self-care @home

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Remediating for 280 Characters

Now let’s talk about my Twitter journey. I have to be honest; Twitter has never been something that I am familiar with. I tried to add some emojis onto my Twitter bio to make it lively and approachable. Although my account has not been receiving a huge amount of attention or recognition over the platform in the past month, I think I am starting to understand the ways to make it work.  At least being active is definitely a key to gaining attention over Twitter.

Firstly, I have found that some particular hashtags such as #quarantine and #covid19 that are constantly being tweeted, would be recommended by Twitter to us. They are the main reasons for the increased amount of people starting to spend time on self-care. Therefore, I have included these hashtags in almost all of my post in order to gain opportunities for them to be seen by other users. However, since both of the hashtags could not fully represent the topic of “Self-care @home”, I have also included hashtags like #selfcare and #selfcareathome in my posts. Even though they are not popular tags, they relate a lot to my topic and could bring people that are really interested in self-care to reach my page. Yet, using hashtags is not the most effective when it comes to gaining followers for both my blog and Twitter account.

In fact, retweeting related tweets from more popular accounts actually helped more in gaining a higher reach to my account. I have gone onto the hashtag page and searched for posts on #selfcare. Then I have chosen some that I found interesting and informative and retweeted them on my page as I wanted to use them to potentially educate and entertain my followers while I am not posting on my blog. Just by actively repeating the whole “search and retweet” action, I have quickly received two likes and one retweet from my notification centre. I was very delighted with the responsive result of retweeting on Twitter. Although I have yet to receive any sort of comment from other users, nor did I gain any new followers, the retweet from that other user has created another potential opportunity for other random users to come across my Self-care @home page. Allowing users to like my tweets has also let me know what kind of posts should I include more on my Twitter page in order to make my posts engage-able.

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Entering the Conversation:

A minimalist blog that I have come across and commented onto: https://www.anorganizedlife.info/blog/becomingaminimalist

My comment:

Minimalism has always been something I wanted to achieve for my own as well, but I found out that it was actually nothing as simple as just getting rid of things that were useless in my house. That is because no matter how much more conscious I had become in purchasing new things, more and more stuffs just started to pile up again each time after I cleared out my space. This endless cycle has made me feel so frustrated over the whole minimalistic thing.

However, this blog has definitely helped me out by changing the way I used to understand and perceive the term “minimalism”. Instead of only seeing it as a practice of continuously decluttering things, our mindset needed to be simple and peaceful enough first. It is also very true that going minimal is not only about physical clutters, digital clutter also matters. Especially when we are all living under such a technological-based world right now. Minimising apps notifications and deleting random apps are some of the things that I have done to reduce the chance for me to check on my phone. Alternating my focus from a materialistic lifestyle to a quality-conscious one is the best advice I have gotten from this blog so far.

I hope to see more fascinating perspectives of minimalism from you.

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Creating Generative Value

Coronavirus can be a sword to families; quarantine bills can be an unbearable burden.

It is very true that mandatory quarantine due to Coronavirus has increased the time and opportunities for people to stay in their house and spend quality time with their friends and families. For example, watching Netflix shows and YouTube videos together, cooking a 5-course dinner in the kitchen or building LEGO as a team. Countless interesting home activities waiting for you to kill time.

However, we should not neglect the fact that not all families are lucky or blessed enough to get this benefit out of Coronavirus. While we were very happy about not having to go to school, being able to get day offs from work or having the chance to work from home, some families were struggling to find a way to meet one another across the states for just a dear moment. This is all because of the strict instalment of Covid-19 travel restrictions. Like us in WA, we have the “Closing the Border” restriction. Almost no one is allowed to enter or leave the border if we are from any of the other states within Australia. Although I am very clear that it is for the health of all the citizens in WA, what if one of our dearest family members was stuck in Victoria needing accompany? We couldn’t just ignore the law and fly there; this is literally impossible. For me, being an international student here in WA, I am lucky that I could spend my quarantine time with my boyfriend here together. However, I have not been able to see my family for over a year now. The only way of communication that we had was FaceTime and that’s it. They looked a bit older each time I see them, my heart breaks a little every night I go to bed.

In Sydney, one mother with her four children were dying to travel over Queensland in order to see their 39-year-old father who was diagnosed with a fatal cancer. Unfortunately, they are required to pay a total hotel quarantine fee of A$16,000 before they could reach Queensland, which was far above from their affordable budget as god knows how much more they would have to pay for their father’s funeral in the future. It was inhuman and cruel to even just think about it.

