Hello, pals. I promise one day my blog posts will get a) much more frequent and b) much more interesting but for now I've got a think piece once again having a moan about the online community, the way it's changed and how the hell I'm going to deal with it. (Spoiler: I have no idea how I'm dealing with it this time)
I'm not even sure really where to start, but recently I've just been feeling pretty crap, to be frank, about the blogging community and my place in it and my place in this online world. For those of you who don't know, I actually started this blog in 2013 as Hangin' With Mil, and I've been in this thing a long ol' time and yet often I find myself feeling like I only started yesterday. I've struggled with a love-hate relationship with my blog pretty much ever since it started, and the things that generally fuel that is lack of motivation, lack of ideas and lack of time, but I think it's lack of motivation and ideas that tends to get me down the most.
Don't get me wrong - I love the way blogging has gone. Big, gorgeous, perfectly posed photos paired with polished think pieces or reviews or editorials and I think it's so cool. The way it's taken off is amazing but wow - is there some added pressure now?! Please tell me other people feel this way because sometimes I feel like it's just me! Girls my age and younger have the most amazing blogs that look like magazines yet I'm still here running something that's not too different to what I set up in 2013. I don't take amazing photos, I can't write amazing deep articles about anything under the sun. I lack ideas, I lack the motivation just because I can't possibly compare to what these other girls are out here doing. And I feel weird about it - I feel ostracised from the community because how on earth do I measure up to that level of success?
We could open this up to a huge other debate about the meaning of success and what it really means and what quantifies failure but we'll leave that can of worms for another day. The point I'm really trying to make though, is that isn't blogging just owning a website and writing posts published on that website? And as soon as I start thinking that way suddenly that earlier pressure melts away and I'm back to being my 14 year old self writing about the new Natural Collection lipstick I bought in Boots after school. It's strangely comforting and I feel like I belong again. But that self-doubt will always inevitably come creeping back, those thoughts that I'm just not cut out for this, I'm not smart enough, I don't fit in, I'm not included will always come back and honestly, this time I'm stumped on how to solve it. I've fought blogging disillusionment and the feeling of being completely disconnected for a long time - I want to say six years but realistically it's only really been the last few years that the pressure has mounted and suddenly you're only a proper blogger if you have a Gucci belt and a personal photographer to follow you around all the time.
I'm not saying I'm giving up, because at the end of the day blogging is my thing and it's been my thing for a long old time. I suppose all I'm trying to say is that feeling like this about your online space is completely normal and I'm trying to convince myself it's normal to feel like this, and hopefully if I keep putting out genuine content from my heart that the people who matter will stick around for me.
How do you fight disillusionment with your blogging space?
Em xx
No comments:
Post a Comment