Full Life Reflections

Gray Hair Transition – Don’t Do What I Did!

Debbie Roes

April 20, 2018

It’s been well over a year since I last gave an update on my gray hair transition process. Although I was on a blogging hiatus for ten months during that time frame, I wasn’t in a hurry to address this topic once I started up this new blog. In truth, I have been dreading writing this post. No, I haven’t gone back to coloring my hair every four weeks like before, but I have made many mistakes along the way. At first, I wasn’t going to write about this at all and I even considered deleting my previous gray hair transition posts. However, I ultimately decided to write this difficult update in the hope that I might potentially save even one woman from going through what I have.

do's and don'ts for gray hair transition

I have done more don’ts that do’s during my gray hair transition…

I’m publishing this post on the two-year anniversary of the last time I colored my roots. I should be done or almost done with the transition process by this time (hair grows an average of half an inch per month), but I’m not. The reason I’m not done transitioning stems from my not being in the right headspace to take on this journey in the first place. I wasn’t ready to fully embrace the process because I was afraid of looking bad and receiving strange looks or negative comments from others. Ironically, those fears only served to make things worse for me, as you will soon learn. The type of deep-seated insecurities I wrote about back in 2014 led to a series of missteps that have made the going gray process harder and significantly set back my progress.

In today’s post, I give a recap of the steps I have taken during my lengthy gray hair transition process. I also share some not-so-flattering photos of my hair at various points in the journey. Warning – this is a very long post that I considered breaking into two parts, but I think it works better as a single long essay. If you’re not interested in the topic of gray hair transition, feel free to skip this one, as I will be back next week with a different topic.

Battling Negative Body Image: Tips from Friends, Part Two

Debbie Roes

4 comments

April 13, 2018

Last month, I wrote about my ongoing challenge with negative body image and shared some helpful tips on this subject from my online friends. Since I received so much helpful advice for improving a poor body concept and didn’t want the post to get too long, I decided to break it into two installments.

Do you sometimes hate what you see when you look in the mirror?

Today’s post is part two and I hope you will find it beneficial. I also highly recommend that you read the comments section of the original post, as a number of readers offered their own words of wisdom on this important topic. I love how much I learn from all of the wonderful women I know through this blog and my other online communities. As I continue to work on healing my body image, I plan to refer back to these two posts from time to time, and I’m glad to have compiled this advice for others to use in their personal growth journey.

Working Toward an Essential Wardrobe – An April Challenge

Debbie Roes

18 comments

April 6, 2018

After two consecutive posts about communication and relationships, I’m going to switch gears today, but I’ll definitely come back to that topic again soon. In one of my first essays on this blog, I shared my theme for the year, “essential,” and how I plan to ask myself a lot of hard questions this year about what truly adds value to my life and thus deserves a place in my home, experience, and psyche. I subsequently explored the role of information in my life and detailed the steps I’ve taken as a sort of “digital detox” with the technology I use. I’ve also shifted the way I plan my days in order to maximize efficacy over efficiency.

As we move into the second quarter of 2018, I already feel that my theme of “essential” has made a profound difference toward increasing my sense of calm and improving my quality of life. My stress level has decreased as I consume less information, eliminate “digital clutter” on my devices, and include fewer items to my to-do list. Now it’s time to turn back to a subject that I wrote about for four years on my previous blog, Recovering Shopaholic – my wardrobe.

essential wardrobe

Can We Transform Our Broken Relationships?

Debbie Roes

16 comments

March 30, 2018

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topics I explored in my last essay, as well as the wonderful comments made by readers in response to what I wrote. For that reason, I would like to continue the subject of emotional isolation in today’s post. I’m glad I decided to open this can of worms because it’s a major factor in my journey toward a more fulfilling, peaceful, and happy life. Some of my relationships feel so broken, with dysfunctional patterns of interacting that are so ingrained, that I’m not sure how to fix them or even if they can be transformed in a meaningful way. But since writing about other seemingly intractable life issues has given me possibility and a way through in the past, I hope that deepening this exploration will make a difference for me and others with similar struggles.

