Welcome

Thanks for visiting Yellow Azalea!

This blog is about using art journaling and scrapbooking as a way of discovering your authentic self in your midlife years. As I tell my stories using these processes, I invite you to join me in telling ‘your story’ as a form of self care.

The Yellow Azalea flower

Why I named the site Yellow Azalea? The colour yellow symbolises joy and happiness, and yellow happens to be my favourite colour. Plus the Azalea flower is symbolic for taking care of yourself and your family, temperance, developing passion and femininity. The combination of these two symbols seemed to fit perfectly together to describe my personal situation.

The inspiration for this website happened when I recognised that I needed to place more importance on looking after myself, to be able to continue to care for my high and complex needs son as he transitioned into adulthood. It was time for me to take action and put my oxygen mask on first. I was feeling exhausted and had been numbing my emotions for more than a decade.

As part of this process I made a significant change with my relationship with wine and stopped my daily drinking habit on 21 May 2018. Wine had become my stress release mechanism and I knew needed to find healthier and better ways of coping with lifes ups and downs. I started to read and research ways of practicing self-care.

After experimenting with self care methods including mindfulness, meditation, yoga, reading, walking, relaxing, taking hot baths or getting more sleep, I started to realise that while I appreciated that these things are good for me, I didn’t always come away feeling like I had fun. I still try to practice these good habits, but I wanted more.

So, I rethought what activities I could do that made me happy and came up with my personalised list. These included:

  • Scrapbooking
  • Art Journaling (also known as visual journaling)
  • Playing golf
  • Keeping connected with friends and family
  • Reading

“I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.”

Audre Lorde

I hope you will join me on a journey towards your own self care practice.

It is my intention to one day offer classes or workshops on scrapbooking and/or journaling that has a focus on emotions and self-care. How this looks, I am not sure yet, but in the meantime I will share my thoughts and projects here.