A combination of others: Absorbing traits of those we engage with.

July 24, 20191 Comment

You know when you’ve been hanging around a friend for a long time and you start to pick up their slang words or their facial expressions? It happens subtlety, you normally don’t start to notice it until it’s pretty ingrained. Then suddenly it’s part of you, not just part of your friend.

These things happen to all of us and they happen on the regular. We absorb traits from those we are around the most. Sometimes it’s simple, like a phrase, sometimes it’s more complex. An example of that would be my growth in ambition. My fiance Chris is ambitious, and I’ve always teetered on the line. I’m ambitious about a few things, but for the most part good enough is good enough, but as we’ve been together my ambition has been growing. I want to do a better job at things that normally wouldn’t matter to me. I want to spend more time planning my actions instead of going with the flow. It’s a lot bigger personality change than gaining a phrase, but it’s a positive one.

Not all the things we gain are though. We gain peoples negative traits just as easily as we gain their positive ones. If we hang around a friend who is a gossip, chances are we’ll become a gossip before too long. It’s in our nature. We partake in something, we hang around something, and before long it’s a part of us too.

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The process of loving someone teaches you a lot about yourself.

June 17, 20192 Comments

Photography by: Sarah Warden Photography

I feel like I’ve been learning a lot about myself lately, every corner I turn I’m faced with either a reality that should have been obvious or something I had never even considered about myself. These revelations have been both good things and bad things and a lot of things that don’t really categorize as either, but one thing that has proven true is most of these revelations come in relation to Chris.

He’s marrying me, so obviously he pays a lot of attention to me, in some ways he pays more attention to me than I pay to myself. He catches small mood changes that hardly register in my mind. He notices repeated habits that are so normal to me I don’t even realize I’m doing them. He speaks on them a lot, pointing them out or asking what’s wrong. It makes me realize how much of my everyday life and being I dismiss because they’re normal to me. That doesn’t make them any less a part of me though, in fact, maybe it makes them a bigger part of me than the intrusive acts or emotions. Maybe these small things, are the foundation on which my personality is laid.

Now, most of these things are neutral acts or positive acts, they aren’t things I feel the need to change, rather they just make me think, but that doesn’t mean that the act of loving someone doesn’t make you notice your flaws. Love may be blind, but it sure opens your eyes to yourself.

You see love makes you want to be a better person for the person you love, and in my case, it has made me critical on some aspects of myself. It’s not negative and I don’t mean it to sound that way. Seeing these flaws are a good thing, because it gives me the chance to approve upon myself, for both him and me. It’s room for growth, which we all desperately need no matter how good we already are.

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Reflection: What makes a person’s personality consistent or spontaneous?

January 10, 2019Leave a comment

If you know me now, you’ve known me since 11th grade. I wrote that I was thankful for our ability to edit and change ourselves in my thanksgiving post. I meant it, I know a lot of people who have changed for the better, I’ve changed for the better, but when I look at myself now compared to then, I realize that it wasn’t really change that happened, but more of a consistent polishing.

I’m a consistent person, a remarkable feat given that I’m bipolar, but I guess with enough time that becomes a constant as well. I remember talking to someone and telling them that I felt like I only knew one version of them, and that was all I could know, because they had changed so drastically over the years. Then I looked at myself and realized that there were only three versions of me. My outgoing crazy energetic and social childhood. My self loathing almost bullied to extinction middle years. And the adult version of myself, that surfaced a little early due to all that happened in the stage before. I say adult version lightly, because you can only be so much of an adult in high school, but if you knew me then you would see me now. There is a lot of similarities and though they’ve been edited, my dreams and wishes haven’t changed a ton.

Honestly, I wonder if it makes me a little boring. But I think I’m like this because I figured out some tough questions early on. It was easy for me to pin-point what mattered in my life, and I didn’t have to have violent revelations of self discovery. I fell into a pattern of picking up traits and interests that made sense, if you had been following along you’d see them and go “of course Anna liked and added that!”. Simple. Easy to define.

Again, maybe boring? But I don’t know if people would describe me as boring either, because I’ve got a lot going on, it’s just the type of things in my whirlwind of character are typical for me.

