About Me – Page 28

Categories: About Me

The Liebster Award

Last week, my good friend Melissa nominated me for the Liebster Award. I’ve been nominated for this award before and I love it because it has a fun set of rules to complete. Normally, I bypass blog awards but the questions Melissa left for us to answer were awesome and I really wanted to answer them!

The Rules

1. Each person must post 11 things about themselves.
2. Answer the questions that the tagger set for you plus create 11 questions for the people you’ve tagged to answer.
3. Choose 11 people and link them in your post.
4. Go to their page and tell them.
5. No tag backs!

11 Things About Me

1. Talking on the phone terrifies me.

2. I have been at the finish line of every single one of the races my mom has completed. That’s 34 races, including the half-marathon she ran this weekend. I don’t love spectating, but I do love being able to cheer her on.

3. I have a raging sweet tooth.

4. Push-ups are my favorite strength exercise to do. They make me feel so strong!

5. I am awful when it comes to confrontation and talking about my feelings in person. On my blog? No problem. But in person? I’m awful at it.

6. I give every book 100 pages to grip me. But if I’m bored with the story and not interested in the outcome by page 100, I abandon it.

7. I overthink and overanalyze every single situation in my life.

8. I cannot seem to sleep past 8:30am anymore.

9. All I can think about lately is going on a cruise. I’ve been looking up 4-day cruises for April or May but it would still cost me close to $500 and I’d rather go on a longer cruise in the Fall. Sigh. First-world problems and everything.

10. This blog and the friends I’ve made from blogging make my life a billion times better.

11. This will be my first Valentine’s Day with a valentine. Ever. 🙂

11 Questions

1. Why did you start blogging, and more importantly why have you chosen to continue it over the years?

I started blogging because I wanted to write and tell my story. In the beginning, it was to document life at college and my teaching internships. I wanted to have something to look back on. I’ve moved on from there to a more personal blogging niche and I continue to blog because it’s one of my passions. I couldn’t imagine my life without blogging and I love being able to look back on all the things I felt were important to me at different parts of my life. It helps me to see how far I’ve come.

2. What was the ONE most important moment of 2012 for you, and why?

Tough question! 2012 was a crazy year for me. I think the most important moment was the month I took a complete break from social media and blogging. It forced me to stop pretending everything was okay and get really serious about my feelings and the path my life was taking. I was focused on the present, living fully in the moment, and I feel like I found myself in that month.

3. If you were on a deserted island and could have any three things, what would they be?

Hmm… Ryan Gosling would suffice. What more would I need? I guess I would also like a suitcase full of books and a toothbrush.

I never know how to answer these kinds of questions. I would be a mess if I ever ended up on a deserted island, that’s for sure.

4. What is your current favorite song that I should be listening to?

Seriously, Melissa? Queen of all things music? I feel silly recommending music to you. My current favorite song is Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” and yes, my taste in music is terrible. SO WHAT.

5. What is one favorite blog post you have written?

I think my very favorite, right now, is my post titled “On Worthiness.” I continue to refer back to it when I find myself feeling insecure about things in my life and it’s just one of those posts I wrote directly from my heart.

6. Name one of your guilty pleasures.

Chocolate.

7. If you could give a piece of advice to yourself when you were 15, what would it be?

Oh, 15-year-old Stephany. My heart aches for her. She was this lost, insecure girl with no idea of how amazing and wonderful she was. I would tell her to trust herself, be her own best friend, and realize how amazing she is right where she is right now. Being popular or having a boyfriend doesn’t make someone amazing (though it feels that way when you’re in high school!), being true to who you are and loving yourself makes someone amazing.

8. What book are you looking forward to reading in the near future?

Kristy’s Great Idea. I just found out that The Baby-Sitter’s Club books are available on Kindle. So. I’m on a mission to reread the series. Yes. At age 25. I just hope they are as good as I remember them!

9. Tell your readers something they may not know about you!

I went home early from Prom because one of my contacts ripped and it was irritating my eye too much for me to enjoy myself even a little. How’s that for an exciting Prom story?

10. You’re told you have to drop one of your social media accounts. Which one, and why?

Facebook. I would delete my account now, but my book club has a page where we discuss book picks and make plans for our meetings so it’s a necessary evil I have to keep in my life for now. I rarely go on and when I do, it’s usually only to see updates for book club.

11. What is one thing you could truly not live without?

Reading. Books. The written word. I could not imagine a world where I couldn’t read on a daily basis.

11 Questions For You

1. If you could travel to any country in Europe and spend a month living there at no cost to you… what country would you choose?

