I have not written a new entry in a year. If it isn’t too obvious, this lovely little blog is on stand-by; perhaps forever, perhaps for a few months, perhaps for a few years. All I know is that, at this crossroads in my life I am far far too busy to keep up with it.
Still, I felt I owed my loyal and/or curious readers an update and explanation before I say farewell for now (also note that I wrote most of this half a year ago, but life kept me too busy to post it until now).
Am I still Happy? Yes. Am I happy All the time? No. I felt the need to write this entry for a number of reasons, but one is that while ReLove Plan.et has always been about being light and fluffy and optimistic and positive, I feel it has left out the “Fine Print” as I have come to like calling it.
So, today, I am going to share some overall points, thoughts, ideas, and ramblings of recent Life Reflections—but particularly regarding the work that I have done here on the blog.
First, I have to start by saying that I am overly grateful and blessed to know that I have helped others through this project. It is a feeling that I cannot put into words and leaves me overwhelmed with the warm fuzzies inside. This blog has served a purpose, and it shall remain here for others to enjoy and happen across at their own leisure—even if there will be no new content.
Alright.
The Fine Print.
Positivity is great, but it’s not perfect.
Thinking Positive is a lovely concept, a magical idea, a wondrous notion. But it isn’t perfect. Not by a long shot. And I’ll tell you why.
Positivity can help, but you can’t be positive ALL the time. If you are, then you’re really just burying a lot of other perfectly natural human emotions, errors, reactions, and general energy-flow. Feeling negative about something is a pretty natural reaction. Feeling sad, angry, or any other “negative” feeling has it’s place. It’s better to feel those feelings than to just think positive and magic it away (again, i.e. burying the problem).
The problem with a Positive Mental Attitude is that it can catch up with you. I mean, how long can you expect to keep up something like that? I don’t want to say PMA is pretending. But it kind of, sort of is. We smack a smile on our faces and pretend everything is happy go-lucky, with the intention to fake-it-’til-you-make-it. All very lovely sounding in idea, not so great in practice. The problem is that it catches up to you. All those negative feelings you’ve been denying yourself end up surfacing ten-fold.
And that’s not to say that PMA doesn’t work at the time, it certainly can. For me, it worked rather beautifully for a long period of time. I genuinely felt happy. I fuelled that happiness with PMA every single damn day. I was on top of the world. But… it caught up to me. As I said, how long do you really think you can keep that up for? When I crashed, I crashed hard—as I generally tend to do. And that’s not to say that I didn’t still bounce back up again—also as I generally tend to do. But PMA is simply not a long-term concept for most people, and there comes a time when we have to accept all parts of ourselves. There is a balance to our emotions and feelings as I’m discovering for myself. There is a place for everything.
The Dark Side of Ourselves.
Over the last year I’ve come to realize something very important about myself: I have a dark side. But not just me. We all have a dark side. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is human nature to have raw, natural, human emotions. We are meant to experience them, not simply sprinkle magic fairy dust with a big wide smile to make it all go away. We are meant to feel those parts of ourselves. We are meant to Accept those parts of ourselves.
I’ve read some amazing quotes and parts from books lately. The ones I was able to dig back up are posted below.
My point is, that negative emotions aren’t bad, and we can’t think positive all the time. That’s not to say we can’t feel positive after feeling something negative; I certainly don’t encourage you to dwell in a negative headspace forever, that is dangerous and bad for your well-being. Balance. Balance is the key to everything now isn’t it?
Feeling angry? Then blast that metal music and throw some fists in the air. Happy music simply won’t do in a moment like that. Feel the emotion—allow yourself to experience it and allow it to tell you what you need to know—then you’ll be much better equipped to release it once you’re done with it.
Art is my healing form. If I’m feeling upset about something—whether it be a melancholic feeling, or an angry feeling (or a mix of both)—I start drawing. I start drawing while listening to some pretty angry, aggressive music. This is where a darker art collection of mine has begun to surface and a new side project (which I eventually plan on piecing together into an art book). And I feel much better after I’ve done them. Clearing out the negative feelings through constructive action is far better than just using PMA. Through this process I am able to actually experience the negative feeling and allow to tell me something I hadn’t realized, or teach me something new about myself or about life.
It’s a form of constant healing, permanent yin and yang. And life is simply not quite complete without it in some ways.
Life isn’t always rainbows and unicorns. But it can be pretty dandy.
I don’t want to say that Life is Easy. A lot of the articles I have written pertain to being positive, to always seeing the bright side, to just think happy happy and it will cure everything. Obviously, everything I have ever written is much more complex and I dive quite deep into many ideas and concepts to help you live a happy life. But, life isn’t rainbows and unicorns ALL the time. And that’s okay. Similarly, the article I wrote about “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay” makes this point well. But what I want to add again to this, is that life isn’t always easy. If you want life to be amazing, you better believe you’re going to have to work hard at it.
