Weekly:*Valentine's Day Tribute*

Today is a day that some people dread and other people love. I have contemplated what I should do today for my blog because well, my blog is all about love after all. So, Valentines day is a day that is to be appreciated around here! I decided to ask my girlfriends to write me whatever they wanted pertaining to self love, the love in their life or anything else they wanted. A few of them volunteered and sent me some really heart felt writing. The love I have for my friendships is one that I want to celebrate today. I had a ton of writing of my own that I was going to contribute to this little Valentine's Day tribute but, I decided that my blog is all about me so, today is their day. I owe parts of who I am to them. I owe the steps of my growth to them. I owe ALL of my love to them. Cheers to our highest highs and our lowest lows! I have not one reason to feel as if something in my life is missing this Valentine's day because love is so so apparent in my life at all times thanks to my amazing, beautiful and kind friends. Today I am celebrating them and the amazing people that they are. Here is a look into the people who are a huge vessel of love in my life. Happy Valentine's day!!

-Jordan :)

"This past year I have learned a lot about myself in the means of relationships and love. I thought that you can be unhappy with yourself and still try to make something like a relationship work but that is not the case but that's what it took to realize I needed to be alone and work on my happiness. It takes a lot to be okay and content with the person you are and strive to become. Before you can even have a happy, healthy and successful relationship you have to be happy and content with yourself. Self love is a big thing for me and that is what I'm working on, honestly it's hard but I really believe once you love yourself and are secure with who you are, love can be just around the corner and when that day comes I really can't wait. This Valentine's Day I have an amazing group of friends who I love so much and I'm having the best experiences with the best people around. Sometimes I'll say something negative about myself and my friends say "no! Say three nice things about yourself right now." It can be little things like that that can start the process to accepting yourself and realizing there are wonderful things about you that you and everyone else love. I still have a long way to go but today and everyday I am working on being more kind to myself and love myself more. There's a reason I'm here and once I come to love myself more, it will be like Valentine's Day every day."

- Chloe Clayton (Clax)

"Today is the day of love, the either dreadful Valentine’s Day that you’ll once again spend alone, or the magnificent day for love that you share with a significant other. Either way, you find yourself either happy with someone or alone. But why do we have to look at it as a day to be alone if we don’t have a significant other? The answer is, there is nothing wrong with being alone on Valentine’s Day. Its brought up to be this magnificent holiday that is a reason to by her flowers, or get him a new watch. Whatever you might do for Valentine’s Day, it truly does not matter. Don’t choose to look at it as just another day of the year. Embrace your loved one, friends or even yourself. Myself? Yes, yourself. Do something special for yourself if you don’t have a loved one to share the day with; take a yoga class, get a group of friends together and go see a movie, or even spend time to reflect on yourself and do what makes you personally happy. This year, I am choosing to let go of the past and only move forward. I’m focusing on self-love and how I view myself. I am learning to let go of those who do not give me a 100% of what I deserve. There will be no ifs, ands, or buts this year. Valentine’s Day will be spent with friends and getting a good workout in. This year is about ME, no one else. I will treat myself with the respect I deserve and not let little things like not having a Valentine discourage me. Why? Because you are the only one that can truly please yourself. Let go of the negativity and self-hate this year. Be the you, you want to be in 2018. Make the changes necessary to see yourself succeed in your goals this year. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but it will be completely and utterly worth it. From me to you. Make that change and don’t stop till you are content with where you are at. You cannot love someone else until you love yourself."