After I expand upon what I view as a key problem in my – and perhaps your – interpersonal relationships, I delve into the five levels of intimacy identified by psychologists and how they manifest in our communication. I then share sage advice from readers on how we can start to break out of our negative ruts. While I certainly don’t have all the answers, I take comfort and hope from those who have walked a similar path and come out on the other side. Included is a helpful exercise we can all use to shift our focus and change our experience with the people in our lives.

Is there a gulf like this in some of your relationships?

The Things That Isolate Us

Debbie Roes

19 comments

March 24, 2018

We all want to feel connected to others. It doesn’t matter whether we are extroverts or introverts; connection is one of the six human needs that we all share. I have written previously on the topic of loneliness, but my primary focus then was on spending too much time alone and feeling physically isolated from others. Today’s post is about a different type of isolation: emotional isolation, which is feeling alone even in the presence of others. I’m sure most of us have felt this way from time to time, and I believe this type of isolation is a big problem in today’s society.

How Often Do We Truly Communicate?

So many of us yearn for emotional closeness, yet it eludes us, even in this age of extreme connectivity, smart phones, and social media. I feel that emotional isolation largely stems from poor communication. We’re in touch with people all the time, but how often do we truly communicate? How often do we open up and let others know who we really are inside?

emotional isolation

When we’re not keeping in touch by way of social media likes and short comment bursts, many of us engage in superficial relationships in which we only talk about macro topics like the weather, what we’re watching on television, and what’s in the news. I’m not implying that these subjects are insignificant, but discussing them rarely deepens our connections. We’re often “pleasant” with each other but don’t really know the person on the other end of our conversations. We stay safe in what we talk about, and we keep people at arm’s length because we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We’re afraid of being hurt should we opt to share our innermost thoughts, feelings, hopes, and fears, and this keeps us separate from others.

Body Image Rehab: My Past Blog, Continued Challenges, and Advice from Friends

Debbie Roes

21 comments

March 16, 2018

Two weeks ago, I accidentally re-published an old post I was editing as part of back-end enhancements I’ve been doing on Full Life Reflections. Some of you may have received this post – titled “How is Your Body Image?” – and wondered about it, especially if you noticed that it dated way back to August 18, 2010. A couple of comments were submitted following the erroneous re-post, which got me thinking that I should write a new post on the topic of body image. Today I’m going to tell you about one of my early blogs (this is actually my fifth blog!), comment on where I am with my body image now, and share insightful tips from friends for me and others who struggle with feeling bad about our bodies.

The Body Image Rehab Blog

Back in 2010, I wrote a blog titled Body Image Rehab, which focused on my journey to heal a very negative body image. As those who have been reading my writing for a long time might know, I suffered from eating disorders for a large portion of my life. I was dangerously underweight for many years as a result of anorexia nervosa, and I was also bulimic for a long time. Even though the bulk of my disordered behavior around food subsided during my thirties (I’m now 51), I continued to struggle with a very poor body image. I remained highly self-conscious about the way I looked and always believed that I was heavier than I actually was. This impinged upon my happiness in many ways, so I decided to start a blog about body image with the hope of healing myself and others through my insights.

Do you struggle with negative body image?

To Be More Productive, Aim for Efficacy over Efficiency

Debbie Roes

11 comments

March 9, 2018

I don’t know about you, but I always seem to have a to-do list that never ends, which leads me to feel like a “hamster on a wheel” much of the time. Even when I have what could be called a very productive day, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the many, many things I need to do. What makes the situation all the more challenging is that I have quite a few other days when I feel like I’m slogging through quicksand to get much of anything accomplished at all.

When I look around at those people who I consider “successful,” I think that they must be super productive every single day. They must accomplish considerably more to-do list items than I do, and that’s why they’re so successful. This makes sense on the surface, but I recently read an article that gave me a whole new perspective on the concept of time management. In today’s post, I share the key concepts from that article, how I’ve been putting them into practice this week, and the way it has positively impacted my life.

Focus on being productive instead of being busy

The Myth of “Successful” People

Tim Ferriss is the author of multiple best-selling books, including The Four-Hour Work Week and Tools of Titans. Despite the fact that he wrote about working only four hours a week, I always thought he got a lot more done than me with far fewer days of floundering or spinning his wheels. It’s no big surprise that I thought such things, as “successful” people like him are typically portrayed as superheroes by the media. We think they don’t experience the same types of challenges that we mere mortals do, but we’re wrong.