Maybe you’re one of those lucky people where happiness comes quite easily. I envy you—and I am also very happy for you. But, maybe you’re like me: maybe life is difficult; maybe to get a smile on your face it takes a lot of tugging and forcing. If you are one of those people, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean we can’t be happy, it just means we may have to work a little harder at it. It may mean we have downward swings more often than we’re happy with. It’s still okay. Because there’s always another day. There’s always another way to look at life, to learn something new, and to keep trying. There are also happy days—and these days are causes for huge moments of gratitude; don’t forget the gratitude! Gratitude=more things to be grateful for.
The thing is, if you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (like I am, and like a lot of people are) then you’re going to feel Everything on a much deeper level. Your highs will be the happiest highs; and your lows will be absolute misery. Such is the gift and the curse of feeling so deeply. But do remember that it is a gift.
I Cannot Help You. (Sort of)
Although I am gracious that I have so many lovely individuals turning to me for help and advice, put simply: I cannot help you. In the past, I have tried to reply to as many messages as possible, but I simply cannot keep up (just as I cannot keep up with new content for the blog). I am also a terrible procrastinator, so, honestly, I am sorry, but replying to individual messages tend to get swept under the river of other works and projects and jumble of my life. In the end, they sadly do not take priority. Why? Firstly, I am not a professional, and, as I have tried to repeatedly urge my readers to do throughout this blog, please seek help when and if you need it (and even if you don’t need it)—it will do you wonders! Secondly, my life is very busy. Very busy. I am an ambitious person and currently all my time and energy is going towards drawing and writing, working towards being a successful Artist and Writer. This is done mostly in my spare time, between orders from my three etsy shops (and markets) and having to get a part-time job to survive. Whatever time is left over, I try to put towards a currently-fairly-lacking social life.
Any help that I have left over is also spent on friends and family, in open discussions. Which is another point I’m getting to. Any advice, any writings here, really, are meant to be interpreted to your own individualistic needs. Everyone is different. I cannot emphasize this enough. Everyone’s needs are different, everyone’s coping methods are different, everyone’s interpretations are different. That is the beauty of being your own person and living your own unique life. I encourage you to take these ideas, to bend them, to shape them, to expand them, to explore them, to discuss them, and to keep keep growing. Always.
So, I cannot help you. Sort of. As previously mentioned: the content of this blog will forever be here for you to use to your liking—and I might add that there really is a lot of content here! All the help I have to offer, really, can be found in the hours upon hours of blog content still available right here. And it’s not because I don’t care about your problems, it’s just that, as I said, I only have so much time and answering every message takes more time than you think.
Thank You!
I shall end by saying, thank you for all your support and love and readership. I hope you revisit the content on this blog whenever you feel you need a boost or if you’re missing new content. All these lessons are worth revisiting—even I find them helpful and interesting, and I’m the one that wrote the articles!
If you’d like to keep up with me I still post to the ReLove Plan.et Facebook page. I’m on Instagram. And you can also check out my art pages.
I will also share a new post soon on how you can keep up with my life for those interested—another of those side-projects I was mentioning. ;)
https://www.facebook.com/ReLovePlanet/
https://www.facebook.com/biancaloranart
(Personal) https://www.instagram.com/reloveplanet/
(Art) https://www.instagram.com/biancaloran/
So, with that… I love you all, and to all, a good night (or day)!
Still, I felt I owed my loyal and/or curious readers an update and explanation before I say farewell for now (also note that I wrote most of this half a year ago, but life kept me too busy to post it until now).
Am I still Happy? Yes. Am I happy All the time? No. I felt the need to write this entry for a number of reasons, but one is that while ReLove Plan.et has always been about being light and fluffy and optimistic and positive, I feel it has left out the “Fine Print” as I have come to like calling it.
So, today, I am going to share some overall points, thoughts, ideas, and ramblings of recent Life Reflections—but particularly regarding the work that I have done here on the blog.
First, I have to start by saying that I am overly grateful and blessed to know that I have helped others through this project. It is a feeling that I cannot put into words and leaves me overwhelmed with the warm fuzzies inside. This blog has served a purpose, and it shall remain here for others to enjoy and happen across at their own leisure—even if there will be no new content.
Alright.
The Fine Print.
{The Fine Print.}
Positivity is great, but it’s not perfect.
Thinking Positive is a lovely concept, a magical idea, a wondrous notion. But it isn’t perfect. Not by a long shot. And I’ll tell you why.
Positivity can help, but you can’t be positive ALL the time. If you are, then you’re really just burying a lot of other perfectly natural human emotions, errors, reactions, and general energy-flow. Feeling negative about something is a pretty natural reaction. Feeling sad, angry, or any other “negative” feeling has it’s place. It’s better to feel those feelings than to just think positive and magic it away (again, i.e. burying the problem).
