where have I been, life updates & a chat about future

Hey!

I’m back and better than ever! Or at least more relaxed and inspired for future. 🙂 In this post I wanted to give you some life updates, chat about what’s new in my life, where I’ve been these past couple of months, and tell you a bit about my plans for the future.

where have I been & some life updates

I wish I could tell you excitings stories about stealing ancient artifacts from the bad guys, running on top of moving trains, traveling the universe with aliens, or something of the sort. Unfortunately, my life has been very ordinary.

The truth about why I wasn’t posting on my blog is quite simple; I felt I wasn’t making content that anyone really enjoyed or found useful. My solution was to disappear for a bit to gather my thoughts, then come back when I’m ready to offer something worthwhile.

As you can tell from my previous post, I finally opened my own shop!

Let me tell you, it took A LOT more time, effort and frustration than I expected. I already had a registered business, but I still had to buy supplies and packaging, create lots of products, do marketing and social media research, create brand graphics for all social media, take and edit thousands of photos, write shop policies and product descriptions, create an inventory spreadsheet, make receipt and return forms, and do a multitude of other things that came up in-between. Honestly, I would love to write more about my shop and how it feels to start your own business; is that something you’d be interested in?

In these past couple of months I’ve had a few life changing realizations that might help you, too.

I’ve always had issues with social anxiety, though it has gotten a bit better during the pandemic. One seemingly stupid thought that has helped me overcome some of my anxiety came from a random tweet which said something like “most men are just some guy”. It made me think about the fact that most people are just… People. And that just because they might have opinions about me doesn’t mean I need to listen to them. I know, it sounds very simple, but seeing how that tweet resonated with people made me think some of you might find it helpful, too.

A thing that has helped me deal with my perfectionism was creating an EA Games account to play Tapped Out. Hear me out!

I wouldn’t consider myself a huge gamer, but I do like to play some games in my free time, like The Simpsons Tapped Out. I always assumed that my town is not as good as other people’s towns, and I always felt it could be perfected. However, after I befriended random people on the game and saw their towns, I realized that my town is far from being the worst out there. That experience made me think that maybe, just maybe, I had internalized the mindset of “other people have it better” and it was actually quite flawed. Sure, there’s always someone out there who has a seemingly better life than you, but that might be an image they’re projecting for the world!

These are the simplified versions of my thoughts, and I’d love to write about them more in the future.

Other than that, I got fully vaccinated against the current boogeyman, nearly melted during the July heatwave, wore no makeup for two months straight, and enjoyed a safe-ish trip to Ikea to get some kitchen stuff. (I highly recommend getting their knife sharpener, as well as salad dryer; we’ve been using them like crazy these past couple of months! Also, their pans are actually very nice; I bought a huge wok pan for about 10 euros and it works very well.)

my plans for the future

I have many plans for the future, but today I can only talk about the plans I have for the rest of this year.

The plan for the blog is to rework past posts and stick to a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday posting schedule. I’d also love to start posting on my socials again, since I’ve neglected them for a long time. I have a question for you: what types of posts do you want to see in the future? Do you want more beauty tutorials and reviews, or would you like to see recipes, book reviews, and other lifestyle posts, too?

My goals for the shop are to create more products and work on building a following for my social media. I’m currently working on autumn and Halloween collections which are coming out next week, and sharing around three posts a day on my shop’s Instagram @shopsweetspiderlily. ✨

Besides working on my shop and blog, I also want to spend some energy on self improvement. So far I’ve restarted learning Czech and studying marketing (for myself, not school), and I’m pushing myself to exercise three times a week. I know all of these things will help me in the future, but it’s hard to find the energy and motivation to do them, you know?

I’d love to share life updates more often, though I want to skip the part where I leave the Internet for three months straight.

#QOTD: What’s new in your life? How was your summer? Leave a comment, I’d love to chat!

Until later,

xoCaligo

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This is not a sponsored post; all opinions are my own. I am not being paid to promote anything.