Shantelle Marie Photography

You Deserve a Mental Health Day

branches in asheville mental health day

As the condensed summer session for school is winding down, I find myself more and more averse to the idea of doing -literally- anything. Add on top of that the stress of buying a new car (which we’re hoping to finally have resolved on Monday) along with regular life stressors and I am one wound up little mama (thankfully without the stressor of kids yet).  I mean, this weekend was supposed to be two days of Andrew & I not leaving the house but Saturday turned into anxiety and running errands and car dealerships from 9AM – 6PM. This all has me thinking about the idea of mental health days and how helpful they were when I was in my pre-college days.

When I was younger, my mom would let me stay home from school and basically do whatever I wanted some days. I’d feel so much better the next day and continue on with life. Those days were total lifesavers. There are/were some days where I cannot force myself out of bed or the house. Whether it’s due to anxiety, depression, or any other number of fun things there is just no way I’m getting out. But now that I’m an “adult”, when I’m “just” tired and a little sick of never getting a minute off I feel totally guilty that I’m not doing one of the million things that are still on my list.

But you know what? That’s a bunch of wooden dimes.

Every once in a while (or weekly, if you need it) you deserve to take a mental health day to make sure you’re in tip-top shape. By taking part in a little self love and care you can often feel better and more refreshed than you would if you completed a million to-do lists! Need some inspiration? I’ve got you covered below (I mean in this post…not like, literally below).

• Order pizza • Don’t even think of getting dressed • Do your makeup super cute • Go see a movie • Bake cookies • Take a bath with epic music • Take a snack to the park and just chill • Play with a puppy/kitty/chinchilla • Only get out of bed for meals • Do something creative: paint, write, compose, bake, cook, dance, sing (the list goes on) • Go for a walk in a new part of town • Treat yo self • Plan a vacation • Go on a day trip • Don’t leave the house • Window shop • Dance • Watch your favorite movie • Binge-watch a show • Read • Play video games
• Do whatever the fudge you want.

Hopefully I was able to inspire a little something that will allow you to take care of who matters most: you! I’m off to finish out my mini-semester and then partake in some celebratory pizza and walkin’. I gotta hit my health goal for this week 😉

How do you show yourself a little self care?

Wishing you no wooden dimes,

Shantelle

The Girl with the Yellow Bag

dating anniversary

Tomorrow marks the three year anniversary of my first date with a very special girl. Prior to our date we hadn’t met in person (we met online) and so to avoid any confusion she gave me a very specific directive to identify her: look for the girl with the yellow bag. We had arranged to meet for dinner and as usual I was running a few minutes behind schedule, but I still got to the restaurant early (which I found out later was due to Shantelle sitting in her car waiting for me to arrive first). I remember standing outside watching people pass by with a growing interest, looking for anyone carrying a yellow bag. It was exciting, but also nerve-wracking because I didn’t really know what to expect. And then I saw her.

I hate to say it but life is full of cliches. From the first moment I first saw Shantelle I was enchanted by this girl with the yellow bag (the large yellow purse she was carrying made it unmistakably clear that this was my date). (Shantelle’s note: it’s not that big of a purse!) She was stunning in every way and dressed impeccably in a lovely blue dress. But once I saw her without sunglasses on I couldn’t turn away – this girl was gorgeous!!!

I was a barrel full of nerves when we sat down to eat, but I can honestly say that I’ve never hit it off so well with anyone in my life. Our conversation came so easily and was filled with laughter and good humor. She was exceptionally witty and I thoroughly enjoyed our meal together. What was originally planned as a dinner date stretched on later and later into the evening until all of the shops around us had closed down and we were left standing in the parking lot talking. I didn’t want our date to end, but we eventually had to part ways with the assurance that we would have a second date in the near future. I was elated driving home and remember telling my roommate that I didn’t want to rush into things too much, but I could totally see myself marrying this girl.

For anyone that knows our story, that girl became my fiancee just a few months later and we were married about a year and a half after that.

I knew from the first time we met that I would marry the girl with the yellow bag, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Our timeline may not show it, but I actually tried to slow things down at first. I could feel myself rushing headlong into a future with this girl and every rational part of my being was telling me to stop. Before I met my wife I had a clear idea of how the dating to engagement to marriage timeline should run, if I were to even participate. I had rules for how long you should date someone before proposing (at least 1 year), and how long you should be engaged before getting married (at least 1-2 more years). I even had exact specifications for the person that I would possibly marry, as though I was ordering a Stepford Wife (except brunette). I was pretty terrible, but somehow managed to be smart enough to completely ignore my own rules.

But that’s what happens when you meet the right person and -another cliche coming- you just know. I knew she was the one and I knew that I would be marrying her at some point. I knew it with a certainty that I didn’t believe was possible.

I’m happy to say that our relationship has continued to grow and marrying that girl with the yellow bag has been the best decision of my life. I have learned so much from being with her and her companionship means the world to me. I feel both lucky and incredibly blessed to be married to my best friend and I thank God every day for bringing us together. It just goes to show you: sometimes you need to toss your own rules aside and heed the cliches.

