Hi guys! It’s been a minute since my last post. A whole month – or really a year if you want to get technical. So, hi. Where should I begin? I’m currently sitting at my desk with a glass of cab sauv, listening to this Nicholar Jaar mix and mentally preparing to pour my heart and thoughts out in this post so I can jump head first into 2016 without any of the baggage I collected in 2015. New year, new me blah fucking blah, but it’s so true right?
As I said in this post, I was traveling most of December and while I wanted to work on the road to make sure I wouldn’t start the year way behind in work (#FAIL), I made the executive decision to not. I’m terrible with creating a work/life balance for myself and after feeling stressed rather than excited for my upcoming trips, I realized that having an expectation of working over a holiday was a huge reason why. I stopped checking my email (sorry, everyone), left posts half-written at home, 86’d cliché holiday gift guides and forced myself to stop making my life a piece of work.
I left LA on the 18th of December, spending a week at home for Christmas with my family and then returned to LA on Christmas night (depressing, I know) to pack for a two-part/two week trip beginning the next day. I took a red eye to NYC on the 26th so I could spend the day there with my boyfriend Ryan and meet his parents (for the first time – eeeeek!). That night, we left on a red eye to spend 8 days in Dubai. We just got home on the 5th and besides that the 16 hour flight from Doha, Qatar back to LAX nearly drove me insane… reverse jet lag is a BITCH. I’ve taken a 3+ hour nap each day since getting home, and I literally never nap. Apparently I’m 26 going on 6 when I’m tired. But, on the bright side: I felt like I had an actual vacation.
(chasing the sunset in dubai with disco shark prince)
It’s rare I ever really unplug and just live my life but something about expensive data and being in a foreign country across the world allowed me and my psycho brain to stop thinking about work and oversharing every detail of my life on social in real-time. I didn’t even bring my laptop! It was amazing, and so necessary to my mental wellbeing. To be honest, I felt kind of burnt out by the end of the year on blogging after trying to juggle it with everything else I had going on in my life… I had unrealistic expectations and was too proud to admit to myself that they weren’t feasible. I was disappointed and felt like a failure for not achieving my arbitrary “goals,” but I’ve also never been so happy or satisfied with my real, actual life away from my work. How does that happen? I was struggling with this disconnect so hard in my head.
Basically, it took a trip around the world for me to see that I was sabotaging myself. Now that I’ve had this little epiphany, I plan to use it as a learning experience and an insight to make more realistic (but still big!) goals and plans for myself and SCB in 2016.
Now that I’ve admitted I bit off more than I could chew for what I had hoped to do in 2015, let’s talk about some of my life highlights for the year. As I said, this year might have been my favorite of life ever, even if I didn’t manage to achieve every single goal I set out for myself. Sometimes when life comes along you just gotta grab it by the balls and enjoy the ride.
- This little bloggy blog totaled over 250k hits – that’s insane to me! Hopefully 2016 will be busier and I’ll total a million or more so I can blast Lil Wayne and rap A Milli from the rooftops. Stay tuned.
- I had purple hair for the entire year, which was a very interesting experience and experiment for me – though I want to let my hair grow out for the time being, I can’t say I won’t do it again one day.
- I worked with various new brands and had some awesome collabs – most notably I wrote a guest post for Benefit Cosmetics and had a fun contributor series for Mode.com in September
- UM, HERE’S A BIG ONE: I sold my house *and made a profit, YASSS* and moved to LA over the summer
- After going to a million shows and music festivals in the last few years, I attended my first as press to cover it for the blog – my favorite one of all time, no less! This was a huge accomplishment for me personally even if it might not seem like a big deal to most people. I go to tons of events as “press” and cover them here, but this experience validated that I can be successful in merging my personal passions with my professional work. :) Can’t wait for more of this in the upcoming festival season!
- Traveled more than I ever have before, and to many new places – from Montreal for my first date with Disco Shark Prince, to Ibiza, Spain for a week in the summer, and of course Dubai to finish off the year. I hope to incorporate more of my adventures and travel content on my blog this year, since I don’t see myself slowing down at all…
- Oh, and NBD but I met this amazing guy who actually finds my flavor of psycho attractive/endearing. He found me dancing my icy little heart out on the dirty dark dance floor of the Yuma at Coachella this spring and the rest is history.
2015: the year StoneColdBetch’s heart was melted and she got a boyfriend. #VOM
As far as my hopes, goals, and plans for 2016 – I’m still working on them. I have some basic white girl resolutions like getting back into shape and traveling and shit like that, but as far as personal goals go – I’m still thinking about what I really want to do with my life this year and how I want to improve myself and grow.
Wishing you all the best for 2016 and THANK YOU, from the bottom of my (not so icy anymore) heart, for supporting me and being a part of my life for the last few years. I am so grateful to have such an awesome community of readers and internet friends by my side as I go through this crazy ride we call life. Love you, mean it.
xx
STONECOLDBETCH 
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