exotic not erotic

A series that I created based on the sexual stigma that surrounds the female body. I wanted to look at the beauty of the female form and how it links to the natural beauty found within nature.

Sophie xxx

Not knowing how much to share

I feel a lot and I feel very deeply. I think about things even more.
Sometimes I feel unbelievably low and sad and worried and generally unhappy and I am never sure how much to share- especially with the people that I am closest too.
For some reason it is so much simpler and easier to share emotions and thoughts and dilemmas with people that you do not know personally. It's easier because those people are distant. They may be impacted by your words or feel comforted that they are not alone in feeling a certain way, but their lives are not directly impacted by mine, and therefore I do not have to worry about my actions or feelings having a direct impact on their actions or feelings/ or affecting a relationship (because it's ultimately non-existent/ very distanced.)

People that I am closest too are, and relationships can be affected, and this is why it is tricky.

I have moments in which I feel incredibly awful- sometimes for a reason, sometimes not. Understandable. People deal with things differently.

I don't ever want to make the people around me, the people that I am close to and feel strongly about feel bad because of something that I am feeling. I do not want to make others feel sad, I do not want to make others feel worried or concerned about me, I do not want others to feel that they desperately must try to entertain me to make me feel better when I am not doing my best. The difficulty is, that I do want those people to understand. If I do not explain my worries or my sadness or my concerns then I feel distant, and not really myself. I feel that if I don't explain things or show how I am really feeling, then I'm not being truthful to the people that I care about most.

 I want to be positive around people and I want to answer "Oh yeah, I'm doing great, I'm having a really lovely day and I have lots of positive things to look forward to" when people ask me how I am, or what my plans are and I KNOW that there are lots of positive things to look at and lots of happy things to focus on and that at some point I most definitely will feel really great and will have a really lovely day- but the thing is, sometimes it feels completely impossible to focus on those things.

Somebody particularly close to me often says that it's just a mindset, and I totally agree. The trouble is, when your mindset is automatically negative, it's not as easy as merely telling yourself to smile and think about happy things and go and do something fun and then it'll all be ok. These things help, sure- but they don't necessarily solve when you're stuck in a sad cycle. People that don't struggle with intense sadness perhaps will not be able to understand what it's like to get to 3 o clock and feel uncomfortable and sad (If this is the case, that's amazing and I, along with many people are extremely jealous.)

So this is my dilemma. I do not want to have a negative impact on anybody else's life, nor do I want to be viewed as a pessimistic or overly negative person, however I know that sadness is often a big part of me, and that I don't always know how to deal with it and that I want people to understand me for me.

When I'm feeling low and people close to me ask me how I'm doing, I don't know whether to answer positively just try to cope with the real feelings without impacting others lives and without making people think that I'm being dramatic and overly pessimistic. Or whether to answer truthfully if I am feeling low, and let people know that sometimes I'm actually not doing too well.

What are your thoughts?

All my love xxx

Glitter sweet

Hazy monday

Gotta remember the things that make you smile. My mouth is dry and my head is fuzzy. Just breathe it all in and then throw away the nasty bits. Take each day slowly, don't expect too much. Listen to loud music and such. Keep hold of your profound thoughts, they've been lacking.

Much love on this hazy watery Monday.

Frenchie summer loving

France, I love your fresh bread with every meal and the poetic voices and the pancakes for dinner and the endless double cheeked kisses. You're pretty special. Thanks for letting fall a little bit in love with you.

Hey little girls, the pictures aren't real.

Social media is flooding out of our ears and reflecting back endlessly into our eyes and it's just sort of growing into a huge sticky puddle of prettiness.

It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool that we can tap a few buttons on a screen and zip our precious pretty pictures all over the internet for other people to ogle over. It's pretty cool that we can share thoughts and emotions and connect with people from all over the place and post images and words whenever and wherever we like. It's pretty cool but it's also pretty scary and mostly, pretty inaccurate.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to go a day without scanning over a photograph of a tanned flat-stomached beachy babe posing with a green juice, or a perfectly set up selection of colourful healthy food that looks more like a painting than something edible. We obsess over other people's lives online, checking to see what people are up to, checking to see where they are, who they're with, what they're eating, what they're wearing. The trouble is, social media doesn't give us an accurate representation of people. Sure, we can gather roughly what a person looks like, where they spend their time, what they like to eat. But really, the proper human being can't really be discovered through a series of brightly coloured photographs.

The people that we spend so much of our time staring at, are not real. They are a tiny snippet of a version of themselves. People don't post photographs of themselves at 6 in the morning as they roll over with knotty hair and puffy eyes to grab a sip of water. They don't post pictures of them sitting down when their tummies pooch out a little at the bottom. They don't post pictures of the peanut butter sandwiches that they slap together in 2 minutes before running out the door to go to work.
People post what they want you to see. They post things that are pretty- the best versions of themselves and the best versions of their lives.

Scrolling through an Instagram feed, you would assume that people live in gorgeous bubbles of happy prettiness. The thing is, on social media, you don't see people with all their demotions. You don't see them move or smile, you don't see the real texture of their skin or the movement of their hair or the wrinkles on their faces. You don't see people living, you see flat people. And these 2D people are only fragments of what it is to be a living breathing human being.

Pretty pictures are great. Really super great, and I love them. But it's important to remind yourself that a pretty picture is just a pretty picture. You can't base your opinion of a person's life on their beautifully constructed Instagram feed.

Share your pretty pictures babes, but hold onto all your realness too.

DON'T DISREGARD YOUR EMOTIONS

You know those really dramatic thoughts that crawl into your brain at 10 PM? (It's most probably later for you. Could be earlier. Could be consistently. For me 8 PM is the uncomfortable hour, and 10 PM is when I suddenly need to write it all down.)
Those thoughts are scary and overwhelming and really important to observe and listen to. I think that humans spend a lot of their time pushing their deep thoughts even deeper because they're really quite tricky to know how to hold and get along with.

I haven't mastered the whole control thing quite yet.

Things that help (A collection of suggestions from myself, and from some other wonderful humans that like to make me feel better)

- Write all your thoughts down in a book. For me, when I write things down, they're taken out of my head and put somewhere else. It's kind of like clearing up (but for your brain...) Shove everything down on paper- you can keep it, or you can proceed to scribble all over it and crunch it up into a little ball to throw into the bin in the morning. Whatever works for you. Mum always had a handy newspaper on hand to dramatically rip up in the bathroom. She said that it always made her feel better.

- Observe your emotions but don't let them drown you. Crying is totally healthy, but try not to do what I do and bottle everything up for ages before exploding into a crying fit that makes you feel as though you'd quite happily fall into a little hole and stay there for the rest of your life. (Also, the headaches are banging. Does anyone literally feel allergic to crying?)
Watch your emotions, flow along with them, think about them logically, continually remind yourself that everything is temporary. Don't do anything stupid, just watch, embrace and breathe (A LOT.)

- Get outside even though you don't want to. (I'm rubbish at this). Throw on some clothes, take a stroll into the garden or down the road. Try and connect with something green- I think that nature helps because sometimes there just seem to be too many humans around.

- Eat some good food. Healthy? Not healthy? Whatever you want. Don't feel guilty. Treat yourself to something amazing. Treat your insides and your brain and feel warm. Just be really super duper kind to yourself.

I think that people should work on being kind to themselves. If you look at how far you've come, it's probably really quite impressive.


Thanks to all the amazing human beans that wrote me gorgeous words and made me feel SO much better. Sharing helps- bear that in mind too :)

LOVES
S xxx