Taking Time

In my actual season of life, it's been really easy for me to feel overwhelmed with anxiety. So much to do and so little time.

The solution I found may seem kind of weird, but it works!

I find it necessary to take more breaks and enjoy the moment. It may sound like a contradiction: 'so you're feeling overwhelmed? taking time for yourself doesn't sound like a wise option'.

But taking a break doesn't necessarily mean procrastinating for an hour, sleeping on top of my books, or lying on my bed staring at the ceiling and wondering what to do with my life.

Here are some of the breaks I get to have, and that make me feel better when I'm feeling stressed or depressed:

- Having lunch with my friends from college at the mall.

- Seeing my high school friends, who are 'the family that I chose and that chose me too'. They can always make me feel like myself again.

- Marveling at nature: near my faculty the trees have such beautiful colours and I can't help staring at them, trying to capture the moment. I also get to see beautiful rainbows sometimes, like in the picture below!

- Fridays, after my WORST class of the week (with my terrible Anatomy teacher who terrorizes me and makes me feel completely anxious and stupid) I have the BEST time of the week with my boyfriend. We get to do lots of fun together and it feels like home to be with him! (I won't get extra cheesy, even though I could)

How do you take time for yourself during stressful times?

love,
Mariana

Community

The prompt for the first Peony Project link-up is Community. It's kind of a 'free' linkup, there aren't many rules, so I will basically start by defining what community means to me.

Community happens when people come together and unite their efforts towards something. It allows us to experience new perspectives, to learn new lessons, and most importantly, to create relationships which will make us feel less lost in this big world.

Friendship, for example, is a form of community - and, now, I will share the story of how finding a group of friends I could relate to changed my life.

I've mentioned that my early teenage years were a difficult time. I spent a lot of that time inside a funk and without considering getting out, but my two best friends kept throwing me a ladder and offering me their help to pull myself together. 

Things changed for the better when I started high school. You know the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower? (It's my favourite of all time, by the way). I was a wallflower myself, but a very lucky one, because, like Charlie, I found the most amazing group of friends ever. 

Even though I already knew some of those people (including my best friends), I finally understood that I was not the only one who was hurting. I started having REAL conversations with them, about the good and the bad, and feeling like somebody thought like me helped me a lot. Despite all the fights and tears, I felt like I belonged somewhere. 

I learned so incredibly much about myself and about the good and the bad there is in people.

I learned to hug and be hugged, to have the courage to express my problems, and to do my best to help out my friends in the hard task that is growing up. 

I am so incredibly grateful for that experience of community.

Now that I'm in college, it's way harder to stay in touch with these incredible people. But it's necessary to me; so I try my best to call and have meals with them whenever I can!

I'm also meeting a lot of new people at school, and I'm starting to form a really nice group of friends. We usually meet at lunchtime and have amazing conversations. Hopefully we'll also be able to form a  lovely community together :)

In the online world, I am also a part of a community! 

"The Peony Project is a community for women who love Jesus, love blogging, and are looking for a common space to share ideas, encourage one another, and make real, honest friendships with one another."

I was barely a blogger when I joined The Peony Project. I'm still a baby blogger, but these ladies have been helping me a lot with making my blog a space to express my thoughts and beliefs! But The Peony Project goes way beyond just blogging: those amazing women pray for each other, share their worries and concerns, and I feel close to their hearts even though I live so far away from them.

If you relate to the sentence above, please click the link and join; I'm sure you won't regret it!

What does community mean to you?

love,

Mariana