Rules be damned, blogging just to blog.

When I initially started this blog back in 2014, I was extremely unhappy with the direction my life was going at the time. I was finally with the right person, but everything else was going to shit.

Looking back, it really wasn’t but it certainly seemed so at the time and change was desperately needed regardless. Change things definitely did. Some for the better, some for the worse, far worse.

I’m a very private person so I don’t share a lot. Even before it became a stream of opinionated nonsense that I lost all interest in reading, my contributions to the Facebook feed were already few and far between. And they were far from personal.

Whenever there’s a patch rough enough to put me in a really dark place emotionally, I clam up. I don’t reach out to friends, and even family won’t hear about it unless they happen to ask. I am working on it, but I have a ways to go.

Despite being 4 years old now, this blog has never really developed into anything because of this. Well partially.

My expectations were never much, and with my “sharing issues” I knew it was never going to serve a cathartic purpose. Mostly I had hoped to document positive changes as well as what kept me sane from day to day. And maybe find a few like-minded readers who could sorta relate.

Clearly that didn’t happen. And even though this is technically yet another “I’m still alive” kind of post, this time I’ve also opted to just start over from scratch and take down all my old posts.

I’m kinda feeling like my original intentions when I created this blog, while well meaning, were kinda unrealistic and unnatural for me. I was trying to follow too many guidelines about what a “successful” blog should be.

Niche down your topics, always include a featured image, promote your posts across your social media, post at minimum X times a week/month and at X time of day.

Once upon a time, blogging was enjoyable and therapeutic for me. But trying to follow those guidelines added pressure, and kept me from writing most days (when I felt like writing at all at least) for the fear of not fitting into the niche I’d settled on.

Plus, I feel like I’m chasing too many, let alone far more important, forms of “success” in my life as it is. I don’t have time for all that formality.

No matter what anybody says, some of us just can’t narrow down our interests. There are a variety of things that keep me sane day to day, and the positive changes rarely all fit in a single category.

I float back and forth between entirely unrelated hobbies constantly, and the changes I feel like talking about could be as trivial as my hair color one day or as major as considering moving house another day.

I can’t pick just one thing to talk about, or I’d have to have 10 different niche blogs to maintain. And I don’t always feel like talking about the one thing consistently, let alone taking/finding the perfect featured image to set the mood for every post so that google might notice and index me.

Bleh what a drag, sometimes I just want to ramble and get it out of my system.

So, I’m not going to pick anymore. And I’m done worrying about writing for an audience that I may eventually have in some far off distant future, if at all. I’m going to write for me from now on, screw the rules.

If you found this post and made it through to the end. First of all, consider me impressed, I literally babbled about nothing. Second of all, thank you.

Tags: #blogger, #mentalhealth, #selfcare, #startingover, #struggling, #wingingit