As we go through life we have this seemingly supernaturally enlightened voice that guides us. Sometimes we like what it has to say and other times it is an unfortunate annoyance that plagues our existence. Whatever feeling is left with you when this voice begins its narration over your life is a message from your body. If feel brave, thats probably because you have made your body feel confident in itself. If you feel scared or anxious that could be because of something your body lacks. No matter the cause it is important that we all learn how to listen to what our bodies are telling us. If you're like myself and suffer from anxiety, everyday can feel like an up hill battle. All the nerves and sickly feelings that accompany them can be a lot to handle. The key is realizing what it all means. If certain situations make you feel worse than others (hear me on this) it is ok to avoid them, just not forever. When you find something that makes you uncomfortable to overcome that feeling it is important to find out why. This can be extremely difficult to do if you are trying to push yourself to do something that is ultimately going to make you anxiety worse. Listening to that inner voice that is telling you to flea may offer a much needed insight. Outside the realm of anxiety our bodies continue to speak to us. We get headaches when we are dehydrated, leg craps when we need more potassium, and we begin to feel very weak and tired when we have iron deficiencies. The sole purpose of your body is to keep you alive. If it is sending you a message, heed it. The human body is the most amazing mystery we may ever come across. Any chance we get to hone a new level of understanding for it is one we should cherish. XOXO, Hunter
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"Why didn't you report it", "why didn't you stop it", "How could you have let this happen". Not only are these questions imbedded in the minds of survivors, they are constantly addressed by the media. By people who have no right to have an opinion on someone else personal tragedy. Imagine a single moment in time that changes your life forever. It makes you wary of relationships, complements, and even one- on-one interactions with people. No one wants to feel the kind of self-loathing and loneliness that comes from these sorts of encounters. Survivors replay everything over and over in their minds. Experiencing the initial, "did that really just happen", can truly be the worst part. The human brain is designed to keep its host free of unexpected trauma. When it fails it has its own form of a catastrophic melt down. Think Chernobyl but isolated to ones own self. The brain can't except that a traumatic event has occurred, especially if it wasn't even on its radar. So the brain begins to attempt a self diagnostic. Beginning with, "Are you sure of what happened?" and ending with "I can't say anything because I will be admitting failure". Leading to what many could describe as "the error message". In many cases, due in part to the fact that your brain can not except that it failed at it's one and only task, and your brain trying to make up for it by protecting you now, memories of these moments are repressed. Accessing them can be an intentional and lengthy process, or it can blind side you. You see your brain can only handle so many things being processed at a time. Things are bound to slip through the cracks. Picture trying to hold your phone, five textbooks, all of your dirty laundry for the week, your bills, boyfriends, coworkers, emails and one amazingly repressed secret all while balancing on a high wire. Thats called life. Now, you begin to shake and faulter and almost drop a textbook, you reach for it and try to remain balanced and make sure that nothing else falls. In that split second the one thing you aren't physically controlling slips away. The memory, you stop for a moment, not able to fully grasp all of the pieces because now your brain realizes it has let you down yet again and returns the memory to lockdown. You remember a face, a place, and you. How scared, innocent, and unprepared you were. Then, you think to yourself, "wait a minute, I'm supposed to tell", but no one ever really told you how to do that. You can't tell your parents because if it was someone both of you trusted you have to protect them from feeling as betrayed as you are. No one wants to see their parents cry! Then, the investigating begins. You message close friends and family to find out if anyone else ever suspected anything out of the ordinary, and then you resort to Google. You find that unfortunately as your brain was trying to save you it really screwed you over. Because now you are seeing all of the questions people will ask if you chose to report it. You become so afraid of the, why did you wait so longs, and the you really can't be more specifics, that you sink into yourself and realize that maybe there is nothing you can do. Of course some people try, and deserve praise. Not the projected fear and disbelief they receive from others. As long as you know your truth and want to tell it, no one can take that