And 45 follows away from my goal on WordPress! Please share if you feel inclined, I’d love to hit at least one more of my goals. And drop your links below too to share with my audience! 🙂
Seems like summer is over before it even got started. Summer is my favorite season, but fall is a close second when the weather is still warm. You don’t get to have much of a summer when you’re a working adult and I know I got a lot more done than I thought I would, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. As August wraps up this week, here’s a recap of my month!
Favorite show:Â I’ve been rewatching Grey’s Anatomy.
Favorite memory:Â Going to the fair with friends, I haven’t been on rides in a long time and I had a blast!
Favorite place: Maple Lawn Farms. We had a scenic drive to the Sunflower Festival, it was so beautiful!
Favorite meal:Â Honestly, I’m back to being addicted to Chipotle.
As my blog grows, I love to be able to connect with everyone on all platforms! Some of my summer bucket list goals stem around social media, so I’d love if you could give me a follow and help me out! 🙂 Drop your links below so everyone can check you out.
The way I approach social media is the following: do it for the gram, but also do it because you love it. I find nothing wrong with people sharing their adventures, selfies, and accomplishments on social media. I find nothing wrong with people traveling just because they want a great photo. I find nothing wrong with people hopping on certain trends like books, movies, or becoming more aware of what’s going on in the world just so they can chime in on social media conversation. Because it may all be for this little internet world, but there are many real life experiences coming from it.
It’s not always the case though. Sometimes our social media lives take over our real lives. And I hate to admit it, but it’s happening to me right now.
If you were to go on my Instagram right now, you’d see fun travel shots from the past. You’d see that I spent my weekend loving life and going to farmer’s markets and getting coffee. You’d see all my friends commenting and liking my photos.
But my real life is just nothing like that right now.
I’m pretty bored and the occasional coffee run doesn’t change that. Work is stressful, life is mundane, and I’m tired. So I’ve dug myself deep into the social media hole just to escape life.
Nothing really should be used to escape life. Alcohol, traveling, social media – are all things you can enjoy, but shouldn’t be used to just forget your life. And that’s what it feels like for now and I’m honestly sharing it with the world because I know other people get sucked up in it too.
I get home from work, put on netflix, and scroll through my phone until it’s time to sleep and that’s no way to live.
Sometimes social media just takes over our lives, but we have to recognize it and get ourselves out and do something for ourselves. Because social media is not going to do it for us.
Every once in a while, when I’m too busy to blog, I throw up a post giving a shout out to bloggers I follow that I think other people should also follow.
I had some time to go through some of the posts like that I’ve put up over the years and was very sad to see how many blogs were inactive. I should’ve noticed they had been gone, but as new followers join my blog I end up just keeping in touch with people that keep in touch with me and whoever else is popping up on my reader.
I totally get blogger burnout. There have been so many times when I sat down to publish a post or Instagram and thought – does anyone really care? I put a decent amount of time into everything blog related and a lot of the time it feels like no one is even listening.
Especially on Instagram, I feel like there is so much mumbo jumbo about whether my picture looks good, my hashtags are good, etc. Then I’m worried about if I’m getting my personality across, if people actually like the products I promote, if I’m authentic like I’m trying to be or just as fake as the many beautifully filtered and curated feeds out there.
Then I’ll get a message or a comment from someone telling me how my blog has helped them or answering a question I left at the bottom of my post. And I’m inspired to keep going.
If you’re a reader, know that bloggers really do appreciate knowing that you like their blog. Whether you throw them a like, a comment, or an email. I am definitely more prone to staying on the silent side when it comes to expressing how I feel about something. I think about it like this, though, if I liked someone’s dress then I could make their day by just coming out of my shell a little bit to tell them I like it. The same goes with reaching out to your favorite bloggers.
If you’re a blogger, I know how hard it is to write to what feels like no one. But that one person you could help with your blog exists and they’ll find you eventually. Do it for yourself, but do it for them too.
I’m not going to lie guys, I am struggling with my Instagram account right now. I reached my goal of 6,500 followers, started worrying less about the perfection of my content, and started sharing my life through my stories and my engagement plummeted. I know a lot of bloggers/influencers are struggling right now, so I like to share out my links and ask that you drop your links here so we can all support each other! 🙂
Please drop your social media links in the comments so we can all check you out! 🙂
As an introvert, I really struggle to find a happy medium of social and alone time in my life. Mostly because if it were up to me, I’d be alone ALL the time. But that’s not really healthy and there are so many people in my life that I care about enough to put in the effort of breaking free of my introvert lifestyle.
And it’s kind of frustrating because in a way I have all these dreams and aspirations to do more and I think my introverted personality along with sheer laziness just keep me in this boring middle ground of wanting more but not really wanting to do more. I wrote a post about it and was reminded of the yes theory by sparkle in my eye.
So now I’m saying yes (within reason). I said yes to a trip to Orlando where 90% of my time would be alone time in a strange place and traveling back home alone which I get very nervous about. I said yes to a whole lot of Instagram collaborations that required a lot of time and forced me to create a calendar and execute. I said yes to my first blogger event that I dragged my friend to because I was wayyyy too nervous to go alone. I said yes to talking in my Instagram stories and showing my face in a real way. I said yes to a new gym to help boost my fitness morale. I said yes to booking up my first two weekends in April even though back to back plans usually stress me out.
All these things I said yes to don’t seem like huge steps, but they are the steps that are going to get me back into the direction of doing more things that I love. And I’m going to say yes to more things. I made my spring bucket list longer than all of my other lists because I really want to push myself to do the things I love but am too apathetic. I’ve settled in a place I don’t want to be, so it’s time to motivate and move forward.
