This month was a good one to wrap up the year of 2021 for me. I’m really glad of how I’ve been making progress, especially with my sobriety overall from the last year, but I’m even more excited to start a new year after this one. I have a lot of ideas for photoshoots and outfit ideas for the next year of photoshoots, so that’ll be good for myself to keep persisting and growing creatively. What is significant for this month to end the year also is that I ended up getting this red butterfly tattoo in the beginning of the month, as a birthday present from my dad. My birthday was on the 15th of last month, and I can’t believe I finally got this tattoo! It’s only my second tattoo, but I have both of them on the same arm. I got a bunch of good pictures of the tattoo in this few-shades of red outfit that I put together, and I think this was perfect to wrap up all of this year’s photoshoots as a timeline. I’ve got a lot to look forward to, but it’s all just one day at a time stuff that I’m slowly progressing with. I don’t really have any big plans or anything like that, but I just do a lot of the same stuff at home everyday and go to the same sorts of meetings every week and other than that, I can’t wait to hype up a bit more and see what more I can do with blogging coming up next year. I’ve at least got my rhythm going this year with posting at least once a month, but we’ll see if I get around to doing any more of that eventually. I’ll just keep pushing on and see where I can get to with everything, it’s just really been over 6 years of blogging that I’ve been writing and I just really love Shop For Days with all my heart. Through this year specifically I really saw myself flourish a bit more creatively after I cut my hair on December 31st, and it had gotten pretty long last year so it was crazy to chop it down to my natural hair color! I then finally went back to red hair in June, but I let that fade all the way out and have yet to go back to red again, so there was a couple months of blonde or so that I ended up loving. Now my hair has definitely grown more than I thought it would but I loved seeing how it looks in the past year of blog shoots. I like it dyed definitely more, even just bleached, but I’ve really evolved after I had to kind of start over my hair last year! That’s craziness, but I really love where I’ve gotten to finally. We’ll see what more I get to working on next month and coming up in 2022, I’m excited to see what else I have to do really. So many things left to do with blogging, I hope I get to better express how I’ve progressed and where I’ve really gotten to in the past year of being mostly 22 and finally 23!

The color red has meant a lot to me for a while, like since at least 2018. That was the year that a lot significantly happened and changed for me as well, being the year I kind of took a turn and started getting into the harder drugs in life. Right before that happened, though I had dyed my hair almost completely red, with streaks in it like Xtina had in like 2002 or so. I then went from doing a lot of the stay-at-home stuff with blogging, to taking a hiatus to run away from the house and get high with some people. By the age of 20 though (in November 2018) I had dyed my hair completely bright red, and it was perfect for me. Three years later I have been sober off of all those drugs for a year, but the red really stuck with me and it’s the color I’ll be going back to next month. The other thing about red in 2018 was that I discovered the song Samurai by Vanic with this red butterfly on the cover, and I thought it spoke to me so perfectly with wanting to run away from how it was for me that year and wanting to get this freedom from where I felt I was at. The following year surprised me for learning about freedom, but after a while I finally settled myself down in rehab in September of 2019, where I got sober and again dyed my hair this perfect red. There’s some really nice story pieces in there, if only I had stayed true to blogging going through it but I of course just didn’t and that was a big part of the wanting freedom. I ended up getting this tattoo inspired by Vanic’s Samurai butterfly and the song and the red hair dye. It works pretty perfectly for me, and I’m glad I got it so close to my one-year sober date (off the harder drugs) too! I think it symbolizes a lot with what I can carry with me through my journeys as I go through them. I’m glad I finally got a second tattoo, it means a lot to me!

Change is something that isn’t always there for me, but I really appreciate it when it’s an option. A tattoo is a good example, because this is something that I can have there for me for a long time, with the option to get more as I go even (any time I periodically want that change again in my life). The fact though that it becomes a consistency is pretty cool too. It’s like, every single day I will have this tattoo, but sometimes it’s hidden or peaking out, or I wash my hands and end up complimenting it as I go, it all just depends on when you end up ‘appreciating’ it like that! I’ve been doing the same thing, blogging, for so many years (as I mentioned) and in that time I’ve taken so dang many pictures of myself for my shoots. Since 2015 I’ve been doing this, and until this tattoo I had only had one other tiny one on my shoulder! So it’ll be one of the best changes I’ve ever really seen in my life to have made this decision with this butterfly to change up my appearance like that. I can’t wait to see what ends up happening with it as I go, because I think I’m pretty proud of it. I chose to do the photoshoot for this to be red everything, with a bunch of significant pieces of clothing that I just put together. The red boots are Abbey Dawn, which I wore for a few photoshoots back in like 2016 (and one in 2018 that was awesome, etc) and such, I’ve had these boots for so long! Plus, this red lace shirt that I got from Nasty Gal so many years back I also thought went with this outfit well, and I wore this in at least one shoot like this from 2017, and also at the Teen Vogue Experience that I went to for some professional photographs! The bright red lips ring that I’m wearing in there I’ve also had since I was 15 years old, longer than anything else on there, so that’s pretty cool! Pretty significant red pieces that I included in this outfit, I think that works so well with the new tattoo. Let’s see some more collages!

