I have gotten a lot of comments recently like "have you written anything lately?" "something is missing from my timeline...it’s your blog posts" "do you still have your blog?"
I have written a lot of things lately, I haven't shared them, I just renewed the rights to my blog back in August.

Over the course of quarantine, I have not felt super inspired to write in the way that I used to. If I'm being honest, sometimes I don't know what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not allowed to say. It seems that no matter what, someone gets offended and or someone just must share their unwanted opinion. Needless to say, inspiration has been lacking. A sentiment we can all relate to these days is looking in the pantry or fridge for something to jump out at you that you are interested in eating, but nothing does because you have been cooking and snacking at home for the past 7 months. Food isn’t even exciting anymore.

This time, the inspiration that I have been searching for did not jump out at me in the form of a snack I have been craving. It dawned on me as I was watching my coffee mug go around another time in the microwave and I looked down at my left wrist and saw the words “Love Yourself”.

A lot of people used this quarantine time to do something productive in the form of starting a small business, fulfilling a dream, discovering a new passion, excelling at work, writing a book… or just continuing their blog. For me, I decided to be productive in another way. I decided to be productive in the form of learning to love myself. This all started back in June when I purchased this little bracelet with those 2 simple words. Love Yourself. Easier said than done.

As soon as that little bracelet sat on my wrist, as hard as it was, I started putting myself first and making myself the main character of my life. I immediately began making decisions about my life for myself and to benefit myself. This included several things that I had never done before including ending a severely toxic relationship where I was constantly left with crippling anxiety always wondering if was good enough or going to even get a text back. Never being loved enough for who I was, never getting the love that I truly deserved, and constantly feeling like something was wrong with me. I knew that this was going to be difficult for me, as I have never ended a relationship on my own terms before, I looked at my sister and my closest friends the night before and I said “it isn’t going to be easy for me, but I’m going to do it and I’m going to need you guys to support me” and they did and they still do, they never left my side.

Shortly after this incident I decided, after many years of struggling, to reach out to a doctor about my mental health. All those sleepless nights, the days when I could not pull myself out of bed, the days I could not make eye contact with friends, the countless amount of times I have been made to feel like something was wrong with me, finally made sense. After talking to my doctor for 10 minutes she could already tell that I was suffering from high-functioning anxiety. She prescribed me medicine, something that I was very hesitant to accept. But she explained it to me like this; “people with diabetes can’t just will their diabetes away, they need insulin to help. Anxiety is the same way, you can’t just will your anxiety away. You need to take this medication to get your serotonin levels up where they need to be and then we can start to ween you off the medication slowly. But you need to start before you hit rock bottom”.

Every day I remind myself to “Love Yourself” and take the little white pill. And every day that I do that, I am one step closer to getting better. I have truly never been happier.
My body and brain finally allow me to feel the feelings that I had previously been blocking out because they weren’t “comfortable” or “familiar” which would just cause periods of numbness. I have started putting my energy into relationships that are good for me as opposed to relationships that don’t deserve me. I’ve found a new love for the outdoors, I’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen, I’ve spent more time with friends and family in the form of monthly and weekly dinners. Because I can “feel” again, I have reconnected with my creative side, writing poetry again, creating videos, and I have even taken up film photography.
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I choose to love myself every day so that I can be the best version of myself for the good people that I have in my life and so that I can continue to do the little things that bring me so much happiness. Maybe I haven’t been productive with writing [this blog] these past several months. But I have been very productive with learning to love myself… again.  

I've never been stung by a bee, knock on wood. And for that reason I have what I would call a very rational fear of them, [what others might call "irrational] because I don't know if I am allergic. I'm not allergic to anything, except for cats and silicone, so I have 100% convinced myself that I am allergic to bees. Call me dramatic now if you want, but you haven't even read the rest of the story yet. 

One day, a few months back, I walked into my bedroom and spotted something out of the ordinary just sitting on my hardwoods. I have really bad eyes, at the distance I was looking at it it could have been a piece of lint or it could have been a rock for all i know. I approached with caution, only to discover that it was in fact a wasp. I called to my roommates who came running from their room with wads of toilet paper, they scooped that sucker up, flushed him down the toilet and no one ever spoke of it again. 