Any amazing first date stories to share? What cliches have you found infiltrating your life? Let us know in the comments :)

Wishing you all the happy relationship cliches,

Andrew

On The Future…Of Here

flowers!

Disclaimer: I’m not going to disappear! I figured I’d lead with that in case any of you faceless, awesome people who stick around and continually read along here (amazingly!) were worried. But there are going to be changes.

Growing up I was always writing; I fully believed that I would either be a writer or actress when I grew up. Sadly, when I moved to NC as a teen, I soon found myself rarely writing, acting, or doing anything creative other than taking photographs. A number of moons ago though I started a blog at Andrew’s insistence after he read a short story of mine. Later on when I started my business, many resources said that you should also blog to help boost your SEO, so I started blogging regularly. It really helped my SEO, but I found myself getting more passionate about writing the blog and more excited about comments/views on blog posts than I did about the inquiries received to photograph a life event.

Here’s where I lament a little

With the blog, I don’t feel like I’ve been blogging as personally as I did when I first started. There’s something to be said for beginning bloggers who don’t research “how” they should blog. I feel like I pigeonholed myself early on because I wanted to justify my posting by making everything be as helpful as possible, which is crazy! I should be able to just post cat pictures twice a week if I want to (I’d probably have a larger readership at that point too…hmm…) 😉 While I do want this place to be helpful to you as a reader, I want it to be personal, to showcase things in my life that I’m excited about and branch out into new things, because it’s fun to live!

With photography, I always loved photographing people I cared about but I’ve found over time that I prefer to photograph people one-on-one for the most part (except for elopements, they’re special). It allows me to get to know the person much better and showcase them in a way I may not be able to if there’s a huge group around. As much as I love photographing people though, I want to be going for a different kind of photography assignment than what I am currently. My original and enduring love is photographing places and the people in them. The places may not be able to talk but I can try to portray the feeling I have when I’m in them (that’s what he said). Which I’m not always able to do, but I certainly love to try. :)

skyline

Here’s where I make changes:

  • More personal posts: I’m not quite sure what that means yet, but it’s gonna happen. Once I figure it out.
  • Food posts! I love food. I also really enjoy making random things in the kitchen, mixing up recipes, and other fun things so I want to start incorporating what I do there, here! Plus, it’s an excuse to bake.
  • A new look and possibly new name. I will be thinking long and hard (that’s what he said) about this so it may not be changed for a while, but other tweaks will be coming to the website along the way.
  • Lastly, the thing I’m most nervous about: style posts. I have recently really started exploring my love for fashion and especially the fashion that sits on my body during the day, rather than others’. I will certainly talk more about this in the first post on the subject which will probably be sometime in June! And it’ll be terrible, as I’ll be a total newbie. :)

I will continue to post about travel and photography and such because I love those things. I’ve never been able to niche myself in real life, so why would I creatively?! These changes are more like additions that will give me the chance to explore other things that I love and y’all the chance to see some really bad photos as I try out new things! When I started blogging I never really had an end-game, I just wanted to have fun writing, meet cool people, and help/inspire somehow. Plus, I’m a super introverted person but blogging allows me to be extroverted while still remaining singular – kind of amazing, in my opinion!

So there you have it: ch-ch-ch-changes! I hope y’all are as excited about the future as I am. Now tell me: is there anything in particular you’d like to see here?

Wishing you blissful newbie-ness,

Shantelle

Lessons Learned: Sometimes You Have to Fudge Up

Southpoint Durham NC AMC Theatre

Last night I ended up staying awake until 1am working on a post for today that popped into my head at the last minute and I couldn’t shake. I was so excited to post it and encourage a discussion and try to provide some support for people dealing with issues similar to mine (self-hate, depression, anxiety, and other candy shop top-shelfers 😉 ). It had been a very stressful day and pretty crappy overall until I had a little thought bubble that became an over 900 word post. I had been so excited & nervous to share it but it was going up today, whether I was ready for it or not. Then, just as I was about to have the dude read over it, it was eaten by the blog post monster that is WordPress at times.

It would be putting it nicely to say that I was wee bit upset.

Thinking about all of the time, energy, and heart I put into that post felt quite similar to investing those same things into a friend and then not staying friends/they ate your homework. It’s rare for me to be very open about many of the things I’ve gone through so for the crazy amount of heart-spilling I did in that post to disappear it really hurt.

This lead me down all sorts of rabbit holes about how much I suck, I should have written in Google Docs, I should have taken that train 5 years ago, wow gee whiz nice HAIR STYLE STUPID. I’m incredibly pleasant to myself when something goes wrong which was part of the point of that huge post. Ironically, there was one TedTalk I had included in that post from Lakshmi Pratury about letting go and moving forward that really seems to hit home today (along with this talk about negative thinking but we’ll save that for another day).

