For the past month or so I have been feeling so uninspired to write anything for this site, and if you know me you will know this is something that doesn't happen often. I am always writing. Journals are scattered around my room, I crave education to be able to write essays again and I love my blog as though it is my child.
But in the beginning of February I woke up one morning with no intentions of writing anything. I had a weeks worth of blog posts planned and told myself it was fine to take a day off from my scheduled writing plan and binge Netflix. After all, I had been working so hard on maintaining my blog that one day off wouldn't matter. One day turned into two and two quickly became twenty. The ignored blogger tab on my browser sat there lonely and haunting me, reminding me that I was completely avoiding something that used to be one of my biggest passions.
Since I was a kid I have always almost immediately fallen in love with things and discarded them just as quickly. Watching a friend play with their newest Barbie doll house while I was still playing with my one that I got a year ago lead me to stop wanting to use mine, lead me to begging my mum for a new one and being both upset and confused when she told me mine was just as good. I realised that this is what I was doing with my blog. I was watching other people succeed, I was looking at pretty sites and falling in love with other people's work and discrediting my own in the process.
I was on the phone to a friend the other day, having a bit of a mid life crisis (and yes, I know I am eighteen and it almost definitely isn't the middle of my life but it felt like a bloody mid-life crisis at that point) when she told me her sister said she loves my blog. It's strange but that small comment made me really begin to think about what it is that lead me to fall out of love with blogging. Why something that had become such a huge passion over the past few years was filling me with dread instead.
Something that dawned upon me was the fact I am always comparing myself to this or that, I am never happy with what I have (as I mentioned before) and so with all this comparison to people who have been blogging for years how am I supposed to allow myself to grow? I can't. That's the problem. So, after taking a step back and looking at my blog and my work I realised how much I have grown. I have gone from running a blog with six of my other friends to completely independently running this one, which should be my pride and joy.
Here are the things that I am going to be doing in an attempt to help myself fall back in love with blogging:
- I want to go self hosted. I have been toying with this idea for such a long time now and at this point I feel it will not only lead other people to take what I create seriously but also push me to create content that I am fully proud of and want to showcase to the world.
- Along with going self hosted I want to get a new theme. I was actually fully inspired to write this post while browsing through Etsy in the hopes of finding a theme that would cure my writers block (I'm not really sure how a theme would do that but somehow it actually managed to). As much as mine now is fine I want something else, I'm bored of it and it is much more limiting than I realised it would be (especially because I cannot code for the life of me).
- Post three times a week instead of the four I decided to force myself to do at the beginning of the year. This may seem like a small change but it means I'm not going to be stressing about as many blog post ideas and I am able to focus more of my time on each individual post that I create.
- Connect more with other bloggers! I have recently joined a few Facebook groups filled with so many different bloggers that it has left me so inspired. Reading other people's posts is quickly becoming one of my favourite pass times (especially when I have a few minutes to spare while waiting for the kids I au pair to finish their clubs and school) but I never really did this before which is strange to think. I also want to begin to reach out more to the blogging community on social media, it seems everyone has their own little cliques and it would be so cool to end the year with a group of likeminded blog friends!
That's it really, I'm going to work on my blog and the content that I am creating in the upcoming weeks and also keep an eye out for the moment I finally get my life together and update my theme instead of just browsing Etsy for a new one.
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