With love,

Kendall

"The feeling of total and utter happiness is everything anyone wants. I think generally in life people look for other people, things, or events to give them the sense of contentment and happiness that everyone so desperately looks for. Happiness has never been something that comes naturally or easily to me. Growing up I have always struggled with being able to feel present in a moment and to have happiness as the underlying feeling in general. I always just felt disconnected and like my brain didn't work right. Everyone in life has had times where they feel depressed and like its not going to get better, but having a constant underlay of sadness even in the happiest times of your life is when its something different. Struggling with this mindset is something I have dealt with all my life and I think it will always be apart of my thoughts. Depression isn't a specific thought such as "Im not good enough" or "Im worthless" its more of a general feeling of empty and you can't figure out why you feel like this. Day by day the severity can differ, I would feel better on some days, and then the next morning would wake up and spend the entirety of the day in my bed and not being able to get up. Once you are in one of these moods where absolutely nothing matters and you are completely empty, it is almost impossible to get out of it. Doing fun things that should make you snap out of it sound like hell and there is not anything you'd rather do more than that. Depression can be a mind controlling issue and can warp your thought process for everything. I remember being in middle school and thinking "why should I get good grades if ill be dead before it matters anyways" and this is the type of thought process that becomes normalized for your brain. Breaking out of this thought process is one of the most challenging thing you can do because your brain has been trained to only think this way. The way I have lessoned the bad thoughts and emphasized the good ones is to just replace the bad with the good. Every time I would have a negative thought I would immediately try to come up with something that would make me happy to replace the thought. This helps train your brain to associate the bad with the good and lessen the power that the thoughts can have over you. Using people, things, and places as distractions is what used to help me in the beginning, but once your are alone you just have yourself and your thoughts. Having struggled with depression all my life, it has helped me not take for granted any of the moments that I do find happiness in. Now in my life I still have the bad days, but the good days mostly outweigh the bad. I still can easily slip back into that hole but now I recognize when its happening and I look at everything in my life that is good to stop it from happening. Im with a man who makes me incredibly happy and I am so grateful to be with someone like him. He helps me with the times where there is more bad then good in my thoughts. Depression will be a struggle all of my life, but I think now I am in a good place and have come to terms that it will always be a dark could in the back of my mind. Chasing moments where I feel full of life and completely content is the main thing that helps me focus on the good and the future thats coming. This Valentine's Day I want to remember to love myself as I have been trying to do throughout my entire life."

- Emily Martel

"I am the type of person to devote my whole self in something. In projects I am working on or even relationships I will drop everything to be accommodating to people. Although, I have never been in a serious long- term relationship the short ones that I have had were not very fulfilling and I wasn’t happy. It was always me overthinking every little action and being worried about how the other person was feeling or not getting the type of reassurance I needed. Growing up watching my friends get into relationships with people that were not exactly healthy I had come to realize something. The realization I had made was that to be in a healthy relationship I think you need to learn to love yourself first. This is a hard concept to grasp when you are a teenager or young adult but for me it is something I am constantly working on. In this day and age we are regularly shown on social media a facade of what perfection is or what a perfect relationship is supposed to look like. Without really knowing it I think we all kind of compare ourselves or own experiences to that. Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and for some people that is a day to be happy and flaunt their relationship and for others this day is dreadful. I’ve never had a real “valentine” before but an unsolicited chocolate box and flowers left on my porch (super cute though). My goal this Valentine’s Day and throughout the year is to not dread on the little things. Be aware of the bigger picture and focus on things that make you happy. Having a goal in mind for yourself and keeping that mindset everyday when you wake up is very self- fulfilling once you achieve it. Self love is very important and surrounding yourself with people that’ll make you laugh and lift your spirits is key to helping you reach that. I am very lucky to have met some amazing friends in college that I know can always pick me up when I am down. One of those people is Jordan, she is self- motivated and inspires me to try new things. With the creation of her blog and the energy she has put into it is clear she is going places in this world. So, when February 14th rolls around I suggest you grab some treats, your best friends, something to sip on and cuddle up on the couch to watch a sappy movie that’ll make you laugh or cry because I know that’s what I will be doing."

Love,

Alexis Andersen

"I found myself having a hard time as this Valentine’s Day approaches. I’m sure many many other single people like myself feel lonely around this time of the year. Between the cold weather, seeing couples together, or maybe even not being able to see your significant other on the day of celebrating love, it can be a difficult time. I’ve decided that instead of being bitter, i want to smile through it and reflect on the growth I’ve made in the past 365 days. Over this last year, I went through a lot of struggles. I lost a significant other, a few friendships, and even a little bit of myself. That took a huge toll on my life. These changes caused harsh blows to my self esteem and a lot of daily anxiety and heartache. With support from my friends, family, and most importantly myself, I was able to begin to grow and get through this seemingly never-ending misery. I know that it takes a lot of time to get over loss and betrayal, but I truly have grown so much and can look back on this past year with a sense of pride. I smile more, I cry less, and most importantly I love harder. My love and confidence in myself has grown immensely and I truly am in such a happy and stable place at this point in my life. I’m excited to spend Valentine’s Day just drinking wine and watching the new episode of The Bachelor with all of my friends this year! I know that we can all reflect on the past year and be proud of ourselves for at least one thing or another."

-Emma Richardson

"I wanna start out by saying I really enjoy writing, but when it comes to how I feel it's a struggle. Jordan has had such an impact on my life and was nice enough to ask for her friends opinions on love with Valentine's Day right around the corner and I thought that was super cool so I am going to try and talk about my thoughts and experiences on love.