After my freak out last night, and a continuation this morning, I realized that it was probably a little silly of me to get so worked up about this. Yes, creativity is a terribly hard thing to reign in, especially when you’re coming up with new topics at least twice a week…or anytime really. Yes, it was a LOT of work and a LOAD of heart, but it’s not like I can’t recreate it. Maybe I was saved by the terrible monster of doom that is WordPress this morning. Maybe not. But at least I did learn one valuable fact.

Write using a program with auto-save 😉

In reality though, I’ve learned a lesson that we never really seem to remember no matter how many times we learn it: sometimes bad things really do happen for good reasons. WordPress has a million auto-save features but somehow each and every one of them failed. Had I not lost that entire post though, I wouldn’t have been able to split it up into the two posts that it really needed to be. That would have been a disservice to both of the topics I wrote about; they each deserve their own spotlight. By 1AM though, I felt rushed (and exhausted) so I wrote them together. Now I can go back, devote time to fleshing out the ideas separately, and I get two for the price of one. :)

So rather than focusing on how super duper mad I am at WordPress, I’ll be moving forward (and splitting up that huge post into two). How have you dealt with the hot mess of bad things happening?

Wishing you all the auto-save features you could want,

Shantelle

In Opposition of Minimalism

minimalism

All facts from Becoming Minimalist & respective sources. Photo from me :)

Recently I came across a blog post from Becoming Minimalism (who I love, so no harm is intended with this post!) that contained some very surprising numbers on clutter statistics. While some of these blew me away, some freaked me out (seriously, if we have kids there might be a strict no/few toys rule for presents), some of these facts and the way they were presented just kind of irked me. So today I’m here to do something that Andrew knows I can do very well: rant. I’m greatly interested in minimalism and we’ve been working on applying the principle to our life. I’ve come across some wonderful posts and talks on the subject while researching but there is sometimes a common thread of negativity towards those who will not start downsizing. Honestly, that thinking really jams my scantron. I don’t see the value in calling people who don’t follow this vein of thinking wrong or saying that they have to start downsizing or they’re contributing to “the problem”.

It’s kind of like one piece of the “feminism problem”. I am a feminist and so is Andrew. If you believe in equal rights, you’re also a feminist (sorry to be the one to break the news to you). But many people, feminists and otherwise, seem to have an issue with women who choose to stay at home (whether or not there are children involved). It’s total crap. Feminism is about being able to make the choice to stay at home, work, or do any other combination. That concept also applies to minimalism. Doing one or the other does not make you better in anyway – it simply means you’ve made a choice that works best for you in that time. To insult or insinuate that the other party is creating a problem is to say that you’re better for having made a different choice – and that’s not true. We all have different needs, wants, and privilege in our life.

There are plenty of people that live in the 2,000 sq ft + and have over 300,000 items in their home and feel great about what they own and how they live. They don’t look at their belongings and feel tied down or unhappy about what they have. Something that I’ve found in researching within the journey that is minimalism is from the KonMari Method (from the book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up“): when you go through your belongings, each thing you keep should make you feel joy when you touch it. Obviously I’m not talking about taxes in this case (because we’d all be in trouble then) but the idea behind it works. Why should we fault people for keeping things that cause them joy?

Minimalism also shouldn’t be going through and getting rid of everything and anything that is extraneous and you don’t use everyday. More than likely in the long run that will not make you happy and that’s really what following a new path (in this case minimalism) should do. Sure, I don’t read the same book every single day of my life but there’s no way in you-know-where that getting rid of a hand-illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that I found in my grandmother’s basement will make me happy. There are things we all keep in our life that really make no sense to. They’re little more than sentimental ornament (which I have many of, come Christmas time) that does nothing more than take up space. But to get rid of these items would surely cause me and all the plans that I have for them sadness. I’ve started going by this rule of thumb: would I be upset if it went up in a fire or would I not care? A bit of a depressing way to look at it but hey, it certainly weeds out the clutter! However it also makes me want to get a bigger fire safe and shove all my mementos in there, so it’s kind of a double-edged sword 😉

As usual my point is this: why can’t we just be happy for those that are happy (as long as it’s not hurting someone else)? We’re talking about keeping a record collection vs. not. Why would you penalize someone for doing that unless you’re the British, in which case you should give people back their artifacts. While I’m not really in opposition to minimalism as the post title would have you to believe (sorry for the clickbait), I’m not really opposed to the other side of it either. Whether you keep the collection or throw it out, doing so should make you happier in the long run. And if we’re making choices that support our overall wellbeing, we shouldn’t be insulting those that make different choices. At least in this semi-minimalist’s view. :)

Have you come across this mentality from others (or even yourself *coughshantellecough*)?

Wishing you to have your artifacts restored,

Shantelle

P.S. Long post being typed, I’m in full support of helping those in need when you can. Should you choose to declutter, try to find a local donation or charity center that accepts whatever you’re getting rid of. You’ll feel better for having less and someone will feel better for having more. :)