A few months later, around 2 am, I was laying in bed watching Netflix when I saw something out of the corner of my left eye. It crawled out of the blinds on my windows, flew over my head, and disappeared behind a frame on my wall. Another wasp. I flung my blankets off of me and sprung from my bed sprinting to my roommates room crying wasp again! We cautiously headed back to the scene where we searched for 20 minutes hitting things, moving things, making noise, trying to scare the guy out of his hiding place. But nothing. 

At this point, I'm starting to panic. I'm panicking because what if I sleep in my room tonight and the wasp comes out of hiding and stings me? Nobody believed I had a wasp in my room so they wouldn't hear me gasping for air and I would die. Or what if I just took too much Melatonin and I hallucinated seeing the wasp? I decided to sleep on the couch that night, but I didn't get much sleep. As I laid my head down and covered myself with a blanket, I heard a buzzing in my right ear. It couldn't be what I thought it was, could it? The wasps were in my room, I was safe down here. Or so I thought. 

The next day I woke up and my roommates were going to Niagara Falls, leaving me in, what I had convinced myself to be, a wasp infested house. Before they left we made sure to check all of the windows in my room. I've had wasps before, back before we got our windows redone I had a wasp nest in my window. We checked them all, but found nothing.

I avoided the house and my room as much as I could that day, I was still in shock from the unwanted friend who flew over my head the night before, and was very unprepared to see another one. Despite my fears, I ran into my unwanted friend once again. Only this time, he was on my hardwoods, in the same exact spot that I found the other wasp a few months back.

Now I was freaked out, but I had to get this wasp out of my room while he was already down, before I could start playing Nancy Drew. I worked up the courage to scoop him up for probably a solid 7 minutes and used a whole roll of toilet paper to do it, but I did it. I faced my fears and killed the wasp, I'm single. 

Things were starting to make sense to me now. I had found 2 wasps in my room. I had also noticed a silhouette of what looked like some sort of bug in between my blinds and my windows. It had been there for a few weeks, the cleaning ladies apparently missed it on multiple occasions. I pulled back my blinds cautiously only to reveal the body of, you guessed it, a dead wasp. 

I checked both of my windows again to ensure that there were no wasp nests in either one of them. There was nothing. Either there was a hole somewhere and that's how they were getting into my room, or the nest was in the walls. I shared both theories with my roommates, they still didn't believe me, but they got up on the later outside anyway only to discover a swarm of hundreds of wasps near the area where our house meets the extension of our house which just so happened to be connected to my room and the family room. 

We had discovered the root of the problem, but the wasp saga did not end there. The exterminator came out at least 3 times and sprayed multiple times and multiple rooms. I swear, every day for the month of September and even into October we found a new wasp or 2 just flying around. I tried to convince my roommates to just burn the place down and start over completely. 

The wasps were really angry at this point too, they fought really hard to live this long after we tried to kill them multiple times, now they were out for revenge. One day I came home and entered my bedroom after a few days of quiet, I thought the war was over, but I heard the loudest buzzing I had heard and I knew one had returned. I called for help and I stayed in my room with my eyes on the prize. But before help could arrive I lost sight of him and I didn't hear him anymore. Maybe he had overexerted himself and died, maybe we were safe, so I called off the guards. 

But then I looked up, only to see the largest wasp I had ever seen crawling on my wall like he owned the place. I shouted again and help came running, pushing me out of the room and into the hallway to safety. This wasp put up a fight, he was flying all over and buzzing and wasn't giving up. After a long, hard battle, we stomped the shit out of him and flushed him down the toilet with the rest of that exterminators career. 

After the battle, we completely tore apart my room. The exterminator had come out and sprayed 3 times but we were still finding wasps, there had to be something else. Sure enough, we filled in 3 additional holes that day and I haven't seen a wasp in my room since. 

Since the wasp incident, I haven't really slept well. I have very vivid dreams of wasps flying at my head, I'm probably just making it up in my mind. But every now and then I will hear some buzzing and think they're back or I'll see something out of the corner of my eye and my whole body will freeze, taking me back to that first night when the wasp crawled out of my blinds and flew above my head.

Nothing like some early twenties trauma, amiright? At least I'll go down in history as the girl who cried wasp... and was right about it.

​Lately,
I’ve been thinking a lot about shoes.
Someone once told me,
“It doesn’t matter what shoes you wear,
Nobody is looking at your feet.”
 
But shoes make or break an outfit.
Shoes make you feel confident.
 
Not once,
Until recently,
While putting on my shoes,
Did I think:
“but what if I need to run?
How fast will these shoes carry me?”

