Summer Is Here | No Longer SAD

Chantelle
June 24, 2019
Gratitude / Mental Health / Personal Development / Sobriety

If you're like me, you might deal with an influx of depression and like feelings during winter months. It's cold and wet here in the pacific north west, and it stays grey for five months straight. When March finally brings days with peeps of sunshine, everyone crawls out of their caves and it's like the town comes alive again. Thank goodness summer is officially here and I can start feeling human again. I've notice when the days get darker and greyer, my mood gets darker and greyer. There's actually a term for this; It's called SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder. I know so many people this affects, but it's never really talked about. Mental Health, in general, isn't something that is openly talked about. The majority of us tend to suffer in silence and hope it goes away in fear of the social stigma placed on mental health issues. This is the worst thing you could do. Always reach out to someone in times of sorrow; Whether that's a friend,…

Law of Attraction: The Scales of Life

Imagine that your life is a scale; One of those “old-school” ones with two sides. One side of the scale represents everything good in life, or all of your positive thoughts, emotions or actions. The other side of the scale represents all of the bad things, or the negative thoughts, emotions or actions. What most of us don’t realize, though, is that we control what we put into either side of the scale. Through the law of attraction, the more we put into one side or the other, life will ultimately become “better” or “worse.” Rhonda Byrnes talks about this concept a lot in her book (and movie), The Secret, to better explain the Law of Attraction and how it works. Recently, I lost control of that thought process. I tilted my scale deep into the dark side. When it rains, it pours, right? However, I was having a really hard time seeing anything positive in my life. It was one thing after another for about six long months. I…

Three Years Dry: What My Sobriety Feels Like

Chantelle
January 9, 2019
Addiction / Personal Development / Sobriety

As of yesterday (1/8/19), I am officially three years sober. Now, anyone in the 12-step program might argue with me about the term “sober” since I still actively use cannabis. I live in a legal state and consider the use to be medicinal, but everyone will have their own opinion. Whatever your stance is on smoking weed, by sober I mean free from alcohol. I haven’t had a drink in three years. This is something that I would consider an accomplishment. People who know me and care about me tell me they’re proud of me so it must be an accomplishment of some sort. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything, though. That’s probably because I still struggle with it on a regular, if not daily, basis. I don’t know why I think that drinking is going to make me feel better when I can easily remember how much it controlled my life. I didn’t go more than two days without drinking, and I couldn’t just have “one or…

Why I Actually Hate The Holidays..

Chantelle
December 1, 2018
Minimalism / Personal Development / Vegan / Zero Waste

The older I get, the more I hate the holidays; Especially Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a holiday that essentially celebrates genocide, and we do this by killing 300,000,000 turkeys a year. That’s right... Three hundred million! Then, before the night is over after we get done saying how grateful we are, we go and spend a shit-ton of money on gifts for the people we’re grateful for. Some of us even put ourselves into debt because of this. It’s a huge consumerism trap, and I’m finally breaking free. Some people may think I’m just crazy, but hear me out. Without giving a huge history lecture, basically, a group of white refugees came to a new country fleeing their corrupt government. The natives greeted them with a feast and blessings, welcoming them with open arms. Then the white men went on to almost wipe out their entire race, raping their women and stealing their land. Now, we celebrate these events by buying a turkey. Here’s a little history video about that. After…

At Home and Healing (Pancreatitis Series #4)

Chantelle
November 23, 2018
Healing / Healthy Living / Uncategorized / Weight Loss

Welcome to the fourth and final part of my pancreatitis series. Finally, I’m at home and healing. I know this part took quite a while to be released. It’s almost as if I didn’t know where to end it because the healing process has been anything but quick. Whenever I thought things would get better, some curveball would come at me. Some unforeseen complication would disrupt my healing process. If you’re new to my blog, welcome, but you’re going to want to read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series before continuing on with this post. (Also, note that this is not my normal blogging style. These posts are also significantly longer than my norm.) Because a lot of the days at home healing was a lot of doing nothing, nodding out of high doses of pain medication, I am going to only elaborate days of importance. October 23, 2018 (TUESDAY) I woke up this morning at 281 lbs, and the realization of a 16-pound weight loss…