for about 3 months and i'm so in love. I am literally the worst money saver ever, I'm a repeat culprit of the money transfer from savings to checking for unnecessary reasons. Qapital takes a few days to process the transfer, so that's been keeping me from relying on money in savings for a quick fix. You can also program it to automatically transfer money in a number of ways, including a fixed amount once a week, a fixed amount when you spend any money, or even every time you post to instagram! It's genius! This isn't a sponsored recommendation (obviously) but if you use this link you'll get a free $5 when you sign up! Seriously I can't recommend this app enough. 

http://get.qapital.com/bzAc/XH8yeYXSDz

-Remember that you don't need to convince everyone to agree with you. 

This year I, along with many of my friends, struggled with the discourse that came along with the election. People came out of the woodwork to disagree about the basic rights and emotions of women, queer folk, and people of color. As a person with strong feelings linked to these topics, it became emotionally draining to argue my points with people who were using these arguments to see me get upset, not to have a discussion. I learned that if a person is genuinely not interested in listening to your point of view, it's not your job to educate them. Especially when it comes to myself, because I am very emotional and am prone to crying when I am flustered. 

-Explore Rochester more frequently.

On the first day of the new year, Sam (boyfriend) and I went to the Lamberton Conservatory in Highland Park and I was shocked that this place had been in my home town for my whole life. Sam and I drove around and talked about all the places we wanted to go to in 2017. Places right in our city that two 24 year old artists can get to for cheap, of course. I greatly admire The Dainty Squid's blog for featuring not only her awesome style but also her adventures. I hope to post more about different adventures, things I'm making, and how i'm feeling in the new year. 

Today I started 40 days at my local yoga studio, which means that for 6 weeks I’ll attend 4 yoga classes a week along with a lecture about the spiritual and practical effects of yoga in a western lifestyle. I’m going to preface this post by saying I’m nothing special when it comes to this topic: I go to yoga but I’m no expert (I can’t touch my toes), I’m a thick girl but I’m about a size 16, I’m mentally ill but I’m high functioning when medicated. I’m not trying to tell anyone that practicing yoga will solve any of your deeply rooted problems, I’m mostly expressing my experience with the practice before starting a project, and at best hoping to start a discussion about the topic. 

My relationship with my body is both complex and subtle. I grew up in an athletic setting where women were openly shamed for being unable to control their growing bodies. I personally never experienced anyone telling me I wasn’t thin enough but I watched other girls experience blatant criticism for their bodies and thought to myself “I love them, but I will not be them.” However when I was seventeen due to a trauma I was no longer able to practice the sport I had dedicated 10 years to and the settling dust of this experience unearthed a lot of issues with my mental health. I found that being an athlete was quelling a lot of inner turmoil and without an outlet I was bursting at the seams with unbound mania and depression. I have experienced a lot of really deep and terrible depressive states in my early 20s but this time when I was 17 is still the time that I think of as my most unstable. I was diagnosed bipolar, which I now I think the more accurate label for myself is something my doctor calls bipolar depression, and when I was 18 I started medication before starting college. 

Let me make this perfectly clear: I don’t think physical activity is a replacement for medication. I fucking love medication. I would kneel down at the alter of my Effexor and my mood stabilizer and give it my deepest blessing. However, the meds accompanied by having no physical outlet caused me to gain a lot of weight in college. Luckily for me, this weight came at a weirdly perfect time in my life. Don’t get me wrong, the weight gain accompanied one of the most difficult and depressed times of my life, but I was so wrapped up in hating my mind and my heart that I couldn’t give a shit about my weight. Honestly I thought I looked fucking fine. I still think I look fucking fine. I think plus size women are so fucking beautiful and I refuse to allow anyone to tell me that being skinny is the only way to be genuinely happy. 