Before Coronavirus decide to completely retrieve from Australia, should the government tenderise its policies on special situations like this? I mean that was basically the last chance for the family to reunion. I would be HEARTBROKEN over that if I was the one who needed to face such reality.

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What is Self-care?

Self-care has an inseparable relationship to our health. According to the State University of New Jersey, the more self-care behaviours are performed by a person, the more positively it is going to affect his or her health (Callaghan 2003). With that being said, we are responsible for our own health’s well-being, and we all have the ability to optimise it. It doesn’t have to be completed base on the reliance on someone else. For instance, self-care is not about visiting the doctors when our bodies are suffering from minor illnesses. It doesn’t have to be something that is costly and expensive. We could do all sorts of things and activities on our own in order to optimise our health through self-care. And we could achieve it at home by ourselves easily for almost no cost. For example, listening to songs or broadcasts of our own liking, going online and do some window shopping or watching movies and shows that are fun and rewarding to our brains. As we can see, the term self-care does not strictly have to imply sense of boredom or loneliness. It is not a nerd’s thing. Spending quality time with ourselves can actually be beneficial and rewarding especially when we are all blessed to live under a world that is full of growing technology. It helps us to find solitude within our highly-connected world (Carter 2012). In fact, a lot of us are already practising self-care unintentionally on a daily basis. It is just maybe it’s not enough yet to the point where we could feel the therapeutic results of self-care.

Self-care could be addictive, it increases our concentration and productivity by minimising potential distractions, reinforces our self-identities by increasing critical thinking as well as deep reflections, and betters our social circles by influencing us in building healthy relationships with others (Carter 2012). Self-care at home not only could repair our skin and bodies through one’s unique pampering routines, it also helps us to clear our minds and restart our brains, increasing our creativity and positivity when dealing with life problems. It is an outlet for us to unplugs ourselves from the cruel and stressful reality. And the purpose of this blog is to be this outlet, creating an online community that is full of people personally recreating various self-care activities at home, experiencing all the mental and physical benefits of it and become aware of the importance of self-care at home.

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The reasons behind Self-care @home...

2020, words cannot even describe what this year has brought to us. Literally everything that you would never think of happening, has happened. It’s like a roller coaster ride that once you’ve reached one sharp curve, there’s another one hitting you straight away. And you do not even know when is this going to end.

First is the start of some serious international political conflicts, like the civil unrest in Hong Kong due to the promulgation of the National Security Law. Then the world hit us with the devastating loss of basketball star Kobe Bryant. And lastly, it was the beginning of an impregnable fatal disease, Coronavirus. The virus was then spread worldwide within months, causing millions of deaths across the globe. Not only did the world’s medical facilities and workers could not catch up with COVID-19, citizens also lost it themselves when it comes to dealing with the virus. You know common sense was vanished when people started fighting over rolls of tissue papers in grocery stores.

Then there is me at home hopelessly looking at my laptop trying to catch up with all the news. Luckily, pampering myself has always been something that makes me dedicated in doing ever since I was a teenager. It helps with relieving all the stress at school and little problems that I thought were so big. Self-care used to be a routine that happened offline before the use of the Internet became mainstream. People now obtain updates of their work and school institutions all from the Internet. To be honest, sharing pictures of myself following online workout videos at home or putting cucumbers on my eyes while I put on my face masks were never imaginable until quarantine has started. With everything happening around, I wanted more people to see the positivity through this tragic time. And this is why I have decided to start my blog “Self-care @home”, I wish the world could feel relieved and repaired with the power of self-care. Self-care can be fun online as well; it is like a beauty blog with a twist in it. Instead of motivating visitors in purchasing new products, I want this to be pocket-friendly and focus on money-saving since a lot of us should be struggling from dropped income. I want to use this website to bring in skincare knowledge and spa-like experience to my audience all at once through words and images, or even videos. Raising awareness on the importance of self-care and self-love, easing the tension within the chaotic world that we are currently stuck in right now.

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Avatar Annotation: Why did I choose this avatar?

I have decided to custom-made my own avatar in order to resemble myself and all other ordinary girls and boys over the world. Therefore, I have used my own colour of skin tone, a nice mix of linen and beige to show my Asian-self. As for my hairstyle, messy bun is one of the classic stay-at-home hairstyles which could bring out sense of cosiness. The freckles on my face also adds realness of a no-makeup face. All these features bring us to the main topic of the blog: Self-care at home. And I hope everyone could feel a sense of resonance when they see me while reading this blog.