Four Blogging Years and Counting: Digging Deeper
/This week marks four years since the very first time I hit ‘publish’ on the back-end of my website, my stomach full of butterflies and my brain completely overwhelmed from code, logistics and other blasé technicalities that go into launching a website. I knew almost nothing then except for a desire to connect with like-minded individuals over fashion and I know very little more than that even now. Except somehow, I now also know SO much more. 🔮
✿ I’m about to get real with you all for a second, if you didn’t already realize. ✿
In the past year, I feel like I’ve been through a blogger’s litmus test of sorts. My blog’s existential crisis, if you prefer more dramatic terms. 😅
I had just started an intense postdoc and I was burning the midnight oil to work on blog posts after work, brainstorming punny Instagram captions on my commutes, racing the clock towards campaign deadlines, it was a lot for me. As if in direct mockery of my efforts, my readership plateaued, my Instagram follower count started dropping precipitously and our camera conked out on us. As any writer with a tanking book release would presume, I thought- this is it, this is the readers’ and the universe’s way of telling me that I’m up to no good here.
While my disheartened blogger self was edging closer and closer to shutdown mode, it turns out that my brain was miraculously bulldozing past all the 🚫 signs in my jungle of emotions towards clarity. I had to do a lot of scribbling in a notebook and sudden pausing of the music in the car to ‘think aloud’ to K, but I came out on the other side in one piece, y’all! Building a community won over analytics and numbers, sharing of experiences trumped creating ‘perfect’ pictures and the goal to create an inspiring resource for kindred souls scored over the desire to get bigger and better at blogging. ❤️
Just so we’re clear, blogger still in da house!!
Certainly with re-organized priorities, but still here.✌🏽
As I’m finding out in recent days, re-organizing my priorities apparently means that I go for several weeks without a blog post, take on fewer brand campaigns, offload my Instagram app on the weekends and even when I do prance around the Insta-space during the week, I focus on those oh-so-special DM conversations with you guys that have become so dear to me. It’s become clear that to me- creating content has always been about forming personal connections and having inspiring conversations… not only about fashion, but about travel and food and books and politics and life in my 30s and neuroscience and the universal appeal of George Clooney.
(I’ve long suspected that my love for avocado toast and my increasingly snowflake-ish behavior made me a prime example of the millennial stereotype, but all this love for the digital age must confirm it?)
Many paragraphs of honest introspecting later, I want to celebrate my fourth blog-iversary by saying that I’d like this blog to be more. I’d hesitate to shake the foundation of style and travel-related content that it’s built on, but it feels like it’s time to dig a little deeper. I’m not sure what that means yet, but I have some ideas- perhaps a recurring post series on thoughts that shape our daily lives like joy and fear and honesty, maybe a monthly love list of random things to bond over, possibly a periodic recap of book suggestions? Like I said, I have some ideas.
But I would LOVE to invite you, the reader, to share your thoughts and inputs on what you’d like to read. In this digital age, what do you look for on a website like mine? What topics of conversation would you like to engage in? Pleeeeease leave me a comment or shoot me a message/email if you’re a friend of this blog, I would truly appreciate it as I chart the way forward. 😊
Longtime readers may recognize this part as my annual sappy ugly crying speech, but I must ignore their jaded eye-rolls to say THANK YOU to old readers as well as new!! 🙏🏽 I still have to pinch myself all the time that anyone other than my mom is interested in my ramblings and in a very unintended way, the readers of this blog make all of my teenage-aspiring-writer dreams come true on a daily basis. An even bigger, biggest, bigger than biggest thank you to my Kushal because as if taking ALL of the pictures isn’t already enough, he then reminds himself to go like them when they’re posted, tells me to create content ‘that makes you happy’ even while stalking my follower count like a hawk, fixes my hair every single time those SF winds attack during a shoot and patiently tolerates my eyes glazing over when he’s talking about dinner but I’m in caption mode. Thanks for being the biggest cheerleader, K, you make MMS possible!😭
Happy fourth blogiversary to meeeee, so excited for the things to come!🤗🎉
