One truth behind this blog post is that this is my second time writing it. I wrote what I thought was a really nice, thoughtful, informative post...that somehow got overwritten and disappeared entirely before I could salvage it. Now, I admittedly feel a little dejected and am not sure that I'm going to be able to ~ recreate the magic ~ to its fullest potential. I suppose I can try.
If I'm being honest, I've had a rollercoaster ride with Instagram this year. I went from caring about it, to forgetting about it, to over-thinking everything I wanted to post, to posting whatever, to trying to carefully curate an all-white-background-theme, to accidentally creating an autumnal theme to try to break the all-white theme, to not caring about what I posted or when I posted all together, to starting to overthink the whole thing again.
Despite my constant conflicting feelings about the way I use Instagram (still love the app, even if the algorithm does piss me off beyond belief), I still post, and I'm still proud of some of the posts I've made over the course of 2017. I think, arguably, this was both the year that I took it the most "serious" while also somewhat being the year that I've really enjoyed most of what I've posted. And if I didn't enjoy it, well, it's now in my archive for the rest of forever (great feature, Insta. Thanks).
Let's be real here though, my Instagram is a bit...vague. I mean, in general, I feel like even if my life is technically on the internet, I'm still a fairly private person. Which is fine and dandy and I do prefer to err on the side of being more ~ mysterious ~ than not being able to take a tidbit of information back after I put it out into the world. However, part of me knows that I'm almost extra elusive because, well, it's just what I know how to be from years of keeping to myself. However, today we're going to delve a little bit deeper into some of my favorite Instagram posts of the year and some stories behind them. Because let's be real, the captions probably told you nothing.
Even if the quality of this photo was horrendously ruined by Instagram (why does that app have such an issue with messing with the quality of photos?), this is still one of my favorite outfits that I shot in all of 2017. This was right around the time that my roommate and I, with three months left in our lease, decided to start taking blog pictures for each other. In our defense, you can't shoot in the dead of winter in Cleveland because of the snow and wind, and our schedules during the semester were too manic to even try to sort out for overlapping free time.
Anyways, we found this spot by accident while we drove around downtown trying to find a suitable location that had good lighting, was wind-free, and also had free parking attached to it. Did we potentially illegally park while we took our photos her? Potentially, but I had the keys for my car on standby in case I needed to sprint to the car and move that sucker fast. Plus, come on, how amusing is it that my lipstick, bag, and jacket coordinate? And not that you can tell from this specific photo, but there's also an orange stripe on my sweater that makes the matching game a foursome.
The back of my feet were, most likely, cut up by the time these photos were taken. My roommate and I were determined to get brunch this day in Ohio City for cute brunch photos...and then realized that every single restaurant in Ohio City for brunch was so busy that our wait would've turned us into ravenous, hangry beasts (note to self: Sunday brunch in Ohio City usually needs reservations).
So, we ended up at a cafe called Koffie Cafe and got our sandwiches and iced coffees and set off to find this brick wall to take photos against. To my right in this picture was a truck and some trash and we realized that the lighting here was too bright and golden so we moved spots for the actual pictures I used in the post. OOPS!
At this point, I was sharing some blooper photos on my blog photos because not all photos come out great. In fact, most of mine don't. Anyways, I decided to post some blooper photos on Instagram as a joke and they're some of my favorites. Sometimes it's hard to convey your personality through a still life photo and...yeah, I'd say these do an okay job of doing that lol.
This was taken in my last few weeks of living in Cleveland. My old roommate and I basically just walked around Cleveland for hours on one of our rare universal days off. It was an unseasonably warm day and we just walked and walked and got ice cream sandwiches and walked some more, just chatting away, as per usual. I'm also pretty sure after we got home, we soon decided with our other roommate that we wanted Barrio and a couple of hours later, started walking some more in the pursuit of tacos and margaritas.
This is one of my favorites, admittedly, solely because my hair looks fantastic. I also love how there are a few pictures from over the summer of my outfits that I took on my back patio for a "white" background that wasn't my garage but I had to whiten the shit out of the yellow siding because it wasn't bright enough post editing. What an absolute nightmare of a theme.
Mirror selfies I'm chill with, I can usually take one of those. But actual selfies? I can't get a good shot to save my life. If I can't put a Snapchat filter on it, then it's not going to come out good. This might have been my second best selfie of 2017 (the first I posted only a couple of months ago, but this was the first good one of the year) and the warm lighting just gives me warm fuzzy feelings. Also, those sunglasses were one of my best purchases and I adore them. This was also taken with me standing between my open screen door and our white front door awkwardly for my neighbors and anybody driving by to see. Because as we all know, a good selfie isn't born just from one shot.
Another "blooper" shot for y'all that my friend Maddie captured. In reality, there were sixteen layers of sweat on me in this photo and I think all I wanted to do was sit down in an air-conditioned apartment after showering away all of the sweat and grime on my body. Instead, we went to Brooklyn and sat on a bench for a couple of hours after walking around literally all day. God bless our feet that day for not totally disintegrating.
There's no story behind this one. I just like to relive the moment that I, after years of having Alfred cups as my lock screen, got to experience this wonder in person.
Shoutout to Natasha, who took this picture and told me that if I actually looked up it looked like we were staring into each other's souls. Okay, so those weren't her exact words, but it's what I decided to do and I was transported into a 2017 version of Taylor Swift's "Style."
My friend asked me to hang out this day and her motive of entitlement was that we could take pictures with these signs. Not that I needed to be enticed to hang out with a friend, but it really is impossible for me to turn down a chance to take pictures with neon signs.
You can't see the heels in this picture, but I was wearing stiletto heels from Kate Spade and they continuously got stuck in the dirt and mud, which as you can imagine was a pain my ass.
No story behind this. I'm just obsessed with this photo. Good job, mom. You did good, kid.
Truth be told, this was the first time I had left my house in about a week besides for dinner with my grandma. I was going through a weird funk (that I haven't quite shaken) and didn't want to do anything. My mom asked me to get lunch with her to get me out of the house and I just didn't want to. We ended up going for a pretty silent walk around Niagara Falls, but it was really relaxing. Sometimes fresh air does do you good.
This is such a cute idea for a post!! P.S. I've really been loving your feed and all your outfits this year!
ReplyDeleteLow key would love to see what your choices would be from your feed buttttt no pressure hehehehe. Thanks Jessica!
Delete