Hello friends!

Happy September! I have been away from my little place on the internet for a while on what some people would call a hiatus and what I would call my own personal brand of self sabotage. It is quite a common thing with me and this blog, to run away when things start to pick up and people are actually reading. I guess I get scared at the idea of bearing my soul and having it be critiqued by people I don’t know. Or maybe even people I do know. Then I fall down a rabbit hole of “well if I don’t want anyone to read this then why am I doing it?” and then I stop… weird, huh? That brings me onto today’s post and what will hopefully continue for the rest of the year and for many more months after that.

This series

Pre-hiatus/sabotage, I was getting really into the groove of writing posts that I thought would do well for SEO - every blogger out there I’m sure can relate to wanting to play the system and find the holes in the algorithm to kind of “hack” your way into internet success. I am no exception to this. Since I’ve been blogging on and off for years now, I dream of the day where my blog will actually be filled with discussion and comments from all you readers out there and then even further down the line I hope that this space I’ve built for myself can help me pay for an irl space to build up myself - ah, a girl can dream. Anyway, the SEO-built posts did end up doing a lot better than some previous posts, but I found myself and my voice getting lost in the fake-ness of it all. Not to say I was being inauthentic with you, but rather, I was writing in a way that I thought you had to write in order to get a viral post. In other words, I wasn’t being the side of me that I want this blog to actually capture. There’s so many sides of me I want to share, which brings us straight to:

MULTIFACETED ME

A word I have come to love very much over the past few months is multifaceted. Look how great it looks:

multifaceted

/mʌltɪˈfasɪtɪd/

All it means is to have many sides. Such a simple meaning for something more complex.

It’s a word that I believe captures what I think all of us are. People with many sides who have many different voices, stories, and iterations of themselves that are constantly changing and evolving over time. I feel like this blog has been lacking a sense of direction and voice because I’ve been trying to fit myself into a box of a writing style/niche/blog type and it just hasn’t been working out for me. The real reason I started this blog is so I’d have an outlet to write and share my stories and anything that’s on my mind and I haven’t been doing that for fear of being judged.

Well, I just threw that fear out the window and decided to stick to my original goal and just write from the heart. Or the head. Or the fingertips. Or wherever inspiration may strike because I love to do it and the feedback I have been receiving has been great. So thank you to all the people out there who message on Instagram or reply to my tweets, you have no idea how much your response keeps me going. Even if it is a gif response of that smiling dog - you know the one.

Daisybutter & If Only

Lastly, I want to shout out two things that I have been reading/read on my hiatus that helped me get to this point. The first one is a blog called daisybutter by Michelle. I started following her on Instagram and a post she wrote about what’s going on in Hong Kong caught my eye (more on that from me next week). She has a series called sundaze, where she chats casually to her readers and I just love it. I hope she doesn’t mind that she is truly an inspiration, hell even the reason, for my friday series because I feel reignited and ready to write again.

The second thing that got me here and back on the blog this September is a book I read called If Only by Melanie Murphy. This book follows Erin, a woman who’s just turned 30 and is basically having a meltdown about her life and focussing a lot on the what if’s and could-have-been moments of her 20's. Even though I have a ways to go til 30, an overarching theme to the book is Erin and her blog. The two biggest criticisms Erin gets about her blog is that even though the posts are good, they’re not her, and that she doesn’t stick to it. AND IF THAT AIN’T ME, I don’t know what is. I totally connected to that part of the book and now I’m here trying to be more me because fuck, if Erin can do it then so can I.

That more or less concludes me coming back into the blogging world. Talk to me in the comments if you have something to say because I’d love to hear all your thoughts. I know people kind of tag that on to the end of things, but if I didn’t want to know I wouldn’t say it. Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

・FRIDAY FEELING・

listening to: Taylor Swift's Lover album on repeat

watching: Royalty Soaps on YouTube

reading: The Defining Decade by Meg Jay

playing: Redecor, a game where you design people's homes

feeling: fan-fucking-tastic