Existential Crises and Evolving as a Blogger After Five Years of Blogging

AHHH IT’S 13^th MAY 2020- AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS?!?! IT’S MY FIFTH BLOGGING ANNIVERSARY!

Everyone take a banana- you get a banana, and you get a banana, and you get a banana!

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give a shoutout to my bloggiversary buddy Katie @ Never Not Reading! I’ve always loved her ideas and reviews and original content- so I highly recommend checking her out!

Now, I’m usually feeling pretty celebratory for making it another year (and obviously I’m feeling that quite a bit!) but maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the current state of the world which we won’t talk about, or maybe it’s cos my brain is in lockdown… I’m also feeling a little more contemplative this year.

Over the years, I’ve had plenty of blogging crises and panics and worries… and usually my response is to just bottle up all those emotions and toss them in the sea (very mature haha!) Behind the scenes, I admit, I’m not that nice to myself. Basically, apart from occasionally saying to myself and others hey, I may need some time off, I’m not all that great at admitting that the course of true love blogging never does run smooth 😉

Part of this, I’ve realised, comes from trying to figure out my blogging purpose. When I started out, my mission was clear: tell people what I really think about books and have fun doing it. And that’s something I’ve tried to return to as much possible. Yet, as much as going back to basics helps, I have noticed that there are other reasons to blog. The most noticeable for me was when people started to interact and it dawned on me that you could actually make real connections online! (A novel concept to me!) I found I wasn’t just trying to be entertaining, but being entertained- and that was amazing!

As Booker Talk pointed out in her post on blogging purpose, blogging goals wax and wane. And with that in mind, I’ve tried to accommodate my deepest darkest desires blogging moods. At the moment, I’ve reduced the amount I post, so that I can (try) to do better quality posts when I do write one. I don’t do as many tags if I’m not feeling it; I try to be excited about every post I put out… even if it’s not totally ground-breaking (see, there’s that inner critic again 😉).

So, all of this is to say that, even if I’m less active at blogging these days, I’m much happier where I’m at with the blog before I went into a slump at the end of the year. And I want to take the opportunity to say a ***MASSIVE THANK YOU*** once again for sticking with me! Whether you’ve been here five minutes or five years, I’m always grateful to have you around ❤

Hope you are all staying safe and well ❤