Mermaiding and Sweet Lolita Fashion!
1.) Sweet Poison Cupcake
I am the most realistically going to be able to go to this store! I discovered it on Tiktok and it’s only a couple hours away from me! Also I follow the owner on social media and they seem really cool
2.) BtSSB + AP San Francisco
My favorite ballet is Swan Lake and that’s technically based on a fairy tale, I’ve wanted to do an Odette inspired coord for awhile now and I’m very happy with how it turned out
Here I’ll have a mix of places you are most likely to find lolitas in Vermont and places that have a cute theme but we have yet to go!
1.) Church Street, Burlington.
You are the most likely to run into someone wearing Lolita fashion on Church Street! Many meetups happen there and it’s where many college kids hang out. I found a now member of my current comm in a Starbucks randomly one day.
2.) My Little Cupcake
This has been a popular place for meetups through the years and perfectly on theme!! It’s also in Burlington
3.) Hana, Japanese Restaurant
This is a wonderful restaurant that I’ve been to many times! The staff is always wonderfully accommodating of our meets. It’s been a little while
4.) Kitty Korner Cafe, Barre, VT
This has been a favorite of mine recently! Due to the pandemic we haven’t been able to have a full meet there but I adore going and can’t wait to plan one once it’s safe again to do so. I feel as if cat cafe’s are a classic
5.) Shelburne Museum
This is a popular meetup place as well! Sadly I haven’t been able to go to any because I swear there is a curse on this meet in our comm
6.) The Vermont Teddy Bear Factory!
This was an extraordinary meet and even though we only went once it was so fun and so one theme for everyone it was one of the best and most fun meets we’ve done.
7.) Each Other’s Houses!
I feel I really took for granted the luxury of so many members of my comm often hosting out of their homes, it was always a super fun and affordable way to have a meet up, and it’s probably the meets that I miss the most right now.
My favorite dress is my angel of Music OP from Haenuli
I went through the iTunes library and changed my alarm to Kawaii call 1! It’s cute but still effective enough to wake me up.
I have started reading books again for fun! It’s been amazing! It’s largely small novellas on prime reading but I’m really proud and happy that I’m able to do that again, I used to rip through 75+ books a year in middle school and as I got older it got more difficult. I used to love fantasy novels however I’m now more into domestic mystery books
I used a website called futureme.org so that I’ll remember to read it! It emails this to the future but here is my letter
Dear FutureMe,
Where are we at right now? I finally learned not to have expectations on how my life will go this year, about every 4 years I seem to change my mind on what I want to be when I grow up, but now that I’ve grown up it feels a bit like a silly question. I don’t think anyone’s ever “grown up” and that’s exciting and terrifying. Like at the moment my fiancé and I think we’ll want to wait until our 30s to have kids but maybe we won’t. Maybe I’ll be a social worker still or maybe I won’t. I just hope I’m happy and connected to people who love me. This is the first year I’ve felt this safe despite the pandemic going on right now. I finally opened up to all of my mental health stuff in therapy and boy it’s been terrifying and exhausting but I hope that it’ll all be worth it for future me and the people I have yet to meet. It’s been odd having to contend with how truly hurt I’ve been and realizing that I hurt other people in ways I didn’t mean to when I was young. Are we still connected with college friends? Did we ever reconnect with high school ones? What new people have we met? Where are we at with therapy? Are we still in therapy? I have so many questions and yet I know I’ll find out in due time. I wish you well
Sincerely,
Past me
So I decided to try one of the hairstyles in the video below!! It seemed a good cross of some of my interests!
I decided to try to do the heart buns!! They’re a bit messy since my hair is shorter but I think it’s cute!
Like many Lolitas I struggle with both overspending and mental health issues, it’s often a common theme in jokes in the community and I have talked about it before on my channel and in this blog but due to a recent bout of extreme overspending I thought it was due time I talk about it again.
I don’t want to be a hypocrite, I’ve talked about financial responsibility and Lolita fashion many times on my platforms and I always say I want to do better and I have overall gotten better but I’m still not where I want to be yet and sometimes that makes me feel fake when I want to have these discussions. Also my improvement can feel agonizingly slow or minute, the biggest example is that my last spending binge was on blouses not dresses and that genuinely felt like a win for me even though it caused me to be late on paying my car payment.
Admitting that so publicly feels embarrassing but in a space where overspending is normalized and sometimes I feel like it’s glamorized too, I think it’s important we talk about these things in a serious way from time to time. It’s okay to joke around to cope but I feel like there is a serious lack of looking at the actual consequences of overspending in this community which for many of us is linked to mental health issues.
My overspending happened when I had to take a break from going to therapy until my new health insurance benefits kick in, and although I was debating whether the hard work in counseling was worth starting again this recent spending binge answered it for me.
There’s nothing wrong with impulse buying a dress that you can actually afford from time to time but when it starts to seriously impact your life you need to take a step back and ask why you are actually doing this. It’s hard and uncomfortable and trust me I’d rather find a new way to transform into a frilly cupcake than to examine deep seated emotional issues (I’m writing this article just as much for me as for you) if you can afford it, I highly reccommend getting professional help and if you aren’t in a place where you can reaching out to a friend who won’t judge you but won’t let you bullshit them.
For this month I’m going to try not to buy any new items, I thought about trying a 6 month spending freeze but I think baby steps will suit me better. Once I start therapy again I’ll definitely be talking to my therapist about ways to avoid this
Jfashion is meant to be fun and a distraction but it’s escapism can easily crash back to reality if it starts to affect your financial health. Take care of yourselves. Have a wonderful night.
My comm has a discord that we use with a dream dress channel! I didn’t want to share anyone’s peesonal info so it was perfect! Below is some of the dresses on the channel, but by no means all of them
Luna By The Lake With Cake 