The Self-Care Secret Every 20-Something Needs To Know

It seems that penning a 'self confidence' or 'self love' article has become a right of passage for any millennial writer, blogger, and/or selfie taker. Or perhaps, this sense of self acceptance is merely what everyone goes through in their early 20's. Those years of limbo - fresh faced and bleary eyed as we emerge from the last remnants of childhood comfort still afforded to us during the college years. Suddenly forced to figure out what we are doing, where we are going, who we are going with, how we want to get there - all whilst also juggling the insanity of 'everyday' things such as paying rent and making sure to not eat pasta 5 days in a row.

It honestly only seems natural that in a time of such disruption, uncertainty, and newness we would retreat within, to reflect upon the only constant in our lives - ourselves.

Millennial Homemaking

Moving - I've done a lot of it lately.
I always joke that I'm not built to stay in one place too long, and recently I have taken that approach to life to a whole new level.
I left my family home in Ireland to live with some of my closest friends in the Bronx, and now live on the Upper West Side with people I had barely met before. All within the space of two months.

Beauty doesn't have to be pain

Last year I became a vegetarian. At first it was simply an experiment, a test of my will power. I told myself I would only do it for a month. But as the end of the prescribed four weeks came and went, I remained off meat. 

I realised two key things after only a few days as a vegetarian.

1. I wasn't really a big meat eater anyway. The only difference that the deliberate lack of meat in my diet made was that I paid more attention to where I was getting my iron and protein from. Rather than eating a small piece of chicken or fish and thinking that would suffice my daily needs for iron I now eat plenty of dark green vegetables, so much so that my anaemia has actually improved. 

2. I couldn't justify another creature having to die when I could get all of my necessary nutrients and live a much healthier lifestyle on a largely plant based diet. When it came down to it, I could not see how me having a piece of steak for dinner was more important than the life of a cow. 

The second realisation is the one that has filtered into various other aspects of my life. I soon began to question how my life choices, beyond my eating habits, might be damaging to animals. If I didn't want to put products of animal cruelty and death inside my body, how could I continue using products of animal cruelty on my body. 

Cruelty-free beauty is something that I have a love/hate relationship with. I love it for the obvious reasons, but having consciously been purchasing only cruelty free beauty products for a while now I am all too aware of various draw backs. 
- Firstly, reliable cruelty free products can be difficult to find. 
- Secondly, a lot of cruelty free products, for reasons I cannot understand, are just subpar to the more popular brands on the market that we may be used to. 
- Thirdly, cruelty free beauty seems to come with a much larger price tag than those that test on animals - again I don't understand this.

However, I have managed to comprise a little bundle of gems that I wholeheartedly adore and recommend to anyone who will listen.