This being said, I still wasn’t content with my mind. I doubt i’ll ever truly be content with my mind. I remember reading Ellen Forney’s Marbles and for the first time truly feeling like I was understood. In this book she talks about being very skeptical about practicing yoga, but in time she found it to be extremely beneficially to her mental health. This was very accurate to my own practice, despite my mother’s futile attempts to get me to lose weight in any way she could manage. After a few weeks of frustrating and trying practices, I found that the quieting of the mind was incomparable. Sometimes the hour and 15 minutes I spent wiggling around in a hot room was the only time all day I didn’t feel like dying. The quieting for me comes from both the excursive and the meditation of the practice. I completely knowledge that as a white woman doing yoga in the USA in the year 2016 completely erases all of the beautiful eastern culture of the practice of yoga, but even the watered down version of age old poses I attempt do so much for me. 

featured image originally published in Ellen Forney's graphic novel Marbles. 

Lately I’ve felt the need to purge. Get rid of junk. Pick the rotten old scab off the skin of my life right now, even though my whole life kind of feels like a rotten scab. 

Purging is not something that comes naturally to me as a person. In college I picked up a bit of a hoarding habit, I thought of myself often as a character in my favorite movie Labyrinth, a puppet who clomps around a land of trash and picks up items that she deems as worthwhile or useful and tosses them on her back until they become a part of her physical body. She hunches over, a hump of trash and antiques towering over her like an extreme hunched back, encouraging the films protagonist to hold on to items in her room that hold nostalgia or aesthetic value. The more I think about it, the more I think my hoarding habit might be drawn from this movie in general, maybe I admired the slow panning camera scene in the beginning of the film where Sarah’s room is filled with toys, knick-knacks, and sweet memorabilia. 

When I left my family home to live by myself for the first time, the hoarding habit got out of hand. I was shopping constantly, if not in store then online. My last apartment in Brooklyn was never ever clean, and was constantly filled with weird things I saved off the street or picked up at thrift stores. When I packed up all this junk and moved across state back to live with my family again, I realized that I was filling my life with nostalgic trash. I remember telling my favorite therapist that I would never be the kind of woman who loves to travel and can fit everything in a bag at a moments notice to hop on a whirlwind adventure. First of all, I think the idea that all young people are privileged enough to travel is dumb, and I won’t get into it now, but the idea of wandering has never appealed to me. I’m a loud person who lives quietly. It takes me a long time for me to figure out where i’m going and feel comfortable in my surroundings, and i’m genuinely happiest when i’m spreading my roots in a place I care about compared to exploring new places I’ve never traversed. 

I still identify as this person, but I definitely have come to acknowledge that I hid behind being a homebody as an identity in my late teens and early 20s. I clung to being the kitschy woman with too many things who was afraid to leave her house on the weekends as an excuse to let the objects in my life take over. Even when I began to embrace paganism in my college years I was really gripping to the excuse to cast spells and leave them hanging around my house as a form of proof that they were working. 

As I’ve been getting more invested in my research into production values as it relates to our fast consuming society, I felt that my life was no longer living up to the expectation of my morals. I could no longer look at the pile of pilled fast fashion clothes in the corner of my room endearingly as things I should save to wear one day. I also found that the more I committed to making choices that would lead to long term happiness versus short term satisfaction, I couldn’t keep physically or metaphorically stepping over the trash in my life anymore. I also have been doing some very minimal (blatant pun intended) research into minimalist lifestyles, mostly using youtube and blogs. I particularly like a youtuber and blogger called Rachel Aust, who has very reasonable recommendations for consolidating your life but still appeasing aesthetic needs. She made a 30 day entering minimalism challenge that I might try to record here on this blog. 

This being said, I’m never ever ever going to be a minimalist. I’m never going to be a woman with five total pairs of shoes or be able to fit all of my clothes in one travel casual duffel. I’m literally a maker, by definition I put more things into the world, i’m not great at taking them away. But the more I think about the well being of myself as  person, consumer, and a woman, the more I need to get ride of the things that don’t fit me physically  or morally anymore. I dumped 6 bags of my former treasures into a donation bin today, and i’m currently just happy to be swathed in clean sheets and be able to see the floor of my room.