Happy belated Samhain! ?
I know, you’re wondering where exactly I’ve been the past couple of months. I haven’t posted my usual monthly recaps, but there’s a good reason for it: university has been keeping me insanely busy! However, as I missed my two recap posts, I’ve had the chance to think about the direction I want to take for this blog and the changes I want to make to it, which I feel it needs. So let’s make use of this Sunday to talk about that!
Firstly, I want to address what plans I had for this blog. When I started this blog, it was the summer of a year where I was “out of the loop”, so to speak: I was unemployed and I wasn’t attending university, either. I spent that whole year trying to find a job (and failing), stressing over money problems, but more importantly, I spent half of that year feeling lost and then like I was stagnating. I battled depression for a good portion of it and wanted desperately to get my motivation back — my motivation to enjoy life, to live and to make stuff.
I started the blog with the intent of keeping myself accountable, to have a tangible place where I set my goals, stuck to them (or tried to), and ultimately the purpose of the blog was to help me find my motivation back, to inspire myself, and use that inspiration for my goals and my creative endeavours.
Arguably, the blog didn’t help much with its original purpose — I don’t feel like I was particularly productive during the summer months, and indeed, in the monthly recaps, I often talked about feeling unmotivated, in a slump, and not getting enough things done.
However, what I didn’t create this blog for, was for it to feel like a task, like another chore I had to do, an extra thing on top of everything else. I didn’t want this blog to become something I thought of as, “I have to do this.”
But, despite my best intentions, that’s exactly what ended up happening: the blog started to feel like another ‘task’ I had to do at the end of the month. I felt like I “had to” keep it updated, to post at least once a month. I kind of dreaded the last days of the month, because I knew I’d have to update the blog and write a monthly recap — posts that, because of the way I had set them up, were always lengthy, took a lot of time to write and just felt like a massive chore.
And I don’t want that.
I have been too busy to post much during these past two months. As I said, it’s because of university. I’m a student again now, my chosen degree program is very coursework-intensive, and I often don’t have the time/energy to keep up with my other creative endeavours (it’s a good thing the course itself is very creative).
For this reason, I don’t feel like my monthly wrap-ups would be very interesting to read: my hobbies have kind of fallen to the wayside, I often don’t keep up with my lifestyle self-agreements just out of tiredness, I am working on my personal projects, though very slowly. But that’s just what it’s like when coursework piles up and I have to attend lectures four days a week.
My point is, I started my blog when I had loads of free time and no motivation, and my original intent and goals reflect that. However, in a way, I am now a different person: I have different amounts of free time and now I have practical, academic priorities and goals. I went from having entire days, weeks of nothing planned, no external tasks (and no motivation), to having assessments due every week for the past 6 weeks (and more to come). These are two different people, with two different priorities, lifestyles and schedules — and the blog should reflect that change.
I don’t want the blog to feel like a chore. I don’t want it to be “another task on top of my coursework”. I don’t want it to stress me out. I also don’t want the blog to just be a collection of monthly wrap-ups where I talk about what happened during the month, which feels somewhat impersonal to me. And, most importantly, I don’t want the blog to actively make me feel bad, as I realise my other hobbies and projects may (and will) fall to the wayside as I concentrate on my degree.
I want to enjoy blogging. I want to write here whenever I want and whatever I want. I don’t want to force myself or the blog to fit into a box that I made up during the summer. Yes, segments like the monthly wrap-ups are nice, but I don’t want to feel like I have to stick to them perfectly every month — I want some room to breathe. I want this blog to be more like my old blogs and journals — places where I had fun, that I didn’t dread and that were a bit more personal than “this is what I achieved this month.”
So, from now on, I’ll be doing just that: some old-fashioned blogging, where having fun writing is the top priority and where I can drop in any time with any kind of post and feel good about posting it. Not every post will be lengthy and that’s okay — if all I can write is small reflections or updates in-between assessments, that’s still perfectly fine. An update might be about a small aspect of my life (or lots of small things) rather than recapping the whole week/month and that’s fine, too. It’s really about writing and the enjoyment of it.
I enjoyed writing this post a lot and I didn’t feel any of the dread or stress that I sometimes associate with the blog, so I definitely think this is a step in the right direction. ?
To celebrate the new purpose of the blog, I changed its theme! So that the writing is the true focus of it.
So with this change in place, I hope to see you in the next blog post! ?