I still do a lot of the same things lately as I’ve been doing for the past few months. That includes a bunch of meetings and shit like that, and also hanging out with my boyfriend a day or two of each week. I might not have a lot more that has been introduced to my life lately, but I’m not sick and tired of the same old things yet! I love getting ready for the day and leaving the house, and hopefully I can spend more time on my writing and everything too more coming up. I was giving myself a little thinking time for a couple of months or so because I noticed I suddenly had less to say at meetings, and it was usually just all the same, me talking about my day to day life every time it was my turn to speak. So then I took a break from both talking much at meetings and writing too much to get more time with introspection in. Now I feel like I make a little more sense for flow, but who knows where the rest of what I have to think is, and when I can finally have much more to say. Pushing myself to write more soon will fix it I think, because I know I have some things I need to get out into writing whenever I finally can. I’ll always have some things I’ll want to be writing about, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but I always eventually do on one of my blogs or in my journals so that’s pretty good. I’m excited to see how my next few blog posts will turn out, I’m pretty impressed how this one turned out so I think I’ll have some good ones coming up soon for sure. Shop For Days I’ll always be working on, and I have all my ideas still and all the clothing pieces I have left to include in some shoots, so that’ll be awesome; writing is interesting when it’s on this blog because it’s sometimes just what I have to say or just centered around the photoshoot. I sometimes push to write around it or I have this flow that I’m working through, but I’ll always have something to say in between every collage I do, I always really have and I got better at it at one point. I’m really glad about where I am these days and I know I have things to put to words with every shoot I do! I know I’ll always have this picture I paint.

It used to be that I did so many photoshoots in my room, but they never really looked the same to me. In fact, it’s still the same room again at my moms, but they still look so different because of the looks I choose. I’m pretty impressed that they still look the same enough though to be fun to scroll through, like consistency in photography! They’re all about the same with a general understanding of my room and it’s setup and what I do with them, but they’re all so different enough with the looks and outfits that I can really get away with anything. I’m pretty proud about how they turn out, there was like only one or two photoshoots this year I think that I didn’t really love that much but all the rest of them (at least 10 or so) I think turned out really good, and I’m proud of them! It was crazy when I first started living with my mom again because I had so many old photoshoots queued that I had to get through and post (back-date or whatever) so I had that to worry about, but I also did a couple photoshoots in 2020 that went really well with all the other old photoshoots from 2019. That turned out pretty well, and then 2021 was just all about being back in this room and doing all these different shoots around the same place, but all of them turned out well enough for what they were! I’m glad about how I keep persisting, and I even did some of them outside or around the area, but overall I think the timeline looked really good. So that’s a cool thing about the past while that I’ve been living here again, and I can’t wait to see how the next year turns out with my photography and different outfits, with all the options I have too! I hope it all happens how I’ve been hoping it would.

My blue nails were definitely a pop for this outfit. I really love that I’ve been sober for so long, doing my nails all the time, because when I wasn’t sober I used to just go so long without doing my nails and it’s so crazy for how much nail polish I have! I used to really collect a lot of nail polish, and now I do my nails every time they chip (at least 2-3 times a month I think) and it’s something that makes me really happy. The colors I used on my nails this time were Cirque Colors’ NYFW that I got from Ipsy one year, which is a really pretty blue, with Nail Sauce’s (which is an indie nail polish brand from IG) Glitter Blizzard sparkly light blue over the top. I did my nails a couple hours before this photoshoot and it had snowed outside so I was excited about Glitter Blizzard this year. I just have so much nail polish but I hope to eventually finish any of the bottles, but I will love my indie nail polish bottles forever no matter how long it takes for me to cycle through it all. I just for some reason wanted the blue nails for winter, and I passed on making them red because they were just recently red for Christmas, but now that’s all over so I switched to the winter shades. I used to have two big nail polish racks full of polish, but now I’ve switched down to one full rack and a couple bags of nail polish, but that’s it. Not sure if it’s still enough to fill up an entire second one or not but it’s definitely still a lot. I’ll just keep making sure to always do my nails, I really love that they’re always done! It’ll be cool to see how everything ends up when I’ve finally narrowed down my collection more, hopefully with just using any of it up enough or whatever. I won’t need to buy more nail polish for a long time!

Moving on to what lipgloss I used for this photoshoot, it was Underage by MAC Cosmetics, which is of course a ‘lipglass’. I have a bunch of MAC’s lipglasses and lipsticks from back in the day, when I was like 18 or maybe earlier, when it was my favorite brand to buy from! A really cool thing about this year though is I’ve used pretty much every single one of my lipsticks & lip products for this year, at least once! I have so many lip products from growing up, and I just wanted to make sure I used all of them so I did this year and it turned out perfectly. I love every single one I have, and I can’t wait to eventually run out of a lipstick! I can use these up eventually I’m sure. This MAC lipgloss was one of the last ones that I needed to wear this year to have worn all of them at least once finally. I’m glad I got through my entire stack! That second picture shows all of my lipsticks, on that acrylic organizer and in the acrylic container. I really love using up my makeup too, I finish products sometimes that I got from Ipsy and places which is pretty cool. I even ended up taking a break from Ipsy a few months ago to use up some of my skincare, but I’ll subscribe back sometime next year for sure to keep getting more products! I totally see what I have and what I really use and I think everything I have is totally perfect. Anyway, that’s pretty much all I had for today! I’ll see everyone next year for more, have such a Happy New Year! I can’t wait to see what more I have left to do coming up for another full year of content, I hope I get through it well. Thanks so much for reading and there’ll be more coming up too!