The problem with a Positive Mental Attitude is that it can catch up with you. I mean, how long can you expect to keep up something like that? I don’t want to say PMA is pretending. But it kind of, sort of is. We smack a smile on our faces and pretend everything is happy go-lucky, with the intention to fake-it-’til-you-make-it. All very lovely sounding in idea, not so great in practice. The problem is that it catches up to you. All those negative feelings you’ve been denying yourself end up surfacing ten-fold.
And that’s not to say that PMA doesn’t work at the time, it certainly can. For me, it worked rather beautifully for a long period of time. I genuinely felt happy. I fuelled that happiness with PMA every single damn day. I was on top of the world. But… it caught up to me. As I said, how long do you really think you can keep that up for? When I crashed, I crashed hard—as I generally tend to do. And that’s not to say that I didn’t still bounce back up again—also as I generally tend to do. But PMA is simply not a long-term concept for most people, and there comes a time when we have to accept all parts of ourselves. There is a balance to our emotions and feelings as I’m discovering for myself. There is a place for everything.
The Dark Side of Ourselves.
Over the last year I’ve come to realize something very important about myself: I have a dark side. But not just me. We all have a dark side. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is human nature to have raw, natural, human emotions. We are meant to experience them, not simply sprinkle magic fairy dust with a big wide smile to make it all go away. We are meant to feel those parts of ourselves. We are meant to Accept those parts of ourselves.
I’ve read some amazing quotes and parts from books lately. The ones I was able to dig back up are posted below.
My point is, that negative emotions aren’t bad, and we can’t think positive all the time. That’s not to say we can’t feel positive after feeling something negative; I certainly don’t encourage you to dwell in a negative headspace forever, that is dangerous and bad for your well-being. Balance. Balance is the key to everything now isn’t it?
Feeling angry? Then blast that metal music and throw some fists in the air. Happy music simply won’t do in a moment like that. Feel the emotion—allow yourself to experience it and allow it to tell you what you need to know—then you’ll be much better equipped to release it once you’re done with it.
Art is my healing form. If I’m feeling upset about something—whether it be a melancholic feeling, or an angry feeling (or a mix of both)—I start drawing. I start drawing while listening to some pretty angry, aggressive music. This is where a darker art collection of mine has begun to surface and a new side project (which I eventually plan on piecing together into an art book). And I feel much better after I’ve done them. Clearing out the negative feelings through constructive action is far better than just using PMA. Through this process I am able to actually experience the negative feeling and allow to tell me something I hadn’t realized, or teach me something new about myself or about life.
It’s a form of constant healing, permanent yin and yang. And life is simply not quite complete without it in some ways.
Life isn’t always rainbows and unicorns. But it can be pretty dandy.
I don’t want to say that Life is Easy. A lot of the articles I have written pertain to being positive, to always seeing the bright side, to just think happy happy and it will cure everything. Obviously, everything I have ever written is much more complex and I dive quite deep into many ideas and concepts to help you live a happy life. But, life isn’t rainbows and unicorns ALL the time. And that’s okay. Similarly, the article I wrote about “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay” makes this point well. But what I want to add again to this, is that life isn’t always easy. If you want life to be amazing, you better believe you’re going to have to work hard at it.
Maybe you’re one of those lucky people where happiness comes quite easily. I envy you—and I am also very happy for you. But, maybe you’re like me: maybe life is difficult; maybe to get a smile on your face it takes a lot of tugging and forcing. If you are one of those people, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean we can’t be happy, it just means we may have to work a little harder at it. It may mean we have downward swings more often than we’re happy with. It’s still okay. Because there’s always another day. There’s always another way to look at life, to learn something new, and to keep trying. There are also happy days—and these days are causes for huge moments of gratitude; don’t forget the gratitude! Gratitude=more things to be grateful for.
The thing is, if you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (like I am, and like a lot of people are) then you’re going to feel Everything on a much deeper level. Your highs will be the happiest highs; and your lows will be absolute misery. Such is the gift and the curse of feeling so deeply. But do remember that it is a gift.
I Cannot Help You. (Sort of)
Although I am gracious that I have so many lovely individuals turning to me for help and advice, put simply: I cannot help you. In the past, I have tried to reply to as many messages as possible, but I simply cannot keep up (just as I cannot keep up with new content for the blog). I am also a terrible procrastinator, so, honestly, I am sorry, but replying to individual messages tend to get swept under the river of other works and projects and jumble of my life. In the end, they sadly do not take priority. Why? Firstly, I am not a professional, and, as I have tried to repeatedly urge my readers to do throughout this blog, please seek help when and if you need it (and even if you don’t need it)—it will do you wonders! Secondly, my life is very busy. Very busy. I am an ambitious person and currently all my time and energy is going towards drawing and writing, working towards being a successful Artist and Writer. This is done mostly in my spare time, between orders from my three etsy shops (and markets) and having to get a part-time job to survive. Whatever time is left over, I try to put towards a currently-fairly-lacking social life.