2. What do you love most about yourself?

3. What did you do for your last birthday?

4. Who has been the most influential person in your life thus far?

5. What’s your favorite food to snack on?

6. What is your biggest pet peeve?

7. What’s the next step for you, career-wise?

8. Recommend a blog to me! Whose blog should I be reading and why?

9. What’s the scariest thing you’ve done in your life?

10. In your opinion, what celebrity is overrated?

11. If you could have a role in any show on TV currently, what show would it be and why?

11 People to Tag

1. Nora from Walking with Nora

2. Lauren from Her Silent Musing

3. Elizabeth of E Is Random

4. Kristen of Life By Kristen

5. Kyria of Travel Spot

6. Krysten of Why Girls Are Weird

7. Gina of Gina Marie Rose

8. San of The In Between Is Mine

9. Amber of A Little Pink In the Cornfields

10. Mandy of Knowing the Difference

11. Becky of Love Everyday Life

… and anyone else who wants to participate. I hate tagging memes because it excludes people so seriously, do this post if you want! If you read my blog, I think you’re super awesome and you deserve this award! 🙂

Categories: About Me

Siesta Sister Scripture Memory Team: Verses 1 & 2

This year, I’m taking part in Beth Moore’s Siesta Sister Scripture Memory Team (how’s that for a mouthful?). Basically, the premise is memorizing 24 Bible verses in a year’s time. On the 1st and 15th of the month, a post on her blog goes live where she gives us the verse she’ll be studying for the next 15 days and then participants leave comments with their own Bible verses. Currently, there are 11,000 women participating! Isn’t that amazing? I think it’s incredible and I’m so excited to spend this year diving more deeply into memorizing Bible verses and making my faith a more active part of my life.

For my first verse of the year, I chose one that I’ve been turning over and over in my head for months.

“For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not until the law, but under grace.” Romans 6:14 (KJV)

I’m really attracted to the meaning of grace. The bare bones of the definition is getting what we don’t deserve. It’s the entire basis of faith, at least for me. This free, uninhibited love that God pours out to us. We are undeserving of it, yet no matter how many times we mess up, how many times we fail, how many times we fall – God’s still standing right there, open arms. I want to get this word tattooed on my skin – and I’m dead serious when I say that. The word grace means so much to me, because of how very often I need it.

And no, I’m not trying to be Ms. Super Christian with a King James translation of the verse, but I pulled up this translation and the word dominion stuck out to me. Dominion. Rule. Authority. Control. Influence. Power. SIN has no POWER over me. No authority. No control. No dominion at all.

It gives me goosebumps.

For my second verse, which I’ll be memorizing for the next 15 days, I chose this one:

“So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 (HCSB)

One of the tenants of this challenge is to choose verses that hold a lot of meaning to you. Something that deals with what you are going through right now. It makes the memorization more meaningful. I had to hurry and find this verse, as I completely forgot about it until I saw Beth Moore’s post yesterday morning. But it still holds a lot of weight and meaning to me. I know I can tend to get caught up in the day-to-day, in the struggles, the triumphs and the pitfalls. I can get so bogged down in it. This verse is about keeping our eyes focused on the hope we have in Jesus Christ.

I know I can get so worried about the little things, worried I’m not living up to my potential or people don’t like me or I need to do more, see more, be more but when it all comes down to it: I’m doing the best I can. I am enough. All of this is temporary. My focus needs to go back to the One who is forever.

Categories: About Me

2013: My Theme For the Year

I mentioned before that I participated in The Holiday Council 2012 with Molly Maher of Stratejoy. This is my second year of participating. Last year, I didn’t fully dive into the worksheets and challenges and I wanted to really focus on completing this course this year. After all, I paid money so I can’t let it go to waste. The Holiday Council, for those who are unaware, is 3 weeks of dreaming and scheming for the new year. Between brainstorming worksheets, the special Facebook group where community is formed and dreams are revealed, and the weekly one-hour training calls, you review the good and bad of the year and begin to unravel and discover what you want out of the following year. For someone who geeks out over goal-setting and planning worksheets, it fills me with so much joy and passion.

One of the major pieces of The Holiday Council is creating a theme for the year. I’ve done this in years past, where I develop one word I want my year to embody (2011’s was risk while 2012’s word was health). This year, though, I wanted to find a theme to wrap my year around. Something that isn’t vague but focused, something that embodies all the different priorities I have for the year.

After much deliberation, going back and forth on different themes (“Embrace the Moment!” “Believe in Myself!”), it was as I was writing down my top priorities for the year and seeing a common thread.

do the work

I desperately want this upcoming year to be one of change. Change in my physical health, in my social life, in the way I attack writing projects, in my finances, in my dependence level on my mom. How do we change? One of the mantras that has always stuck with me is something Dolvett, a trainer on The Biggest Loser, constantly chants to his team: Hard work. Dedication. That is how we change. By putting in the work and being dedicated to the cause.

