*Shouts into what feels like an abyss* – “Hello… is anyone still there?”. If I take a look back at my blog, I’ve been offline since April, and before that blogging had been very patchy for me for over a year. My instagram other than the odd story here and there has been almost dormant and I think it’s been needed for me to just reset my life a little bit after a lot of big changes.
In the past 2.5 years, blogging felt like it transitioned slightly for me, which I’ve previously spoken about my move into working in the beauty industry and maybe finding the juggle of what was my passion outside of work, becoming an everyday topic of conversation. I think I was feeling a bit burnt out by beauty on a day to day basis as when you spend all day at work talking about moisturisers and the next product launch, for a while my interest dwindled in that on a personal level.
But, over the past few months I’ve found myself craving taking pictures of eye looks I do, wanting to shout about a new palette and almost more importantly – wanting to tell the world about products that did and didn’t live up to the hype, which is why I started my blog in the first place many, many moons ago. More recently, that crave for it as a creative outlet has started to return, as has my own personal interest in the industry widening past my day-to-day life.
What Next?
Working out what to do next has been tricky, blogging isn’t what it was 2, 3 or even 5 years ago – people have moved on in terms of how they consume content, but for me – I hate the constant shift that instagram demands, IG wanted IGTV, now they want reels, if you don’t create what they want they don’t show it to people, it madness to create content in a way that another platform demands, and most people don’t want to consume, and I don’t want to create content I don’t enjoy. Tiktok for me is semi-enjoyable and I have created a few, but it becomes a massive time sap for me and is so cleverly addictive, I try to stay off it.
Personally, a lot has happened since we last caught up properly, and has been a large reason that despite that I’ve wanted to get started with blogging again in the last 2-3 months, life has been so busy and now we’re in that winter slump life feels a little slower and I feel like I have time for my passions again.
Life since we last caught up:
- My boyfriend officially moved in after we’d come back from Rome
- We rescued two feral cats, which we planned to rehome but within an hour of being home, we decided they would stay
- The same week we’d realised cat got pregnant and had a litter of 4 kittens
- We had a summer of doing things to the house and garden, being super busy with jobs and it was refreshing to have a partner who has the same drive for home improvements that I do!
- We managed to squeeze in some long weekends away and ticked a load of things off my theatre bucket list! (Hamilton, Tina, 2:22 and The Colour Purple).
- During the midst of the cat’s pregnancy, one of our cats got really poorly, and at one point we were facing the prospect of all of our cats being put down while we waited for results of whether it was a particular disease. We still don’t know what is wrong with him after spending a small fortune trying to find out but he is still clinging on.
- We weren’t going to keep any, but we both fell in love with two and couldn’t resist (yes, now we have seven cats and two dogs)
- We started decorating a room to become my partners office and quite literally everything that went wrong, did go wrong and it’s taken three or so months to get to complete.
- We went to New York, and went up to Albany to see Luke Combs in concert
- We caught covid whilst in New York – the first time for both of us, and had to self isolate when we returned as we felt awful
It was really when we got back and were in this haze of not feeling well enough to go out – that I really wanted to jump back into blogging again – but also, during this time I felt too ill to put on makeup so it’s waited another month to get going in the background again.
Pam’s Babies: Panko & Sushi
I won’t lie, I’ve done a fair bit of beauty shopping recently and I feel bursting with new products giving me inspiration, and I’m so ready to find my feet with it again, and I’m particularly excited to get reaquainted with my camera and finding my groove with photos. Although, my current challenge is having the two miniest balls of chaos are far from blog photo trained and have been terrors at crashing the shoots!
I’m hoping there’s people still here reading… If so please leave a comment and let me know I’m not the only one still alone!
That’s a lot of animals…that I want to see more pictures of 😁
I feel that blogging failed around the time WordPress forced the blocks thing for something that supposed to be for amateurs. Maybe that was their intention but it surely seems like less and less people want to do blogging. It may also be that the fast tempo after the pandemic has left people without time for their hobbies and they just abandoned so many stuff. Nevertheless, there are still people here: if not publishing – reading others people’s posts 🙂
Wishing you a good one and hope to see more posts 🙂
Author
Completely agree with you on the blocks, I’m an ex web-developer and the first iteration of blocks didn’t work well at all to use and create content with. For a long time I had them disabled completely and just carried on, but I knew how to do that and it was a completely alienating experience for many!
I think for a while there was the growth of being able to post on instagram and get the same interaction, but now that’s died too and people have moved on again. I do think long term there’s still a world for blogging, many don’t use instagram and tik tok to actively search for reviews and it’s used for what catches your eye in the moment. Google and search engines still hold some power that those platforms don’t as they’re not found in search results in the same way.
Thank you for reading, maybe I’ll do a fully pets related post on what life is like with 9 pets!
My goodness all your kitties are adorable! We’re considering a little Birman friend for Halo, just waiting to hear back from a breeder.
You’re right, blogging isn’t what it was a few years ago and it’s a little sad but also reflects the time we’re in, things are fickle and change seems to be more constant. I haven’t blogged since March for a couple of reasons which I have actually been thinking of writing a post about recently. I do still read other blogs semi-regularly and don’t think I’ll stop being here in the background for a while!
Author
Thank you! They are all really lovely. We sadly lost the cat that was poorly last week, he finally gave up on what ever was making him ill but at least he didn’t start suffering.
Totally agree to you, it seems to be a bit of a strange transition, things are fickle but people aren’t buying as much and seem to be on the new train – but that doesn’t match up with social media. Instagram is actually a sap of my happiness a lot of the time and I try to spend as little time there now as I can, I enjoy the interaction, but not the app in general. It makes it tricky for feeling like I want to create content but I’m not really interested in doing it for instagram, so bringing blogging back for my own enjoyment if nothing else!
I’d love to see you back blogging – when I first logged back into my blog I headed back to yours to see if I’d missed anything! x