Any help that I have left over is also spent on friends and family, in open discussions. Which is another point I’m getting to. Any advice, any writings here, really, are meant to be interpreted to your own individualistic needs. Everyone is different. I cannot emphasize this enough. Everyone’s needs are different, everyone’s coping methods are different, everyone’s interpretations are different. That is the beauty of being your own person and living your own unique life. I encourage you to take these ideas, to bend them, to shape them, to expand them, to explore them, to discuss them, and to keep keep growing. Always.
So, I cannot help you. Sort of. As previously mentioned: the content of this blog will forever be here for you to use to your liking—and I might add that there really is a lot of content here! All the help I have to offer, really, can be found in the hours upon hours of blog content still available right here. And it’s not because I don’t care about your problems, it’s just that, as I said, I only have so much time and answering every message takes more time than you think.
Thank You!
I shall end by saying, thank you for all your support and love and readership. I hope you revisit the content on this blog whenever you feel you need a boost or if you’re missing new content. All these lessons are worth revisiting—even I find them helpful and interesting, and I’m the one that wrote the articles!
If you’d like to keep up with me I still post to the ReLove Plan.et Facebook page. I’m on Instagram. And you can also check out my art pages.
I will also share a new post soon on how you can keep up with my life for those interested—another of those side-projects I was mentioning. ;)
https://www.facebook.com/ReLovePlanet/
https://www.facebook.com/biancaloranart
(Personal) https://www.instagram.com/reloveplanet/
(Art) https://www.instagram.com/biancaloran/
So, with that… I love you all, and to all, a good night (or day)!
If you found this article to be helpful, please consider a small donation or visit the shop. Thank you for your love and support.
Love how you've always kept it real, even if the blog focused on the more positive aspects of news.
ReplyDeleteReLove Plan.et always brings back wonderful memories because it's the very first vegan/ veggie blog I ever followed! Hoping this year brings you nothing but the best.<33
❀ VEGETARIAN COURTESY ❀
aww thanks love! Very sweet of you! And that makes me feel awesome that this was the first veg blog you followed! :D
DeleteWishing you all the best for 2016! xo
First off, I want to thank you for giving us an update on what is going on. I also want to thank you so so very much for your blogs and video blogs!!! You really changed my thinking on a lot of things and for that I am so grateful to you. It makes me sad that you are not going to be doing this; at least for now anyway. I understand though. I hope someday you will pick this back up again in the future and surprise us all. lol I have learned a lot from you. Your advice; I have taken to heart and really listened. I read books you recommended and found some awesome music through you too. You rock! I also agree with that quote from "Way of the Peaceful Warrior" about letting your emotions flow and then let them go. So true. I don't know if you know of Danielle LaPorte or Ariel from the band Icon For Hire, but if you don't, you should totally check them out. They are both very inspirational as well. ;) Lacey Sturm has her solo album called "Life Screams" coming out in February and has released her first single called "Impossible", which is now one of my favorite songs. She still screams like a beast! I love it! lol I have bought some of your artwork. It is so beautiful! You are very talented! I wish you happiness and continued good luck on your creative projects and hope to hear more from you in the future.
ReplyDeleteLove, Peace, & Happiness!!!
Love, Kayla
Aww thank you so much for such a heart-felt reply Kayla! <3 It will never stop meaning the world to me to hear that I have at least been a part of people's stories and changes through the work I have done here. Who knows where life will lead me next, so who knows if the blog will start up at some point in time again.
DeleteThank you thank you!
xo
~Bianca
Hello Bianca!
ReplyDeleteI am really sad to read that you don't have the time to post new writings,
but i understand you.
I think it is really difficult to get a right balance of your own and the
needs of your surrounding social life.
After all i just want to say THANK YOU for your love, you touched me deep
within, you influenced my life a lot.
You gave me the push for going vegetarian and now i am on a good way on living
vegan.
You were my first vegan blog that i read, too!
I found you through google-ing "Dub FX" in 2011 and then read your blog regularly.
I loved your vlogs with the Flower Fairy Gingerbread Man-Song as video-intro
sound :)
You and Shosh are big role models for me for self-help with difficult feelings.
I wish you all the luck in the world for beeing successful with your art and
living a healthy and fulfilling life!
I am happy that you found your real soulmate!
You're a great and strong woman, be proud of who you are, i think you helped
many more people with sharing your honest words.
Maybe some day i'll find a friend like you here in boring germany ;)
Take care! <3
Greetings from a soulsister named Yve
That is so nice to hear! And thank you so much for sharing and for the kind words!
DeleteWishing you all the best in your own life journey!
<3
~Bianca