Falling Out Of Love With Blogging

You may have noticed that I’ve started to become a little inconsistent around here. Both before and after my month hiatus, my blog posts were being uploaded infrequently, Instagram and Youtube went out the window and I started to shrink back into my shell of self doubt and worry. I’m never one to put myself into the spotlight, and my blog as a whole is a way to push myself a bit out of my comfort zone. But as I started adding more and more to my plate I was becoming unconfident with my own work and self-critical at every stage.

I kept writing posts, and then deleting them because they weren’t ‘good enough’. I didn’t have the perfectly posed candid editorial photo’s to go with my lifestyle posts so they got scrapped. My blog became less and less like a content site, and more and more like an Amazon reviews page. As I wrote more and more reviews (with the same old template) I started to feel that I wasn’t actually being creative in any way. I was good at writing reviews, but was I really bringing anything new to the table? The answer is No.

Of course, it didn’t help that those around me seemed to be growing and I wasn’t.  I don’t have the most instagrammable flat or the newest products. I also don’t have the amount of cash to afford all of these beautiful things that every other blogger seems to have. The comparison game is a wormhole, and once you go into it then it’s a struggle to get back out again. So with my own worries and clear ‘proof’ comparing me to others, I was stuck.

I was stuck in a cycle of self doubt even though I wanted to get up and do something fantastic and unique. But with time restraints around working full time, and feeling fatigued both mentally and physically I was really struggling to pull myself out of the rut. With the constant pressure to have the perfect blog, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram I was basically burning myself out just trying to juggle the planning of them all.

So during my month off I spent a lot of time thinking. And thinking. Plus thinking some more. I made an action plan of what I wanted to do with my blog and listed out what I needed to start doing. I’ve basically scrapped Instagram for the time being (and I’m not sure when or if I’ll start it up again). My main social channel is now going to be Twitter as I find it the easiest to create content for and to promote my blog. I will start creating YouTube videos again, but I’m not setting myself a content calendar like I do with my blog.

So basically, I’m making myself fall back in love with writing and blogging by focusing on it. Simply and solely focusing on the act of creating blog posts. Not create additional content or pushing myself to promote my posts 24/7. I’ll be making my best efforts to write words which (hopefully) people will understand and connect with and to try and stop looking at the numbers at the end of every week. And as I’ve been getting back into the swing of things, I think so far it’s working.