Jordan on the lookout for birds outside her mom’s house.
Ah, so I’m a little late with this.
Initially, I wanted my July recap to go up at the start of August, but this last weekend Jordan and I took a mini vacation (one day) away to visit her family. I wanted to document the trip for a video and I wanted to include the video in this post, even though it technically happened at the start of August.
Covid has reminded me how fragile our lives are and how quickly we can lose the people we love. It’s been a really harsh reminder. So, as much as I wanted to stay present while visiting Jordan’s family, I also wanted to capture it so I could onto it as much as I could. I haven’t seen my own immediate family in months, so I’m happy we have the ability to visit them.
July was an interesting month. It was my first time really getting back into painting. I took some big jumps this month getting into business. I started posting regularly on YouTube again. I shaved my head. I revived this blog. I graduated back in June and yet I’ve been putting money into business courses.
I guess, looking back at it, July was a pretty transformative month. Oh, and Taylor Swift released her best album to date (sorry Red and Speak Now).
For the last half of July, I was pretty focused on working in my sketchbook. It’s not something I do often, especially the way I’m working in it right now. But it’s been enough to warm up all of art-making muscles. I prepped an old canvas with gesso so I’m ready to get back to painting any second now.
It’s really easy to look back at any of the last couple of months and think they were just terrible. And they’ve been hard, I’m definitely not denying that. But there were some pretty good moments in July, if sandwiched between some bad. Or a lot of bad. When I look back at all of the transformation moments in July, I feel a lot of excitement for August.
“Please picture me
In the weeds
before I learned civility
I used to scream ferociously
anytime I wanted.”
Today I sat down to do my weekly reset and remembered with quite a lot of dread that it was actually a new month as well, so I had to do my monthly reset too. I’ll make a whole video and accompanying blog post on my resets and planning in the future, but part of my monthly reset is to remake my desktop wallpaper. Every month (for the last three months) I’ve been creating a sort of vision board to set as my wallpaper for the next 30-or-so days. I’m not super conscious of my wallpapers when I use my laptop. It’s not like I pause every morning before I start work to really think about all of the goals I have displayed on my vision board or anything. But I do look at it every day and I think that casual reminder is enough for me. I mean, on my July wallpaper I had an image of a person with a buzzcut and then I did in fact shave my head so…maybe it works!
I’ll share my wallpaper for August so you can get an idea of what it looks like and maybe it’ll inspire you to make your own. Or not.
Either way, I guess I’m excited for August. I mean, technically, it’s already started, and I’ve already felt super melancholy, but that doesn’t mean it still won’t be a really good month.
