Things have been quiet here on my blog for awhile now. There are several contributing factors, with two tied for first place: planning a wedding and not really laying out a plan for this blog before I started. You know what they say, hindsight is 20/20.
I’m writing this post quite cautiously. You see I’m noticing with each passing day that this platform, along with other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, feels like it’s closing in on me.
I have four or five blogs that I visit at least once a week because I love their personality, writing style, or lifestyle. Lately, I do my weekly round-up of blog visits and I feel myself getting mad. Mad at being marketed to. Mad at feeling inferior because my clothes aren’t as nice as their (sometimes free) designer clothes. Mad that I had an hour commute to work and they’re off on their next adventure.
I open up Instagram and I lose 5-10 minutes of my day scrolling through perfectly curated content that sometimes inspires me, but usually leaves me feeling deflated and disappointed in my own Instagram aesthetic. At brunch the other day, I made the comment that I don’t post a lot of things (including tons of photos of my dog) because I felt like they didn’t match Instagram’s aesthetic. Man, just typing that out makes me angry that I even feel like that.
So you see, I’m in a bit of a slump. I would say I need to take a step back to gain some perspective, but it feels like we’re living in a world that uses authenticity as a marketing gimmick.
We’re told “comparison is the thief of joy” through beautifully (and sometimes poorly) designed quotables and pins, but we’re encouraged to keep comparing every our reality with @everyone’s virtual reality.
Every swipe, every like, every email newsletter reminds me “you should be doing more,” “you could be doing better,” and “what are you even doing?” Quite frankly, it’s exhausting.