Welcome! Meet Your New Eco-Conscious Bestie
Hi friends! (:
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Kayla. For those who already know me from my Instagram, sustainable.kay, welcome! This post is my first official blog post (whoohoo!) and the longer intro of how we got here. If you’re looking for a short bio of who I am, you can check out my About page.
I’m not even sure where to start this one. If you know me in real life, you know that sometimes I start telling a story or I go to answer a question, and I have to explain so many other little unnecessary details along the way. It is quite literally a Michael Scott moment. Most people are nice enough to let me keep going. My boyfriend is always the one to interrupt with “Kayla, please get to the point!”. To me, it’s all key information that adds to the point that I was trying to make that is now lost, but to someone else, it doesn’t matter.
My point in telling you this (lol) is that you, my friend, are a lucky duck! You aren’t having a full in-person conversation with me, so you’re getting the good stuff and the good stuff only: the meat and potatoes of the conversation, the top tips, the product recommendations, and allllllllll the info, without the random and very off-topic side stories. I love writing, and I wish I would’ve started blogging sooner than this (5 years into my Instagram journey) because writing is my preferred way for me to organize my thoughts and actually get out what I have to say most efficiently.
My History With Starting a Blog and Website
I actually have started two blogs before! You probably never saw them because one was when I was in third grade and I wanted to tell the world who I was for some reason. The second one was a Sustainable Kay site that I launched through Wix in 2019.
At this time in my life, I was a busy working college student, and juggling everything with posting on Instagram was enough for me. I wrote about three blog posts, all of which were kind of toxic with titles like, “My Ab Routine: How to Get Dancer Abs”. These topics were relevant to people my age, but looking back on it WTF was I thinking?
Anyways, I ended up neglecting the site, and thank god because it was cringe, but things like that were a growing pain that needed to happen for me to get to the mindset I have now. I’ve treated my Instagram account like a blog for a long time now, but you can only write so much, and the algorithm is constantly changing to where it can be hard to reach people sometimes.
Towards the end of graduating with my Master’s last year, I decided I wanted to create my own place on the Internet for my content. I got the crazy idea one day to turn this into more than just a social media account, and I bought a domain and registered as an LLC. I was so excited to be an “owner” of something, yet also clueless as to what that meant and how I was even going to do this. After a few months of YouTube deep dives and plinking around on my computer, I’ve finally been able to get this going.
My Journey With Health and Sustainability in College
I will likely do a separate blog post on my health journey (stay tuned for a spicy ex-vegan post), but I’ll give you the short gist of it since it did play a crucial role in the development of my platform. Back in undergrad, I was at a point where I was trying to clean up my diet, be more active, and at the time I was trying out my third hormonal birth control. I was constantly living in a state of stress, had tons of digestive issues, and felt so disconnected from my body. I quit birth control cold turkey and I started learning more about how to take matters into my own hands.
At this time in college, I had an amazing professor that also taught me a lot about our connection with the environment. I then started to piece together how the health of the planet impacts our own health, and I became fascinated with food systems and environmental sustainability. I then started to come across how personal care products could be impacting my hormones that I was trying to heal, and how those products also connect to environmental damage…there were so many moving parts that hit me all at once. With every new piece of information, I would come across, I felt like I had been living my life all wrong, and that I needed to tell the world about it.
I started making changes to my diet and lifestyle to reflect my new outlook on life, and I created my Instagram to document everything along the way. For those of you that remember my OG Instagram, it started as a fitness account. I ended up making the switch to include more sustainable lifestyle content about a year or two into posting so that I could share all of my passions instead of just one (plus I was low-key sick of being just a “fit girlie” lol).
I started to share swaps to cleaner, greener, and better-for-you products to help improve my health and reduce my impact on the environment. When I began to share more about these changes I was making, I got lots of questions from friends and even random people online that were interested in learning more too. That was when I realized how much of a need there was for informational resources on these topics and how useful I could be if I continued to document my journey.
I was raised pretty conventionally in a small town in Wisconsin, so caring about the waste you create or worrying about pesticides wasn’t exactly something most people thought about growing up. This way of living more mindfully has slowly become more normal for me, but for many years prior that wasn’t the case.
I Definitely Didn’t Grow Up This Way…
Looking back on it, I really did live a different life even just 6 years ago, when I was still dowsing myself in Victoria’s Secret Pure Seduction perfume, eating cheese-covered things out of plastic containers that I microwaved, and not thinking about bringing a reusable cup anywhere. I would even go to the mall every other weekend to look for a new outfit to go out in. These were much simpler times, but it was only so simple because I wasn’t thinking much about any of it. Things have changed for sure, and at this point I can’t even imagine going back to my old lifestyle.
Nowadays on my Instagram, I post my favorite snacks and recipes, the best ethical brands to support, my secondhand and thrift store finds, and clean and eco products to use. My posts include tips on everything in wellness, sustainability, and non-toxic living. Some might say my niche isn’t really a niche, because I do focus on a few topics rather than just one, but to me, these topics are all very much connected. I can’t wait to continue to make those connections for all of you through my writing and the content I share here.
And with that, I think I’ll wrap this up and leave all the other details for some other time. I also want to take a moment to thank you! I really appreciate you being here. You’re the best.
In the comments, I would LOVE for you to tell me what you think of the site so far, and anything that you’d like to see here! It can be a topic of interest, a project, more photos of my pets, or anything. I wouldn’t be here without you, and I want to make this the place for all the answers you want and need when it comes to the eco-wellness niche. I have some blogs in the pipeline that I will be posting throughout the next few weeks that focus on Earth Month, so stay tuned for more!