I know I am not broken, nor do I need to be fixed. I know my self-worth comes directly from me – not from being skinny or having lots of friends or snagging that super cool writing project. I want to achieve those things and I want to chase after them because they are important to me – but I know the Stephany of the present is good enough. She is vibrant and lovely and beautiful. She deserves the best out of life.

Do The Work means focusing on losing weight and being healthier. It means exercising regularly and to stop letting laziness fuel my tomorrow. It means stepping out of my comfort zone to ask girls I could see myself being friends with on girl dates and forming relationships. It means being more social, and opening myself up more to new opportunities. It means getting serious about freelancing and writing a novel. It means putting myself on a strict budget and sticking to it, as I figure out a way to afford a car and pay off my medical bill from that crazy ER visit two years ago. It means a year of less sugar, less shopping, less travel.

Another part of The Holiday Council is these interviews Molly has with ridiculously awesome individuals. One interview was with Ash Ambirge of The Middle Finger Project who said that one of the things she does to evaluate her year is to think, “What makes me feel like an asshole for not accomplishing this year?” I thought that was just so great because seriously: there are goals we set for ourselves and when we don’t complete them, we do feel like assholes! (I love how honest she is!) I can freely admit I feel like an asshole because I’m ending the year heavier than when I began it. I feel like an asshole for being stupid about the way I spend my money. I feel like an asshole because I’m 25 and just now realizing how much I depend on my mom for so much. I feel like an asshole for believing in the lies that my writing just isn’t good enough for publication.

I don’t want to feel like an asshole about these things in 2013. (And wheeeee, this is the most curse-filled post I’ve ever written!) I want to focus on the above for this upcoming year as I embark on a year of change. A year of doing the work that needs to be done to change.

One of the fun challenges Molly wanted us to do is to create a vision board. I’ve actually never created one but I’ve always wanted to. I sat down with a stack of magazines (since I don’t subscribe to any magazines, I had to make do with my mom’s Good Housekeeping and her one copy of Women’s Running Magazine that she received at a race, ha!) and starting tearing out pages that spoke to me. Celebrities that I adore, pretty flowers, words that inspire me, foods I want to incorporate more in my diet, people exercising. And a wrinkly little dog because he’s too cute!

Not too shabby for my first time, especially since I’m not the most creative person ever. Also, I feel like I should mention having Zooey Deschanel front and center. I actually didn’t realize that was her until later… I just loved the picture so much since it exudes happiness and health and light.

Do you have a theme – or a word – for 2013?

Categories: About Me

NaNoWriMo: Lessons Learned

So, NaNoWriMo is over. And I completed it. It took me just 21 days and I wrote a novel. I’m still in a state of disbelief that I did it. I finished it. I had had two miserable failures before so there was this niggling fear it would be too much for me to take on. Or that I really wouldn’t enjoy it and it would feel like another job.

FALSE.

A) It was a breeze to complete
B) I never had trouble finding time during the day to write. I only woke up early twice for the specific purpose of writing and never was up late to finish my daily word count.
C) I had SO MUCH FUN with it. I never realized how much pure joy and pleasure I derive from writing.

I thought for today I would share some lessons I learned during my journey to 50,000 words:

Writing comes naturally to me. I think there were maybe two days where it was a struggle to get the words down. (And this was mainly because I was also watching TV while writing. I am someone who needs complete silence to write.) I didn’t succumb to any type of writer’s block and the words flowed well. It helps that I knew I was writing this story for fun and it was my first novel so the pressure to write anything life-changing was off. I don’t think it’s one I’ll want to edit and try to get published. So I wrote for the specific purpose of just getting the words down and writing a novel. I wrote without an outline and it felt natural and true and right.

I need to outline. Yeah, so I wrote an entire post on writing without an outline and how I liked the process of it in early November. Remember? Which I think was fine for the purposes of this novel. For the type of novels I want to write, they need to be around 100,000 words so I know I’ll need to outline the plot much more deeply so the character development happens more naturally. I think it will give me a more focused plot and conflict, as well.

I need to do more writing exercises. You know the ones I’m talking about. All those mundane writing exercises you had to do in high school English or college-level composition classes. The ones that seemed pointless and ridiculous. I never much liked them, really. They always seemed to be busy work and not a real reflection on the writing process. Well, folks, I’m here to tell you that your English teacher is not off her rocker. There is a reason for these writing exercises and they force you to take a good look at your surroundings and write about all those little details you otherwise miss. I plan on taking next year to read through One Year to Writing Life and gaining a better appreciation of writing and prose.