The first time I felt love towards someone was probably my family. I am not the closest with my family, but I am close enough to where we have a good relationship. I have amazing parents and am so thankful to be raised by them. The second time I felt love was towards my middle school boyfriend haha! Yes I do realize I was like 12, but I had never experienced anything like that before. I had someone who was just as crazy about me as I was about them. It wasn’t the best relationship and its safe to say it took me a while to recover from it. I was so young I didn’t really understand what I was feeling, I just knew it was strong and I felt like if I lost that feeling I would lose everything. When I fall for someone I fall HARD for them so when I didn’t get closure for why that relationship didn’t work, I spent forever wondering why. It low key made me crazy. People may say that being that young you can’t be in love and you can’t fully grasp what love really is, but at that time in my life I thought I was in love. It was also a confusing time for me because I struggled with loving myself. I was really self conscious and I would be lying if I told you I still wasn’t. I grew up with friends who in my eyes were perfect and gorgeous and had everything that I didn’t. I wanted to be anyone but myself. When I started high school it got even worse. I was now single and scared. I needed to figure out how to love myself, but I kept searching for someone to fix me and make me happy.

I will never forget what one of my best friends Tatum Kraft told me. We had just graduated high school and were in Mexico for our senior trip. I had gotten super drunk of course because what else would you do while in Mexico, and I started crying. This still doesn’t make sense to me because I was literally at the beach with my best friends and no worries. I guess something had triggered in me and I lost it. I was sitting in the hotel on the bathroom floor and Tatum comes in and asks what’s wrong. I told her why I was sad and she almost yelled at me because this had been a reoccurring thing. She told me that I need to stop looking for people to make me happy and to make myself happy. I know that this seems like an obvious thing, but it just stuck with me because it was so true. It became clear to me what my problem was. From that point on I tried to work on self love, but it just was not happening.

I went into college with the mindset that I was going to see what happens and not rely on anyone to make me happy. Guess what the first thing I did was? I met this guy the second month of being in college and I fell so hard for him it was a joke. He ended up leaving me for some other girl. So, after that of course I started talking to another guy who pretty much played with my mind and heart for a year. I just couldn’t realize that I deserve someone better and the way I was getting treated was horrible. I then said FUCK guys overall and took a break to just have fun and fuck around with my friends. I am now talking to someone who has treated me better than anyone has ever before and it has only been two months. It is actually really funny because of the way we met. I had joked with my friends that I just want a guy who is black with abs because I am not going to lie, that is my type. I had downgraded when talking to guys and just figured I couldn’t get any better. One day my roommate's friend that she has known since she was like two came over to our house to pick his lights up from the party we had the night before. Like this perfect looking human just walks into my house and I said you're joking that is everything I want haha. Yes I am aware that looks aren’t everything, but they do have a big impact. My roommate then ended up hooking us up and we have been talking ever since. “You ask and you shall receive” or something like that is a saying in the bible and hey, that happened to me in this situation haha! He is a king and I am taking a different approach with this one and it's been going great. I still struggle with feeling like who ever I talk to is going to leave me, cheat on me, get tired of me or just anything to where I wouldn’t be good enough. It sucks because I sometimes feel like a crazy person always worrying about what everyone else is thinking and that everything is my fault. My mom has taught me to only focus on the things that I can control because I can’t control what other people think. I am really hard on myself with everything and I am in the learning process of moving on from my past.

I have really tried these past few years to work on self love and I have made progress. I now realize that the only people you can rely on is God and yourself. I have grown a lot throughout the years and I have my friends and family to thank for that. This year I really want to keep working on self love and just spreading love all around. I have a tattoo that says “Live in the Moment”. I joke about it all the time because I sometimes think it is super cheesy, but I really do love it. It’s a reminder to not hesitate when wanting something. I am focusing on making myself happy this year and doing what I want to do. I have some really good qualities that some people don’t have and that is pretty cool. Overall with everything that I have gone through, I think it has really shaped me to become a better person and I have learned so much along the way and am excited to keep learning. I haven’t been this happy in a while and it is the best feeling because I am in control of it. I don’t feel like it's going to slip through my fingers like I have in the past. I am going into this relationship with a new mindset and its the best thing I have ever done when talking to someone. This Valentines day I now realize I don’t have to put anyones happiness over mine and I am full of genuine happiness."

- Danelle Davidian

"This Galentine’s day, I’m spending it with some of my best gal pals and making sure my best friends and family know how much I love them! No expectations, no stress, just sharing laughs and spreading love! Valentine’s Day is always a great reminder to tell everyone around you how much you appreciate them!"

- Courtney Hakes