It makes me wonder what makes a person this consistent.

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Giving yourself more dimension: Why it’s important to explore things out of our norm.

September 20, 20182 Comments

I wrote a post about labels this month, and my first way keep labels from working against you was to mix them up, because we’re individuals and our labels shouldn’t read them same as everyone else’s. The truth is I feel like a lot of people generify themselves so they can fit into a nice little package, whether they’re chasing a brand, an aesthetic, or simply want to be more liked.

I’ve noticed that a lot of my hobbies and loves let me fit into a neat little package, then when people get to know me they’re knocked off their feet by one of my more obscure fascinations or hobbies, not because they’re that rare, but because they never would have placed them with me. They only had a surface level reading of me and there’s always much more going on under the surface. We’re all like this, none of this new.

But what is a newer trend is collectivism, wanting to fit into to a certain group seamlessly and having all of our friends match us in hobbies and ideals. Okay, maybe that isn’t new either, but it’s growing and growing fast. I blame the internet for this, and I blame peoples insistence that you need to pick a side on everything from hobbies to politics to which TV show reigns supreme. You’ve heard of the sinking middle class, but what about the sinking middle ground? When we don’t have middle ground we tend to jump to one side as quickly as possible and leave all the stuff across the line to stay hidden or simply rot out of existence. It’s bad. That other stuff is just as important to who you are.

I hear people say “I lost interest in volleyball because I threw myself into art school and all that goes with it.” or “I lost interest in romance novels because I got my English degree and moved on to “high-brow” literature.”

It’s a common thing. Ask your friends why they dropped things they loved. Ask yourself why you stopped doing that hobby you loved three years ago. We all have our reasons, but I bet most of us didn’t spend a lot of time reviewing those reasons. If we were to, would we still think of them as legitimate enough to have dropped something we loved?

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Back to the Girl I Was:

April 27, 2016Leave a comment

my_documents

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve strayed from who I was when I was little. Certainly life has taken me on a different path. Seven year old Anna was completely confident, unapologetic, and so energetic. The confidence and unapologetic ways were stolen from me at age twelve from aggressive bullying. But like things do, they recovered, they grew back. I wouldn’t say they are stronger, but they are here.

I’ve always had this idea that we have core traits programmed into us, that our childhood selves can tell a lot about who we will become, not because we won’t change, but because some things will always come back.

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Is My Style Right for… Blogging?

June 21, 2015September 30, 20152 Comments

I tweeted earlier today “Can I be a fun blogger without a white desk and an apple computer??” I meant it in a joking way, but let’s be honest, isn’t that all you see? So… should you be concerned about being successful when you don’t have the exact same aesthetic? No. Not all. And I’ll tell you why, it’s good to be different! It’s good to have a little sway in your style, because you want something to set you apart.

This picture for example was taken with my mom’s ipad, because, you guessed it, I don’t have one! As you can see, my handwriting isn’t flawless. If you look through my social media it’s not the same tactic as most bloggers. And I know I’m just starting out, I haven’t built up the followers that everyone else has, but I have done something that I feel like is important, and that’s going with the flow while still standing out.

Copy Quality, not Style. Quality is important no matter what style you produce, if you’ve got good quality photos and posts on your hand, your style is not something you should be too overly concerned about when comparing it to others.
Keep Your Personality in Every Post. You don’t have to tell a personal story with everything you post, but you need to have your own voice. People relate to people, and you’ll find people who relate to you. You don’t have to appeal to everyone as long as you appeal to the right people… your people.
Collect Ideas and Mix Them. Everyone finds inspiration in others, that’s nothing to be ashamed of! But don’t look through one blog at a time, or even one type of blog, go through a mixture of them at a time and then merge ideas into new fresh ones of your own. You know that saying “there is no new ideas”. It’s mostly true when it comes to blogging, but there is always new ways to present them.
Get Options. If your hiring someone, get more than two options, more than three. If your doing it yourself, don’t just stop with your first design. We all know when we like something, but when given a handful of things that we like, we tend to pick things that are more “us”.