Growing Pains
Blogging is a funny old game. Putting your musings, opinions and rants out there for the world requires a kind of fearlessness. There’s a whole lot of judging going on, and rightly so, it’s out there, people are going to have opinions. But what I didn’t account for when I started was that people will drop in at certain points on my blog, read it once, form an opinion (quite often a negative one) and that’s the stance they judge me on from that point forth. I guess it’s just like life, first impressions and all that, but when you’ve been blogging over three years, things change, morph, evolve, grow – can your audience grow with you?
In the beginning…
I started this blog three years ago when I was in a very different and difficult place in my life. I’d been living in Canada a year. I was alone, very lonely and depressed. It was my only creative outlet, my friend that I vented to, my baby. I knew my parents read it and maybe a few friends. I never really talked about my personal life in the beginning – I was working on my writing style and showcasing my outlandish, and some argue, funny opinions on random nonsense.
From there…
A year later, I was still in Canada, still blogging, still alone, very lonely and even more depressed. Stuck in a job I hated, I clung to my blog as my only hope of a way out. I was now down to the point where I found it difficult to leave the house or be around people. I spent a lot of time in my own head. I was angry, often upset, I ranted, I was sometimes mean, bitter. I’ve never been shy about my opinions but during this period everything was coming across with an extra dose of harshness.
A breakthrough…
Cut to a year later, I was back in England, back around my family, doing a job I enjoyed and my blog had picked up a much bigger audience than before, with Twitter giving me a further outlet to dump my outrageous opinions on. And outrageous opinions seemed to be something I was kind of getting known for. I was the girl who would say what you were thinking but wouldn’t dream of saying. People found it funny. The more popular it got, the more some people appreciated it but the more ‘you’re really mean/you’re a bitch’ messages I got.
I felt more connected to my audience and started to share more personal aspects of myself on my blog. Within the past 8-10 months, I’ve gone through a lot of changes. I’m not angry, bitter, upset and depressed anymore. I’ve worked really hard on myself in every way to be a better me. I like who I am. I love that people email me telling me I’ve inspired them in some way – quite simply the best feeling ever.
The problem with growth…
But then, there are those who dive into my blog and see a post taking the piss out of something and decide I’m the worst person in the world. There are those who email me telling me they don’t like when I do ranty posts and want me to stick to uplifting/inspirational stuff. Well, here’s the thing: I’m a work in progress. I’m human and as such, I’m not one dimensional. There are days I’ll want to try to inspire you and days I’ll want to have a good rant and there are days when I will be completely sarcastic and take the piss out of Madonna or Ugg Boots or Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s just how it is. I’m not a bad person. I’m just a person, like everyone else, I have many facets to my character.
There I things I look back at on here and think ‘I can’t believe I wrote that’ but I keep them up because they remind me how far I’ve come. I can understand that some people will always judge me on past posts and think I’m a terrible person for saying wearing Ugg boots makes you a hot mess but I’m on a journey here. Me and my blog are growing, I can only hope you’ll grow with me.
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Tags: blogging
