“If it’s important to you, you will make it happen.”
Last night, I was feeling overwhelmed with self-doubt and disappointment in myself for losing consistency and motivation for managing this blog. To be honest, while there’s been a lot going on in my personal and professional life in the last few months, I still sometimes beat myself up for not showing up and working on my blog more often.
Some days I forgive myself. Some days I think, “You’re busy, it’s okay to take a break.”
But then others are like last night, where I find myself in the ever popular “comparison trap” on while scrolling through Instagram, wondering what I need to do in order to achieve similar success to the bloggers I follow.
I was expressing these feelings to my boyfriend last night, and amongst his comforting words came something that stuck with me, “You know, if it’s important to you, you’ll make it happen.”
For the past 24 hours, this phrase has been repeatedly running through my head. Not only because I knew it was true, but it suddenly hit me that this was a huge lesson I’ve learned throughout blogging this past year.
One year ago I relaunched and rebranded this blog. Back then, I was lost, in a full-time job I didn’t enjoy, and experiencing the worst anxiety and depression I had ever dealt with in my life.
When this blog was simply on WordPress.com, I wrote about basically anything that came to mind: book reviews, trips I experienced, and I even tried a hand at fashion and beauty. (If anyone knows me well enough, they all know that fashion is NOT my strong suit.) I was just getting back into blogging after retiring my Disney blog of nearly five years, trying to see what to dive into next.
After dealing with horrible anxiety and panic attacks for nearly a month, I decided it was time to see a therapist for the first time. Many of you might already know about my experience from past posts and a Youtube video, but this is where I first started to really think about getting serious about blogging again.
While it seemed like I was lost and unhappy with most aspects of my life, I knew blogging was something that always brought me joy. I knew I needed to get back into it more regularly if I wanted to start walking on a path that aligned more with my goals and passions.
I spent hours upon hours researching possible topics, niches, theme ideas, and basically anything you need to know about launching your own self-hosted blog. I discovered that I wanted to write to help people similar to me: I wanted to help millennials figure out who they were and what they wanted, with some self-care and mental health advice and awareness along the way.
It was important to me, so I made it happen.
March 1st, 2016 to be exact.
And ever since then I’ve grown and changed as both a blogger and as a person, meeting new and incredible people within the blogging community and hearing amazing stories from readers along the way. I slowly started regaining my self-confidence and took control of my anxiety. A few months after I re-launched this blog, I quit my job, became a full-time freelance writer, and ended my first long-term relationship of a year and a half.
Boy, was this a learning experience.
I was living the blogger’s dream – leaving the 9-5 to be my own boss. I quickly found a few more clients and created a daily schedule working on my blog and freelance work each day. I integrated working out regularly to lose the weight I had gained during my desk job and started reaching out to friends more regularly since I didn’t have as much time when I was commuting an hour to and from work.
I plan on getting into deeper detail about this part of my life in a future blog post, but after a few months, something felt off again. Disregarding the fact that money was tight, I wasn’t enjoying freelancing and being 100% on my own as much as I thought I did.
After much self-reflection, I decided that it was time to search for another full-time marketing job. Needless to say, this was a bigger challenge and much more time consuming than I expected. There were good prospects, disappointments, and long hours spent submitting resumes and tweaking cover letters to fit job descriptions.
But you know what? Despite the challenges, rejections, and endless applications, it was important to me, so I made it happen.
Despite the challenges, rejections, and endless applications, it was important to me, so I made it happen. Click To TweetTo be honest the job hunt and starting my new full-time position are the two main reasons why I haven’t been posting on this blog as regularly as I’d like. However, I’m slowly getting better at forgiving and allowing myself to not be perfect all the time, and that life throws unexpected curveballs during the moments you feel you have everything planned out. (Like a completely unexpected new and wonderful relationship that essentially fell into my lap…funny how life works sometimes.)
Even though I realized the overarching lesson for the past year rather recently, I can already feel a difference noticing that my mindset has greatly influenced how I see myself, my future, and my passions. Learning the balance between all the elements that make up my busy life is half the challenge. Finding the passion to pursue my goals that I have set for myself, can only be found by pushing myself through.
Moving forward, I want to take this new motto and what I’ve learned throughout this year to empower you to live your best life and achieve the best version of yourself.
Thank you for following along within the last year of this blog’s journey, whether you’re a new or long-time reader. I appreciate all of you and can’t wait to see where the next year takes us!
Leave a Reply