I thought about not splitting this up, but I figured you wouldn’t want to see such a long block of text and would have probably stopped reading. Who knows, maybe you aren’t even reading this and that’s cool too. You do you. Anyway, Part 1 was kind of rant-y, but Part 2 is going to be more about why I decided to try this again and what will be different.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I had stopped blogging long before the hackers got ahold of my site and wiped all of my content. I think it was around February of 2018 that I stopped. I had taken a year off of work, blew through my savings, and now was having to go back to work which I told myself I’d never do. Shit got depressing and to be honest up until recently, I was still pretty depressed.
I wallowed in self-pity for quite a while, thinking that the reason that it didn’t work for me was that I was just unlucky. In reality, I hadn’t worked as hard as I could have and was trying to force myself and my blog to be something that I didn’t want. I tried a couple of different approaches, all of which failed. I was trying to do what I thought would make me successful, not what I enjoyed. I put in a lot of time just throwing crap at a wall, hoping something would stick. I made a whopping $8.00… the whole year. Well, like $9.72 if you count the ad revenue lmao.
Once I had blown through my savings (living in Seattle is not cheap so it happened a lot faster than I anticipated), I had to act fast and find not just any job, but a good-paying job. I couldn’t really continue paying my bills and keep my car if I had taken just any old job. So, I went back into banking, hoping that it would only be temporary.
But here we are a year and a half later and I’m still in banking. And it’s not that I completely hate it, it’s just not what I love. As an introvert, I hate confrontation and rude people. As a branch manager, I deal with it a lot and it wears you down after a while. People get intense about their money (understandably so), and a minor little thing can get blown into a huge ordeal that is difficult to diffuse.
You’d be surprised how many people that I’ve talked to about not loving my job who have said, “You’re not supposed to love your job, it’s just what you have to do.” It blows my mind that so many people have this mindset. We spend the majority of our waking hours at work. Shouldn’t it be enjoyable? I don’t want a life where I am just constantly looking forward to the weekend and dreading every Monday. It’s incomprehensible to me.
So, I decided to take up blogging again. While a blog may not be an answer to my career woes, it can be something that I enjoy and look forward to doing. Ultimately, I want to be a published writer, so in my mind even if nothing comes of it, I’m still getting my practice in. But I’m going to do things differently this time around.
For starters, this blog is going to be what I intended it to be in the beginning: a lifestyle blog where I document anything and everything that tickles my fancy. I’m not going to niche down, I’m not going to try to follow some secret algorithm, I’m not going to obsess over the number of followers I have, etc. This is going to be a place where I can be honest and share exactly what’s on my mind, share a recipe here and there, share a DIY project, share my adventures, what I’m reading and or writing, reviews, motivation, and maybe give someone something entertaining to read. There will be memes, occasional cursing, and pictures of my dog.
I’m not going to have a schedule that I force myself to stick to. You might see 5 posts one week, and 0 the next. The less this feels like a job to me, the happier and more attentive I will be.
I want to feel like myself again and I want to push myself to start achieving my goals. I hate that I failed the first time around, but I learned my lesson. My only goal with this blog is to do something enjoyable and figure out what my goals actually are for myself. No hard feelings if you don’t read it, but if you do then let me know.
