The Blonde Rosie Blog is a place where I can share my everyday life and be transparent. This includes amazing shampoo or mascara that you need to try or some new morning routine I have incorporated into my schedule that others may find helpful. Being transparent means that my life is not all rainbows and sunshine or happy hours with friends and my hair and makeup being perfect. I love to go makeup free on the weekends and am committed to dry shampoo during the week.

I had dreamed of moving out of my little small town since the minute I moved back home after college. After months of thinking about it, I finally leaped and just did it. In some ways, I thought it would fix my depression, anxiety, my loneliness and it did in some ways. However, my mental health is not where it should be and moving to Philadelphia did not fix all of my “problems”. Moving to a new city without a roommate was a bit scary, but I did love the independence it brought with it. I know this year will teach me a lot and I will be able to grow as a person. I like to be alone and need a bit of alone time each day, but waking up to an empty apartment on a weekend is a bit scary because most of the time, there is nothing to do!

I have been getting better at reaching out to friends first to make plans, but I also understand that they have routines and plans before I moved to town. Laying around on the couch watching Netflix all day sounds great in theory, but after hour three, I start to get restless. During the week after work, I go to the gym for a few hours so I don’t sit around being bored. On the weekends, I am bored, but not that bored to be in the gym all day! The first few weeks in Philly alone were difficult, but now I have a routine in place and I am accepting that boredom is actually a good thing.

How I am making boredom a good thing, not something I should feel bad about…

When I get home from work, I immediately rush down to the gym in my building because I don’t want to be bored as if that is the worst thing in the world. After a bit of self reflecting, I realized why I don’t like to be bored and why I fear it. Simply put, after weeks of therapy with my mother and self reflecting, I have come to the conclusion that I have abandonment issues. It’s like have FOMO, but instead of being sad about missing out on the fun, my brain starts to ask questions like “But why wasn’t I invited?” “Do they not like me?” “Will anyone ever like me” ETC. Having thoughts like this time after time can be detrimental to my health and let it get to be so bad that the negative thoughts were in my head constantly and I needed medication to make them be quiet. Now when I lay on my couch in a big, cozy blanket watching Netflix, I program my mind not to feel guilty. This relaxing time is something I need to do, not something to do because there is nothing else to do.

Be lazy, but then make a plan for something….

Okay, so I was in bed watching Netflix for 3 hours on a Sunday morning, but now I need to do something else so I don’t feel like I wasted a day. What I started to do on the weekends is to go for a walk everyday and explore a new area. The old me would have been terrified to do something alone like this, but now I am forcing myself to just walk around the block and see what happens if I turn left. There is a Target near my apartment, so I spent a weekend walking around the Target for an hour before I actually went in and found a few nail salons in that direction. We find great things when we are not trying! I spent another weekend exploring Rittenhouse Square area did some window shopping. I take each walk as an adventure and I am never sure what I am going to find. It is so much better than laying on the couch wondering why no one likes me…