What is a Full Life? – Revisited

Debbie Roes

32 comments

March 2, 2018

When I launched this blog two months ago, I mentioned that it would pretty much pick up where my previous blog, Recovering Shopaholic, left off. The tagline for that blog was “Trade Your Full Closet for a Full Life,” but the majority of my focus during its four year tenure was on the full closet part of the equation: responsible and mindful shopping, wardrobe management, and personal style. I’m proud of the progress I made in all three of those areas, but I feel that I still have a long way to go in terms of cultivating a fuller and more fulfilling life, which was in large part why I started this new blog.

Many of us have the goal of leading a full life, but what does that really mean? I pondered that question first back in June 2013, but I’d like to delve a bit deeper today. I’ll revisit my original answer to the “What is a Full Life?” question and share new insights I gained from one of the articles I saved when paring down my overloaded “articles to read” folder a few weeks ago.

a full life revisited

My 2013 Thoughts on a Full Life

I recently re-read my initial post on the full life question for the first time and I still wholeheartedly agree with what I wrote almost five years ago. That essay included the following quote from Rita Mae Brown:

“Happiness is pretty simple: someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to.”

Essential Information Part Two: Digital Detox

Debbie Roes

12 comments

February 25, 2018

Earlier this month, I wrote about the subject of information overload and how it relates to my theme for the year, essential. Specifically, I shared about my difficulty in narrowing down the articles I want to read and my feeling overwhelmed by so much information. In today’s post, I delve deeper into my journey to get to a more peaceful place with technology and the Internet. I have taken further steps that may also be helpful to you if you struggle with similar issues.

An Update on the Articles

I will first give a bit of an update on how I’m doing with the articles. You may remember that my husband suggested that I create a new “articles to read” folder each month and only carry over ten articles to start off with. Doing this was difficult and took me over an hour, but I felt a good release after letting go of close to a hundred articles that I had been meaning to read “someday.” Over the course of this month, I have read some of the carried over articles and I’ve also saved additional articles to read. At the time of this writing, I have 23 articles in my February 2018 articles folder. I’ve decided that I’m not going to carry any of them forward into next month. Over the next three days, I will read the ones that most interest me and start with a clean slate in March.

The Power of Small Steps

Debbie Roes

9 comments

February 16, 2018

When we want to make changes in an area of our lives, we often think we need to take big, significant steps. At the beginning of every year, it’s common for people to make New Year’s resolutions. In fact, as many as 45% of Americans resolve to make at least one major change each year, with the most common resolutions being to lose weight, start exercising, or quit smoking. Sadly, however, over half of these people give up on their goals by the end of June, and many quit much sooner.

Although there are many reasons why people abandon their resolutions, I believe a common explanation is that they over-commit and attempt to take on more than they can handle. For example, a person who wants to start exercising joins a gym the first week in January and starts going to daily boot camp classes. Another individual who wants to lose weight shifts from eating carbs all day long to consuming an ultra-low-carb diet consisting of mostly meat and vegetables. It’s no big surprise that such people struggle to maintain such difficult regimens and ultimately end up abandoning them. Of course, some can and do keep up with their lofty plans, but it’s a recipe for failure for most of us.

“Baby Steps” Can Lead to Big Changes

power of small steps

As I mentioned several posts ago, I didn’t set any New Year’s resolutions for 2018. Instead, I just chose a single word – essential – as my guiding intention for the year. That doesn’t mean I don’t have specific changes I want to make in my life, however. There are actually quite a few shifts I’d like to see happen in various aspects of my existence, but I’ve learned that small steps are the best way for me to successfully make and maintain change in my life. What follows are two such examples of how taking “baby steps” has led to meaningful shifts in terms of my health.

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How Often Do We Truly Communicate?

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The Body Image Rehab Blog

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The Myth of “Successful” People

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My 2013 Thoughts on a Full Life

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An Update on the Articles

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“Baby Steps” Can Lead to Big Changes

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