Thoughts on Sunday: It's easy to get lost trying to be a blog you're not.

So. I haven’t blogged all week. It’s been quite disheartening in the sense that it’s not that I don’t want to blog, it’s just that I haven’t wanted to blog on my blog if that makes sense. I’d come up with all these potential blog posts on top of the week I already had planned, but when it came to sitting down and writing them, I just couldn’t. In my head I told myself it was probably because I hadn’t taken any decent pictures of the products I wanted to talk about or because I was too wrapped up panicking. what I’d write about fro Halloween so the unnecessary pressure I was putting on myself was making me not want to write anything at all. 

In the end, I pinpointed the reason behind the fact that I wasn’t being myself. I was trying too hard to be something I’m not. I realised this yesterday as I was watching Lily Melrose’s vlogs (how did it take me so long to realise she has a vlog channel?!) and came across this vlog: “Advice” for New Bloggers. Lily has some pretty solid advice. I really like her main “advice”: 

 

“Don’t listen to blog advice.”

 

It was a point that made me go ‘Ah, that might be where I’m going wrong’ especially since I'll happily admit that I'll be the first to save or bookmark a particularly interesting article with blog advice. I think Lily goes on to explain it so well why listening to blog advice can be detrimental when she says:

“The thing about blogging, is if you think too much about it you get consumed by other people and what other people do. Blogging -or vlogging- is about expressing yourself as a person and being who you want to be but just on online media. You’re the one writing the blog: you can write whatever you want. Everyone’s blog story is different and if you ask any blogger how they became successful, they will probably tell you I don’t know”.

This part of her vlog really struck a chord. I realised I was so wrapped up in finding a niche, having my pictures be perfect straight away or stick to a blog schedule or have super amazing beauty content whatever that is)- regardless of whether I was happy about writing it or not. I was putting pressure on myself yes, but of the terribly unproductive kind: I was trying to be something I’m not. 

 

I realise now that I am not all the bloggers that I admire or need to necessarily have the same posts that I like. In reality, I’m not even what I think I should be in my head. I’m still figuring out who I am as a person let alone what this is as a blog, so really it’s okay if it’s a little all over the place at first, because in all honesty, that’s a perfect description of me: a little all over the place until I find my feet.

There's a difference between being inspired by the blogs you read and trying to emulate the blogs you read, and it can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish between the two. However, only one of them can help you grow as a person and add to the blog you want to write; the other is pretty much gauranteed to leave you frustrated, because regardless of how well you're doing, you'll never ditch that nagging feeling that you're not being you.

So for the next coming weeks or even months, I’m going to experiment and try different features, content, layouts - you name it -and just have fun with it, figuring out how to do all the things that have to do with blogging through good old trial and error, because she is absolutely right. It is really easy to get lost in the thoughts of being successful, doing things “right” and not looking like the total newbie that you are, and forget why you started blogging in the first place: because you wanted to join on all the fun.

So basically, from now on, I'm going to just be myself. Whatever that means.