Well, hello there.
So I’ve been on a hiatus for a good four or five months from my blog and all related social media. There are a couple of main reasons for this, so let’s chat about it.
1. We’re all Covid-iots (well, a lot of us are)
We all know that 2020 has been a trainwreck of a year. One by one, all of 2020’s events made blogging about the perfect morning routine seem less and less significant to me, especially when the main focus was making money (and I wasn’t even making any). The hustle started to feel wrong and I began to wonder what the hell I was doing.
The main thing that prompted my hiatus was the pandemic. As soon as lockdown began looming, I started thinking of appropriate blog posts to write:
My lockdown self-care routine
How to take care of yourself during quarantine
Why, as an introvert, quarantine is actually preferable for me (kidding, i wouldn’t have written that post, however true it is)
But none of it felt right. I did draft up a post about self care during lockdown, but everything I wrote just seemed so disingenuous to me. Lockdown had just started. How was anyone supposed to know how to cope when we hadn’t yet experienced it?
I started seeing all these YouTube lifestyle channels making videos about the very same things that I was thinking of covering. Now don’t get me wrong, I did really enjoy some of the videos from lifestyle YouTubers that I follow and think some of the advice was really solid. But when you add in a sponsorship or ads to a video about a global pandemic that’s devastating the world, especially when no one actually knows what the situation will become… It just didn’t sit right with me.
I really couldn’t bring myself to write about an ongoing and ever-developing situation (still ongoing, really) that I hadn’t personally experienced yet. Nor could I pretend that everything was normal. I think maybe now is a more appropriate time to offer some insight into how one might cope, as we’ve gained some experience of the situation and aren’t just pulling suggestions out of our pre-Covid lives. We are still in need of some positivity in our lives, and I still want to be the one to offer some solace. But we’re still not experts and it’s still not over.
2. Trying to keep up with the hustle
Even before the pandemic, I had hit a bit of a roadblock that had probably made it much easier to drift away from my blog when the outbreak happened. A very common roadblock: money.
My main issue was that I had been treating the blog like a job while not getting any satisfying return from it. I spent every day focusing on how to make money from it, coming up with new ways to email companies for collaboration (most of whom probably didn’t appreciate my correspondence), and ultimately getting frustrated with myself when things didn’t start looking up. But the past few months have made me realise a few things; primarily:
I don’t want this blog to be my job, I want it to be my outlet.
I started my blog as a way of putting my voice out there. I had something to say and I wanted to say it. Then there became a focus on making money out of it, which is always the kicker. Why does everything we do have to be some sort of money making venture?
Don’t get me wrong, treating my blog like a full-time job and putting all my effort into its creation wasn’t a waste of time. I enjoyed myself, learned a lot about online marketing, built a solid portfolio, and hopefully gained skills that I can put towards getting a full-time job. Then I actually had a very successful phone interview for a job which made blogging for money even less significant in my mind (the follow-up interview was put on hold, thanks Covid). But that’s just it: this ain’t my full time job.
It’s exhausting putting so much effort into something that just doesn’t give anything back. And that’s even when you can still find joy in it. When the joy begins to dwindle, well hell. What’s the point anymore?
So I want to find my joy again. I want to enjoy blogging and writing and engaging with my peers and friends that I’ve made online through my blog. I don’t want to give up on something that I used to love and have spent so much time building from the ground up.
But I don’t want it to be a job.
If I make money from it: cool! If a company reaches out to me about making a post, awesome, I’m all in (spoiler: the next post is sponsored by a company that reached out to me, and may or may not have been the thing to prompted me to come back now.) If I bring in fifty quid of ad revenue a year simply by letting the blog run itself: great!
But I won’t be putting my all into making sure I get paid for running my site. I don’t want to have to stick to a posting schedule for my blog and every damn form of social media out there and feel awful when I can’t keep up with it (that’s right, we’re scrapping the new post every Wednesday rule). It’s just not necessary and really not helpful for me or my mental health.
I’m not knocking the hustle! Some people have incredibly successful blogs and even some bloggers that I know are making legitimate bank from blogging. I completely admire them and their drive, but it’s just not for me anymore. And this is what it’s taken me the last four or five months to realise.
I want to make writing a hobby again. Over the last two years, I’ve been almost solely writing for money. I’ve not written any fiction (which I used to adore), I’ve abandoned all of my personal writing projects, and my main focus has become writing for money (or education). Because it’s actually something I’m good at, eh?
And then there’s all the additional things that go into blogging that are usually hobbies but end up taking up even more commercial focus in my mind. I love taking photos and recently bought a used Canon 60D with a flip-out viewfinder. Did I buy it to take even better photos? Sure. But did I really buy it so I could try to move into the realm of YouTube and expand my blog further to ultimately add to my brand and make more money? Definitely. But do I also hate being on camera and feel incredibly uncomfortable talking on video? Absolutely. (And did I ever actually make any videos using it? Of course not.)
And there’s the issue again. The feeling of needing to capitalise on all of my hobbies and pressuring myself into things that I’m not even comfortable with. Forgetting what it’s like to simply create for the joy of it. Writing about what’s going on in your head just to get it out there. They’re hobbies for a reason, Em.
So here’s my conclusion. I don’t want to turn my blog into a cash-cow, I want to use it to express myself and interact with the community again. But I also want to be able to take a step back if life gets in the way without feeling like I’ve failed or given up on the blog. Which is how I felt for a good few months.
So maybe that’s a very long-winded way to say: I’m not trying to make money from my blog anymore, and the whole rant was unnecessary. But I hope you understand my thought process and why it’s taken me a while to figure out where I actually stood with blogging on a personal level.
Maybe you found it interesting to read about my personal thoughts and my internal process, or maybe you really don’t care why I took a hiatus and were just looking for some self care tips. I don’t usually write posts about my thoughts, so both are cool with me. But you can probably expect to see some more posts like this from me, alongside the good old productive morning routines of yore that I do genuinely love making.
And don’t get me wrong, this comeback isn’t me trying to pretend that things are better in the world. The pandemic isn’t over. Institutional racism isn’t over. Police brutality isn’t over. LGBTQ discrimination isn’t over. The Hong Kong crisis isn’t over. The struggle isn’t over, and we need to remember that.
Peace x
The post Where I’ve Been and the Future of the Blog appeared first on Emily Aagaard.