from you. On a side note, these are not dangerous times to raise boys. These are enlightening times to raise them, teach them about how they should treat women and how to avoid situations were they could act inappropriately. Raise gentleman not abusers and we will all be better for it. Don't sit there and dig wholes in the stories of survivors. Don't say they were asking for it or that they led their attackers on. The reason things go unsaid range from self preservation to fear of what their attacker will do when they speak up. I mean they already hurt them once who are you to say it wouldn't happen again. XOXO, Hunter I don't even know the last time I've gone through a day without hearing someone utterly decimating themselves based solely on how they look. Most of us women have grown up hearing our mothers, grandmother, aunts, or cousins point out the things they hate about their bodies. Sure, most of us can agree that it would be nice to lose some weight, of fix our teeth, or finally get our acne cleared up but those things are not all we are. Forget the fact that you put in all of those hours at work last week to finish that big project. Or that your kids, even if they may or may not have brushed their teeth before school today are alive not to mention happy and healthy. We put so much stock in how we look that we almost forget the other parts of us that make us people. Not just these disingenuous automatons we have seemingly morphed into. Hearing all of these things from the time that you are just a child can produce the more serious self esteem problems we see adults today dealing with. It all started with good ole Twiggy, seeing her in magazines and on billboards led to an unprecedented amount of body shamming in the female population. Now its the psychosomatic world of social media. Photoshop and editing have built a barrier around real people and the way they are portrayed. I mean, do you guys even realize that Marilyn Monroe was a size 14? She was an icon and people still focused on all the ways she wasn't like the other models. We have our own form of this today. Most of us, having grown up in the age of the cyberbully, we know they most often limit their reign on terror the URL's of the inter web. However, when we see their ruthless attacks we create a sort of mental safe guard. Or at least that what we intend to do. It's pretty common to scroll through your news feeds and see someone who you don't know and care nothing about ripping into somebody else you don't know about how ugly they are. Now most of us can agree that we see these things and think to ourselves, "well damn, she's much better looking than me". Then we keep scrolling and go on about our day. Little do we realize that we have just began categorizing ourselves as being less than this random stranger that people out there say is ugly. I'm not going to sit here and say that every women is a 10 because we all know that is a bit naïve. At some point we have to just walk to the mirror and say, "this is how I look, not who I am". We can't judge ourselves so harshly on a superficial front that we portray to the world momentarily. Our looks are the wrapping paper not the whole package. I don't want to live in a world where the women that come after me still sit in the shower and cry because they have decided that they will never be as pretty as the popular girls at school and that is all that matters. I want to be apart of a change where we see a little girl and instead of praising her for being "so pretty" we tell her that she is "so nice" or "so smart". I what to leave this world having given love and kindness and respect. I know that for that to happen I have to start by giving those things to myself. XOXO, Hunter Forget spring cleaning. Without a doubt the most productively stupendious time of year to organize anything is fall. Why spend time indoors cleaning at a time of year when being outside is truly the only thing your wondrous minds can focus on. Devote the days of cozy moderate temperatures to giving your space that relaxed, crisp, cinnamon scented feeling that your craving. Tip #1: Take everything out of the space you are focusing on. I know this sounds like the most tedious and terrible way to spend your time but it truly makes all of the difference. Not only does it give you a blank slate to work with, it allows you to get down to the nitty gritty and deep clean the shiz out of you space. Tip #2: Clean absolutely everything. Once everything is out of your way it is very hard not to notice the things that you have unintentionally neglected to clean. So, get your bucket of decadently scented cleaning products and get to it. Scrub those base board, wipe down the walls, sweep, mop, vacuum and whatever else you can think of, now is the time. Don't forget in the midst of your cleaning frenzy that as you move everything back into you space. clean it. Clean it before you bring it into your sparkling utopia. Pull everything off of that book shelve that hasn't been dusted in an undisclosed amount of time. Dust everything, wipe it down, rearrange to your hearts content. Tip #3: Let your inner OCD out to play. I know that this is going to possibly sound obnoxious but my favorite, most basic white girl thing to do for the fall is bring my sweaters out, front and center in my closet. Aside from my basic color coordinated organization I move all of my fall/winter clothes to the far left of my closet and move all of my spring/summer clothes to the far right. Fall cleaning while not your averagely trademarked activity is just as satisfying. It brings out the hidden comfort of your space and preps everything for the tremulous winter season where no one feels like doing anything. So crank up the T-Pain, open the windows, and refer back to this fall-tastic organizational cleaning guide. XOXO, Hunter Every fall when the leaves begin to turn from their tranquil green lusciousness to their pumpkin spice hues the clock begins its melodramatic ticking as I realize the season I have been tensely anticipating is here and that it will be gone in a frantically fleeting amount of time. In that moment I begin to calculate the amount of blissfully baggy sweaters I possess and which movie will kick off my annual fall movie marathon. I generally gravitate towards the same set of cinematic master pieces from year to year. Here are some of my favorite fall-flicks that will saturate you weekend with epic coziness, fluffy blankets, and copious amounts of warm beverages. Fall Watch-List Harry Potter (Sorcerer's Stone-Deathly Hallows Part 2) The Complete Halloween Town Series Gilmore Girls Supernatural (Season 2 is the best) Charmed (Season 2 is also the best) Scooby Doo on Zombie Island (yes, you are reading this right. Don't judge me) I recommend setting aside a day to fill with ghouls, goblins, and the occasional shirtless Winchester. With pumpkin spice and everything nice, Hunter This is not meant to be a pity party, but we all have these moments. We feel them from family, friends, and even life itself. We get the comments that we aren't working hard enough, we don't do things the right way, we don't have the right opinions, or even just the feelings we get when we realize that the people we care about really don't care about us.
I don't really know the right way to deal with these kinds of situations but I wanted to put this out there so that other people feeling these things would know that they aren't the only ones going through it. I feel it to. That heavy feeling in your heart when you realize that no matter what you do or how hard you try you will simply never be good enough, even though you truly are just doing your best. It brakes my heart the same way I know that if you are going through this too, it's breaking yours. To have people you love make you feel so small is quite possibly one of the worst feeling that there is. Then, once you really get passed the fact that you will never please them, reality sets in. You realize that you let these people into your heart and you let them effect your life. This kind of cause me, and maybe you too, to get sucked into this shame spiral. Feeling ashamed of yourself for allowing people to get close enough to hurt you, for caring at all about what they think, and then of course the classic feeling ashamed of being ashamed. That last one is the real doozy. Even with all of these crazy emotions and feelings the only true thing that has gotten me through them is Keeping the Faith. This is really just something that I tell myself whenever I begin to fall down the slippery abis of self loathing. This is the moment when I decide not to shape my life around what these people around me are saying about me. I decide (and you should too) to hold out for the future you can't see yet. To have this overwhelming belief in your heart that better days will come and that they will be completely and totally worth everything you have gone through. So, I guess in this crazy life, we all get trapped under the emotional bolder from time to time. My only advice and/or wisdom to impart on you today is simply to, Keep the Faith. You will get though whatever it is that you are going through. One day, maybe sooner or maybe later, you will reach the light and the end of the proverbial tunnel, and you will look back on all of this, and be so glad that you decided to hold out for the future you couldn't see. Keep the faith, Hunter Anyone that knows me knows how much I love my T.V. shows. I get emotionally invested in the characters and their plot lines and laugh, cry, and occasionally curse right along side the characters as I watch. As if anything I do would change their inevitable outcomes right. So, given all of this I thought that today I will give you a fall watch list of all of the current shows I am following.
xoxo, Hunter |
Hunter FergusonHolding her Associates of Arts in Political Science, Implementing Beneficial Community Project, and having Led a Student Collaboration team at her college of attendance- Hunter chooses to blog about the world around her as well as her personal experiences in hopes of creating a Powerful group of like-minded people. Archives
July 2019
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