What’s this about?
You may be wondering: why wasn’t there a journal entry blog post last Sunday? Well, I wanted to take the time to take a step back and re-evaluate the current state of the blog, address some things that have started to bother me about it, and talk about where I want to take it next. I’ll be talking about my old vision back in June and how it stands currently. I also want to just take this time as a mini reset button on my blog since my drive to write has slowed down while settling down for my first fall semester in college. Here are the topics that I want to cover in this post:
- Current State
- Issues With The Current State
- New Vision
Current State
Alright, so what are my current and honest thoughts about my blog? I love it. It’s like writing out my own story in real time and it’s fun to sit down and just write out my raw thoughts with very little filter. The public journal aspect of it is oddly fulfilling too. I’ve always liked the idea of writing to an anonymous audience, and blogging perfectly fills that niche. At the very beginning, I constantly checked the stats on my blog posts and what not. Now, I rarely, if ever, check the stats on my blog posts and advertisement stories on Instagram, which gives me a sense of peace.
Since the announcement of my weekly journals, I’ve stayed consistent with my weekly Sunday schedule (with a few crossing into Monday 12:00 AM). Over the summer, I had a lot of free time to write everything down and was very ambitious with this blog. I tied a lot of my identity to this blog and even doubled down on it during my trip to Disney. Though, I would find out how the past few months felt a lot like the honeymoon phase of a relationship. I found myself procrastinating on these journal entries and worked on them at the end of each week. This caused me a decent amount of stress, but it wasn’t enough to overwhelm me since I did have a lot of free time to deal with it.
A big portion of that stress came from finding what ideas to write about and for many weeks, I didn’t have much to write about that was actually interesting. So that led to me stretching the smallest of ideas into semi-plausible ones for journal entry chapters. This itself brings me to what has been bothering me for a long time now. Trying to write at least two interesting chapters per week has led me down a rabbit hole that I realize that I don’t want to enter. Sometimes stretching ideas meant that I would write publicly about family, friends and conflicts that I now feel were inappropriate. If I wanted to maintain this blog long term, publishing posts about personal issues with my family was definitely not something that I wanted to continue doing. I always thought how if I realized that a relative or someone close to me was writing publicly about me, I wouldn’t find it comfortable. And so, with this post, I’ve also removed sections from a few journal entries that reflect this lack of privacy boundaries. I may also remove more sections in the future if I feel that they aren’t appropriate for the blog or are a little too personal.
I’ve found myself unconsciously using my blog as a reason to not try other things out while in college. My college experience so far has been very lacking in the social department and I genuinely believe that something has to change if I want to make the best out of my college experience. I’ve spent a lot of time and mental energy on worrying about staying extremely consistent with my blog and the pressure itself causes me a lot of stress. I uphold a really high standard for my blog and unfortunately, it won’t be healthy for the blog in the long run. There is one fear that keeps me going, which is that if I don’t stay consistent, then I’ll just find excuses to cut the blog off.
With all this in mind, this is the current state of the blog. I would really hate to see the blog die out entirely since I do enjoy it. So this is why I want to slow down now, before I start disliking the blog as a weekly chore.
Ok, Now What?
There are a few guidelines that I want to set for myself going forward. These changes are to help me move toward less restrictive expectations for myself.
The first thing I want to push towards is establishing blog breaks. This should allow me to take the time I need to regain motivation and energy during weeks that I might need them. Some times I might use blog breaks would be during exam seasons, weeks with a lot of work due, during holiday breaks, or after long streaks of weekly posting. I don’t want to have blog breaks often because I’m scared that using them too often will give me more excuses to not post, which could be another way this blog dies out. I still want Sunday night to be my normal posting time, but I don’t want it to be the end of the world if I end up not posting on a Sunday. I write this here because of this self-identity trap that I’ve identified on here before, where everything that I post on this blog creates a restrictive expectation for me to follow. Unfortunately, this is how my mind operates and I’m not sure how to solve it. However, it does help me stay disciplined with this blog and is probably the only reason why this blog is still going.
The second thing that I want to do is expand on the content that I publish. The journal entries themselves are relatively easy to write, but finding enough material worth writing about every week is what drains me. It’s also relatively easy to lose motivation to write them, especially when there isn’t much variety in my life to write about. One idea that I currently have is to share a philosophical, psychological, or sociological term that I find interesting and write about it. These academic fields cover a lot of things that are very applicable to everyday life. I personally think it’s a common thing that many people also find interesting. This series would help create a two-in-one incentive where I can use my curiosity as a source of motivation. As for the series name, I’m currently thinking of something along the lines of “There’s A Term For That: (insert term here).” There will definitely be more series that I want to branch out towards, but this and the journal entries are all I have in mind currently.
The third thing I want to do is to have shorter posts. Having shorter posts will help me reduce the feeling of the blog being a homework assignment and more so something fun. Initially, this concern didn’t really pop up, but when you continuously write for weeks, the burnout can stack up fast. For this new series, I’m thinking about keeping each post to roughly a page and using that as my standard. With this new focus, I also want to spend a little more time polishing my posts while still maintaining my voice. I’m not exactly sure how that will look but I guess I’ll find out.
The fourth thing I really want to emphasize is a new shift towards privacy and consent. If I have written about you and/or have any details about you that I have posted on my blog, please let me know if you want me to revise those sections or delete those sections at any time. Any time can mean in a few days, few weeks, or even years from now. From now on, I want to be more careful about what I publish in the first place for both my peace of mind and everyone else’s.
By the time you’re reading this, the blog will have received an overhaul which will make my blog easier to navigate, along with a new privacy & consent page establishing the new privacy boundaries that I want to set going forward.
Lastly, I just want to take the time to thank everyone who’s read any post so far. Even though it doesn’t receive a lot of interaction, I really appreciate any reader who takes any time of their day to read my pages full of yap. I hope I can keep this blog going for a long time and continue writing posts that are up to my standard.
Have a nice rest of your week. :)
No photos of the week for this post sadly.
Comments