Month: June 2024

Hello hello!

The last time I posted it was January and now somehow it’s June. I didn’t set out to take a five month hiatus from the blog and basically just stumbled accidentally into it. It started with getting behind on my posts and feeling very little motivation to sit down and write. Thoughts like “eh, I’ll do it tomorrow” turned into “maybe next week, or maybe even the start of next month” and before I knew it, I was thinking . . .

. . .what if I just set this down entirely for a while?

The thought made me a little nervous. I’ve had this blog for 11 years now, and it’s been a consistent hobby of mine for the past six years. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had some things I really needed to take the time to assess in my life. Today, I want to share some of those here. This post is going to be a little lengthy and probably not very polished, but there are some things I feel are important to put out there before jumping back in to regular blog posts.

What is my goal here?

This blog started out as a pure hobby, a creative outlet for me after Justin and I got married and moved to a new town where I knew no one. I did it just for me and didn’t share it with any of my friends or family for a long time. In fact, I remember the first time an acquaintance found it and started following – I was so embarrassed! It hadn’t felt silly for strangers to follow along but suddenly there was someone I knew watching and it felt different. It took a while to analyze, but ultimately I realized that I felt silly because I thought if people who knew me knew about my blog, they would wonder why I had it. Why is she doing this? Why would anybody be interested in this?

And that’s an interesting question, right? Why do it? What is my why here?

Back in 2013-14, this blog was a creative outlet I enjoyed but did basically in secret. Then after a years-long hiatus, I came back to it in 2018 as a young mom where it became an outlet to share more publicly about motherhood (I actually told my friends and family this time, ha!) Sharing my experiences was fun and somewhat therapeutic, and I also thought maybe I could offer encouragement or solidarity to another mom or two from my little corner of the internet. Once we moved to our new home in 2019, I started sharing our home projects as well and discovered a huge passion for it. I love documenting our DIY projects and transformations both big and small, and while I still share things like a day in our family’s life or reviews of the books I’ve read, I have mostly focused on sharing our home ever since.

Around the time I shifted to sharing my home projects, the culture around social media was changing. Suddenly, everything was monetized and all these accounts that started for fun were now growing into huge money-makers. For a while, I also entertained thoughts of growth and monetization. Wouldn’t it be great if this hobby of blogging and sharing our home projects actually made me some money? It sounded like a dream situation, and I did have a few opportunities where I either got paid for my photos or received a free product in exchange for promotion. I quickly learned the reality that monetization turns my fun hobby into a job, and jobs come with a level of demand that hobbies do not. On the one hand yes, the compensation was nice, but on the other, the pressure to perform well, even on this very small scale, took quite a bit of the joy out of my hobby and replaced it with stress. Stress to perform well, stress to prove myself, stress to keep up with everyone else. And stress to grow, which meant I had to play the game of the algorithm, posting better and better things more and more often.

Ultimately, having monetization and growth as goals made me shift my daily focus off of my family and onto the work of maintaining the blog and social media (even on an extremely small scale, being a content creator truly is work!) It was exhausting and unsustainable for the life I want to lead. It’s not why I became a stay at home mom and it’s not what I want this chapter of my life to be focused on. I enjoy social media, but I want my life offline to be WAY more vibrant and fulfilling. To find some type of balance, I have fully embraced the fact that my goal is not to monetize or grow but continue writing this blog and sharing home projects simply because I enjoy it. And once I made that decision, social media became fun again 🙂

Just one more thought I had through this process: I had to examine why I had monetization as a goal in the first place. Why did I feel the need to make this into something more when I was already enjoying it as is? I realized, I think we are fed so many stories in our capitalistic society about monetization of hobbies that we just think it’s the natural progression and goal. How many times do we see a hobby turn into something like an Etsy business or social media empire? We watch shows like Shark Tank and see how someone’s side hustle, hobby, or passion grew into a bigger, more successful thing. But what is success? Are we only successful if we’re making money? I realized I did have this subconscious feeling of guilt that if I’m spending my time and energy on something, there should be a reason. A value. A type of compensation, maybe not monetarily, but a tangible reason to show others why I’m doing this. Why can’t that reason just be that I enjoy it? Can we allow ourselves to just get pleasure from our hobbies? (Let me be clear: I think it’s awesome when people turn their passions into business. This is amazing and wonderful for so many people!! But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for every hobby and every person.) I’ve come to understand I prefer my hobbies to stay hobbies for pure enjoyment and that is enough. It’s satisfying to have this thing just because I enjoy it.

The weight of the world

I also want to address that a huge reason I haven’t been posting as much lately is because it’s really hard to know how to show up online when the world feels heavy, and it’s been feeling incredibly heavy for a long time now. For me, the constant access to information is a paralyzing thing – I recognize the importance of knowing what is going on in the world, but it can also feel so so overwhelming to process a constant stream of difficult news. I fully recognize there is privilege in even having the option to post or not post about something, to be able to control the access of information I have. It’s not everyone’s reality and that isn’t fair. I wish it were different.

Even now, it’s very hard for me to get my swirling thoughts figured out enough to write something that makes sense and feels right, but I’ll try to explain with a specific experience from Memorial Day. We spent the day with at a friend’s house and they have a pool. I was listening to my kids laughing and splashing, enjoying a carefree day in a carefree childhood. It was peaceful and beautiful and fun and my heart was happy watching them. But also. I had this gut wrenching feeling of despair at the exact same time. I felt the strange mix of being happy and unsettled simultaneously, something I’ve become very familiar with lately. I knew as I sat in peace, surrounded by plenty of food and fun, another mother on the other side of the world is experiencing horrors. Another mother just like me is experiencing war, violence, loss of her home and her family. Another mother who fiercely loves her children and wants the same things for them: peace, safety, comfort. For months and months I have been filled with the tension of holding space for the enjoyment of my life and my family and the knowledge that the world is a cruel place for so many humans. There is so much suffering and despair, and my words are inadequate.

So I struggle with how to post online. When my heart is heavy with news, it feels trivial to post about a home project. It’s hard to jump in with something light and breezy when your heart is also broken for others. But the reality is, my life is bigger than an Instagram story. I am writing a blog post and writing to a senator. I am making a donation to a relief organization and making cookies with my kids. I am working on a home project and working to make a difference in my community and the world. I’m doing what I can with the resources I have and finding a creative outlet to help keep my mental health and wellness strong, which makes me a better mom, wife, friend, and human.

Like so many others, I’m just trying to do the best I can each day, and I know I get it wrong just as much, if not more, than I get it right. It’s hard to show up online and post something about my life when it feels so silly and small in the face of the rest of the word. But these small things are also my reality and do bring me joy to share. It’s still hard. Both things are true. I guess I just feel like I can’t get back into blogging without acknowledging this tension: I post things that are true for my life, and at the same time, I recognize the world is bigger than my life and I’m trying my best to make that a little bit better too.

At the end of the day, this blog (and social media) will continue to be a creative outlet for me, a place I can share and reflect about our life and home. But I guess the point of this entire post is to say 1) it doesn’t tell the whole story of my life, thoughts, and efforts, 2) it’s going to be done on my time, in a way that’s sustainable to also have a full and vibrant life offline, and 3) I still enjoy this, and if you want to follow along, I’m happy you’re here. ❤