There is a place in Canada that looks otherworldly, I’m sure you’ve seen it on Instagram. An influencer is perfectly posed in a canoe, on water as flat and clear as glass, with mountains in the background and cool blue skies. She probably doesn’t have a hair out of place, her outfit doesn’t have an ounce of dirt on it, and her hat is completely secured on her head.
 
We’ve all seen this photo and we have all wanted to go. And so, I did. [To be fair, I’ve been wanting to go since before I saw it on Instagram, but that’s neither here nor there.]
 
We did our research, we booked our hotel, secured our flights and our shuttle and off we went.
 
1. July is peak season in Banff. It is supposed to be their "summer" and it is the time of year when most tourists are in the park. Keep this in mind when booking your trip, that with peak season comes peak prices. It was almost impossible to find a direct flight so we had a 12 hour travel day in an odd order, but we got there eventually and it didn’t break the bank. Also keep in mind that you can't fly in to Alberta. You have to fly into Calgary and then take a 2 hour shuttle trip into Banff National Park to where you are staying. You will have to book your shuttle in advance of your arrival date because you need to have a reservation. I would recommend using the Brewster Express. 

2. You don’t need to stay in the fanciest hotel. In fact, you probably wouldn’t even want to if you really knew how far away they were from everything. The Fairmount Banff Springs is about a 15 minute, uphill walk from downtown Banff, or you can wait to take the shuttle up there. The Fairmount Chateau at lake Louise is over an hour shuttle ride outside of downtown Banff. Of course, you’d be staying on lake Louise so what more do you need. The Banff Ptarmigan Inn is the perfect spot to stay. It’s reasonably priced, in the heart of Downtown Banff, located right next to Good Earth Coffee house and right across from a shuttle hub stop (more about the shuttle later). The Banff Ptarmigan Inn gives you that at home feel when you’ve come back cold and tired from a long day of hiking. That’s all you really need when you’re thousands of miles from home. 

Again, I will say that peak season comes with peak prices and not a lot of hospitality options. Before we found the Banff Ptarmigan Inn the most reasonably priced option was an RV parked in the RV area of the park that someone was renting out as an AirBnB. Consider that your warning to book quickly and early.
 
3. The girls you see on Instagram all done up look great, but they must have a lot of confidence because literally nobody else looks like that. I mean there is a little bit of everything but most people are in hiking apparel and its not exactly what you would call "mountain chic". It’s fine and great to want to look your best, but just as you dress for the season, not the weather, I’d recommend you dress for the location and not your Instagram feed. 

4. There are 17 hours of daylight in Banff. The sun rises at about 5 AM and sets around 9:40PM. Be prepared to eat at odd hours of the day and drink a lot of coffee or tea. 

5. Pack a rain coat. And probably a winter coat. But you also might want to pack shorts, tank tops, and short sleeve shirts. 

6. Take a lot of photos, but also make sure to appreciate the beauty of the world through your own eyes and not solely through your phone screen.

7. Be prepared for bears, moose, and mountain lions. Going to the mountains is like going into the ocean. You are a guest in their home, and the wildlife is always home. Respect that and respect them. 

8. That being said, don't hike alone. Actually, most of the trails are recommended that you are with a group of 4 or more. And other trails its mandatory that you are with a group of 4 or more, or you will be fined. The trails near downtown Banff are easy and welcoming for all hiking levels, but the further you get into the National Park, continue with caution. Someone once told me, when I was at the peak in the Smokey Mountains, that "this is the safest you will ever be." And I believed that, and still do, because at the top, a lot of things can’t get to you. But it’s good to keep in mind that the mountain lions can see you, you just cant see them. 

9. Public Transportation is a must. Banff utilizes a transport system called Roam. When we first chose this location for our adventure we assumed that everything would be in walking distance, but we were wrong. We had to utilize the Roam shuttle almost every day. It is free and easy to use especially because when booking at the Banff Ptarmigan Inn they provide you with your own bus pass for the entirety of your stay. 

10. As with all trips, do your research so you know what you are getting yourself into but also go in with an open mind. Not all trips go as according to plan. 

The other day at work I said something along the lines of “I can’t figure this out, I’m so stupid” and my friend looked at me and said “Don’t talk about my friend like that”.

​I started thinking about how often I hear people in my life say negative things about themselves.
 
