Hello, Again.

Hi there! Long time, no write???? Haha does that work…I am not sure about it, but we will leave it there because well…it’s me.

But seriously. I think it has been over 6 months since I have sat down and written a blog post for you all, which blows my mind to think about. However, sometimes space is needed and I think I have needed to do a lot of reassessing to do over the past 6 months. Life begins to develop in a new way and I have definitely been at a crossroads with my blog.

I mean where do I start….well I will start with being honest. Honesty encourages me to tell you that I had big hopes for this blog. I have been writing for officially four years. Four years this month in fact. It all started after we got married.

We had recently moved to Charlotte (I had been here for about 6 months at this point) from California. I had left all that I knew to come to a place I knew NOTHING about with my then fiancé for his new job. We had recently been engaged prior to moving, so the first four months of living here where spent flying back to California for wedding festivities and preparation. Then…as my fellow married friends are aware, it is all over in a day and you are left with…well a ring on your finger and your forever love to readjust back to normalcy almost like the whole thing never happened, despite spending hours upon hours of your life preparing for this one day.

Once it was all over and reality sank in…I was a mess. I had no friends, hated my job, all my family was miles and a timezone away and I felt like I was empty. It was a low point for sure…so what did I do? I began reading self help books and it was within my reading I began to realize I wanted something more and was MADE for something more.

So, after doing some inner work, I realized that blogging was how I was going to do that. I had loads of free time, enjoyed writing and had already had a fitness instagram account that had given me plenty of social media experience. Plus, I learned how much successful bloggers madeeee and was like, uh ya…sign me UP!

I then spent the next 2 years learning and writing and attempting to grow my instagram and blog. I loved it, and loved sharing my thoughts and taking photos and all the things that came with it. On top of that (full transparency here) I was determined that becoming a full time “blogger/influencer” was my future and I was going to have hundreds of thousands of followers and make tons of money and be given lots of super cute clothes because, well,…I am like super cute and why wouldn’t people like me, and I wanted to show anyone that ever doubted me I could “make it”…whatever that meant….

Fast forward to today.

Clearly, I am still a full time nurse and clearly I don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers of Instagram and am not making millions.

It was around the 2.5 year mark I started struggling. Losing my spark. I wasn’t growing or seeing progress anymore. I felt stagnant. Jealous of how others around me were growing or how I felt they had “cheated” their way there. I started focusing on the external, instead of focusing on me. And when I say that, I don’t just mean focusing on my community or number of followers, but now that I can look back I stopped focusing on my own mental growth, as well. I stopped learning and I stopped enjoying the creative process.

I sat in this place for a long time. Not sure what to do. Spinning my wheels, spending way too much time scrolling mindlessly hoping for inspiration…until about 6 months ago.

I had already began my self-evaluation after the numerous events we all experienced through quarantine (isolation, Black Lives Matter, election, storming of the capital, etc). These situations changed me each time, bringing in a large amount of self-evaluation.

Then, I found out I was pregnant.

Wow. I was going to be raising a human? Now, I really needed to shape up.

I found out I was pregnant in December and by the end of January I was considering how blogging (which I still struggled calling a hobby because I wanted more from it even then), would fit into our new world. Incomes would be changing, jobs would be shifting, time would be limited…where does that leave it?

By March, I had thought long and hard. I had talked to friends and families, listened to podcasts, read books, watched fellow bloggers with kids, etc and decided that I would take a social media break. By now, I had accepted where I was in the blogging world. It was a result of my own efforts, which truly wasn’t much of anything at this point. So, I decided that I would take a 3-4 week break from social media. I told myself that if I missed it and wanted to get back on, I would set limitations and go ALL IN. I would write, interact, post…do all the things I knew I needed to do to grow, but was too lazy to actually set in motion. If I didn’t miss it, well then, it was time to accept it for what it was.

Well, instead of 4 weeks, I ended up taking 6. I didn’t miss it and in fact, I felt more free than I ever have without it. I also realized just how truly addicted I was to the apps, as well which in truth was sort of scary. I went from spending two hours alone on Instagram, with a 6 hour daily average on my phone to less than two hours total. Can you believe that? I gained. 4 hours a day back of my life. That is 1460 hours, or better yet, 60 WHOLE DAYS PER YEAR of my life.

I mean.

Mic drop.

I got my life back by leaving social media and what I realized was why I really enjoyed blogging in the first place, which was the creativity I used through writing, the knowledge I learned through learning new techniques or figuring certain aspects out, and of course the FUN I used to have. Which made me think…so social media took my life away, but just because I am not on social media, doesn’t mean I don’t have to stop blogging!

So here I am folks. Writing again. Getting back to what I really enjoyed in the first place, which is creating.

If you are still reading this…I applaud you (especially because I write the way I talk and the amount of grammatical errors up in this thang is probably atrocious). If I lost you somewhere up top…I don’t blame you. I just needed to get it out there.

I got up this morning around 5:30am to write again and words cannot describe how good it feels. I can’t tell you what sort of content will be on this page (probably similar to what it has always been), how often I will be posting, and if any of it is going to be ground breaking, but what I can tell you is that I am going to keep writing. I am going to write for me and that one person who may be reading this (probably a family member of sorts). It will evolve, and it will grow into exactly what it is meant to be, but for now, this is it.

I am a blogger without social media (except Pinterest, I mean who can give up Pinterest).

Who knows, maybe I’ll start a trend.

xoxo,

Melissa