I take more mental pictures. I’ve found myself more deeply appreciative of nature and my surroundings. I’m studying the sky at different times of the day to memorize the colors and the way the clouds lay. I’m doing more people-watching and eavesdropping on conversations and studying their nuances. One of my weaknesses in writing is scenery because it’s something I tend to skim when I’m reading novels myself. But I also know it helps readers to picture the story and the scene in their mind and it’s something I need to hone. I find myself more aware of where I am and what’s in front of me and what I hear and how I feel. All my senses are alive and I want to capture that and do more sensory writing activities.

I won’t write unless I make myself. Well, duh. Knowing I had a deadline of writing 50,000 words in 30 days lit a fire in me to sit down every day, usually for an hour to an hour and a half, and hammer out 2,000 words. I work better under pressure, better under looming deadlines. Without them, I don’t know what to do with myself. I go months and months and months without writing anything. With my blog, I have put myself under a deadline of writing 3 posts a week. Using Google Calendar, I spend a few minutes at the beginning of every month creating a tentative blogging schedule and it keeps me focused on what I want to write about and since I’m a stickler for routine, it helps me keep my M/W/F schedule. I need that same schedule when it comes to my fiction writing. I need deadlines and word counts and routines. I want NaNo 2012 to be the turning point in my fiction writing, I don’t want it to stop here.

This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I enjoyed the process of writing so much. I know I’ve said it before but I was always a bit fearful of the actual writing process. I just loved creating plots and characters, writing backgrounds and daydreaming. I am a major research nerd and the research part of writing thrills me. With the story I wrote for NaNo, I went in with a vague idea of a plot and characters. I know my novel will showcase some inconsistencies based on the fact I didn’t use an outline or research anything at all. I just wanted to write the novel and what I discovered was how much I love writing. Pure love. And one day I will do this for a living.

Categories: About Me

On My Twenty-Fifth Birthday

Today is my 25th birthday.

This past year has been a really good one. I visited three countries, went on two cruises, traveled to two different cities. I went on my first plane ride, visited my favorite family in Georgia, and experienced my first broken bone. I had my first real heartbreak over a boy, grew closer to blog friends, and moved my blog over to self-hosted WordPress. (I can’t recommend Doniree and Whiskey Cloud enough if you want to make the switch. She is my absolute favorite.) I joined a new Bible study and just recently, a new young woman’s book club. I went on a low-sugar diet for a few weeks and realized how much I’m capable of when I put my mind to something. I started therapy, saw my baby cousin have a baby of her own, and celebrated my nephew turning four. I wrote a novel.

There were low moments: the heartbreak and the broken bone being among them. Struggles and mistakes happened at work that had me questioning myself. I began to wonder why I didn’t seem to have it all figured out. What was my purpose in this life? How do I attain happiness on a daily basis, when my job is such a struggle? Can I learn to love myself where I am now? Who is Stephany and what makes her special?

Every year brings about growth, learning experiences, and exciting adventures. My year was no different. I definitely feel like I am finally coming into my own, finally realizing my own power and learning to be content in the place I am at now. Life is never perfect. There will always be a part of my life that I want to change. And that’s okay.

The hardest month of twenty-four was August when I was dealing with the aforementioned heartbreak, as well as major work struggles, and trying to come to terms with my mom dating again. I sat down one night when I felt the most hopeless and listened to the introduction video of Stratejoy’s Fierce Love course. I adore Molly Maher. I think she has such a bright mind and she has helped me sort through pieces of my life and yes, she’s just great. She said something that night that has stuck with me ever since. It made me bawl right there in the chair because they were words I desperately needed to hear when I felt like my world was crumbling and I was screwing up this “life” thing.

I am not broken. I do not need to be fixed. I have all the tools, power, and resources around me to be the woman I want to be. I just have to hone into my power and recognize its worth.

(And yes, this is paraphrased and added onto. This was the gist of what she said.)

It’s something that caused a shift in my thinking. I won’t say my entire life turned around after I watched that video but over the course of the past few months, I’ve gradually begun to understand who I am becoming and growing more comfortable with myself. It’s caused me to adjust what I want from my dating life (and be okay in my singleness), figure out where I want my career to go next, and find the simple joy in the everyday.

Twenty-four has been a crazy ride. I have big plans for twenty-five. I want to continue stepping outside my comfort zone, take another cruise, pay off my medical bills, train for a half-marathon, lose all this pesky weight, and move out on my own. I want to write more novels and seek out freelance assignments. I want to buy my first car and travel to see blog friends. Most of all, I want to continue on this path of self-love and acceptance.

Twenty-four was amazing. And I just can’t wait for what twenty-five has in store for me.