“I’m so fat”
“I hate my body”
“I drink too much and I hate myself in the morning”
“I have a shitty personality”
“I’m losing my hair”
“I hate that I'm dependent”
“I hate the sound of my voice”
“I hate that I care so much about what other people think of me”
“I hate that I take things so personally”
 
I could keep going but I won’t, I'll just leave you with this; I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but if other people can love us for the same things that we hate about ourselves, I think that we can try to learn to love ourselves too. 

I haven't written anything in awhile and it's not really because I haven't done anything that’s worth writing about, it's because I don't feel like I have the time to take the time that it takes to write. I think this is because of the way society conditions us to think; Society tells me that I have to go to work every day and then I have to come home and work out, get things done around the house, run errands, etc. So I go to work, I drive home in rush hour traffic, I come home and I exercise and by the time that is all finished I am ready to take a shower and get in bed.

I read all the time that you need to take an hour for yourself each day and i think about this often. What do I do for myself each day? I forced myself to exercise because I've been told to think that that is what I need to do. But if I don’t necessarily enjoy exercise, then is that really taking time for myself? I don’t really think so.

Little bits and pieces of my blog have been popping up here and there; at a graduation party one of my quotes from I Don't Mean to Brag But I Be Like...Doing It Anyway was displayed as a centerpiece on the table, and that’s a nice reminder that this blog, my very own little escape, still exists and maybe I should make time to write more often.

A few days ago my super talented friend took time out of her life to paint me and asked if she could post it on her design Instagram. She said that she usually posts the photo with a quote said by that person and asked for my favorite. Because I haven't written in so long, the only quote I could think of was the one from the graduation party, so that is the one I provided her with. It reads “When you’re happy with what you’re doing and where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how many bad days or how many rough moments you have, because the good always outweighs the bad”. 

She said it took her awhile to finish the paintings of me because she hasn’t been home a lot. But the point of it all is that she still started them and finished them because she made time to do it. She said she didn't mind that it took her awhile because she had fun doing it and she loves to draw and create. Despite being busy with whatever life would throw at her, she still took the time to do the thing that she enjoys doing. 

She inspired me to take at least some time out of my life to write. Because even though it is so easy to fall into the routine that is almost robotic of going to work, coming home, working out, doing things around the house, running errands, etc., I still need to do something for me, something that makes me happy. Even if I can't have a full hour out of every day, I'm still taking the time. 

You can check out the drawings below and check out more from @designsbycaitb by clicking the link!

I’m really happy, it’s not because of a man and it’s not because I won the lottery, and I just want to brag about it a little.

In the past month I’ve saved so much money on Starbucks because I don’t feel the need to “treat myself” every other day of the week just for surviving one day. I used to literally bribe myself with coffee.

In the past month I’ve spent so little time scrolling through social media. In fact, I hardly have time to touch my phone throughout the day. Sometimes I’ll hop on Instagram just to see what my favorite celebrity is up to or to see if there’s a new giveaway I want to enter or I’ll get on Twitter just for a quick laugh. But over this past month I haven’t sat and scrolled through social media longing to have someone else’s life because I have been so caught up and so busy with my own life.

In late February, about a month ago, I started a new job and the next chapter of my career. It has been a major adjustment. The hours are different and the job is demanding. Every day is a challenge, every day I struggle and I make mistakes, and every day I get stronger personally and professionally. I don’t find myself bitching and moaning constantly, I don’t find myself complaining. I literally find myself laughing and smiling and thinking to myself “I love my team and I love this place”.

Never in my life have I thought I would be that person who says “I love my team” and I certainly never thought I would be that person that wants to purchase for myself a company sweatshirt, and yet, here I am. I think it’s because for the first time in a while I’m genuinely happy and proud of where I’m at.

This is not to say that I wasn’t happy before the job change. But I do think before I was just going through the motions of life. Waking up, going to work, coming home from work, going to sleep and doing it again the next day. I was spending a lot of time with my head down either just getting the day’s tasks done or looking at my phone and not enough time enjoying my life and being present in the moment, even if in that moment I am in an office working.

In the past month I’ve had a lot of good days and a few bad, and a lot of rough moments and a few great ones. But what I’ve realized is when you’re happy with what you’re doing and where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how many bad days or how many rough moments you have because the good always outweighs the bad.

SO- I’m sorry if I don’t snapchat you back, if I don’t like your Instagram post, if I take 3-5 business days to text you back. I’m just really busy focusing on my clients, my career, and probably making snarky comments and laughing with my coworkers. And most importantly I’m just really busy being happy.