2017 started with a blogging identity crisis. After my year-long self-improvement project in 2016, I was left thinking ‘what next?’
It’s fair to say my goals for the blog changed last year. At some point, I stopped caring about turning my project’s research into a book. Or getting free products, making an income, or even writing a book. Success became redefined as something I was achieving offline rather than in or through my online life.
When I started my blog, it never occurred to me that turning it into a business was possible. But attending talks, conferences, and receiving goodie bags changed that. It became a possibility. It was other people’s reality.
Last October I attended the Irish Blogger Conf in The Marker Hotel. It was brimmed full of speakers who have made it. Bloggers with their own product lines, who travel the world for free, who make a million dollars a year.
And in my head all I could think was "I don't want that. This isn't for me".
I don’t care about Instagram themes. If you have an Insta theme, great. But I won’t notice it.
I don’t want a product line. What does a mental health themed product line even look like? Some sort of squeezable stress ball perhaps? A t-shirt emboldened with ‘This is what mental really looks like’? A memoir about growing up ‘different’?
Rather than leave me inspired, the Conference snuffed out my spark for blogging.
I hit a crossroads.
I realised that I don't want to be a full-time blogger. I don't want to make a career out of my experience of mental health.
So what was the point of stressing about my blog? Of putting time and money into something when I don’t have the enviable life goal of making a living from my thoughts? Why do I create a strict schedule and feel guilty when I fail to live up to it?
What was next for my blog?
When the Romeo Project finished at the end of 2016, I took a break. I gave myself time to decide on my blog’s future, but it was safe to say I had spent the previous two months writing half-heartedly and without inspiration.
From January, posts trickled out. But not by plan. I wrote when I felt compelled to write. When I had no other choice but to put my thoughts to paper.
When the media failed to call out Blue Monday, I wrote.
When so-called mental health professionals ditched ethics to label Donald Trump ‘insane’, I wrote.
When I was sick of hearing people throwing around the word ‘mental’ like some sort of metaphor for unusual, I wrote.
And somewhere between my thoughts and the keyboard and seeing my words appear onscreen, I remembered why I started my blog.
Maybe there doesn't need to an end goal or a money-making aspect at all. Maybe blogging doesn't have to be anything of the sort.
Maybe it's about the lethargy of writing, the therapeutic aspect of releasing, revealing and sharing.
Maybe it’s about having a space where I feel safe to say the things I can’t talk about offline.
Maybe it’s about giving a voice to those who feel the same way I do. Who’ve been rendered silent by society’s stigma.
I've been too focused on what other people do with their blogs or what they're in it for. I thought that wanting to be a full-time blogger was what I was supposed to want. But that's not for me.
I write because I've always written. Because I always will. Because I need an outlet, an expression. I write because I’m scared and angry. I write because I need therapy and I don’t have the time or the money to see a counsellor.
It's okay to write for no other purpose than because you WANT to. That's what I do. And that's what I will continue to do without a schedule or a plan or an aim.
For me, blogging is a hobby. It's where I vent and share, but also where I choose to spend my time. But more than all of that, it's good for my mental health. And that means I'm here to stay.
