Happy birthday to My Anxious Life – a reflection on my first year of blogging

As strange as it seems saying it, it’s my first birthday – 1 year of My Anxious Life. A year since personal trauma saw me resolving to make some major changes. And what a year it’s been. It’s been exhilarating, frustrating, time-consuming, exciting; it’s seen me meet new people and do things I’d never even thought of before.

Turning 1 has me reflecting again (as you know birthdays always do!) and I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned, and how I’ve changed, along the way.

When I started blogging, I mistakenly thought it was all about the writing. Haha, oooohh Lordy, how naïve I was. I mean yes – of course writing is at the core. You need to be passionate and you need to have talent. But that’s just the beginning. The number of things you have to learn simultaneously – and quickly! – is insane. People think blogging is easy (to be fair, I guess I did before I started). But let me tell you, it’s really NOT.

Promotion & Networking

What good is writing if no-one’s reading it? It seems obvious, right? But when I started out, I was somewhat guilty of the “write it and they will come” mentality, and naively thought that likes and shares from friends and family would be consistently forthcoming. Quickly I realised that I needed to re-think my strategy. I realised that writing was no different from any other industry and if I wanted to be a success, I needed to work: to do my research and understand the game, network, understand competitors, self-promote, find out where all the cool kids are hanging out and surround myself with likeminded people. And in the digital age a lot of that is done online, which brings me to:

Social Media

There are sooo many different kinds of social media platforms! I’m over here wrangling with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram like an old lady, whilst all the kids are on YouTube, TikTok – Christ, even Boris Johnson has a Snapchat account. And each platform is different. The nuances of algorithms, vaying ways in which each platforms users’ like to communicate, hashtags, groups… and just when you think you’re catching on: there’s an update and it’s all change. There’s a reason social media management is a full-time job.

Technical sh*t

I started blogging because I needed an outlet for my creativity. I’m arty farty, guys. So I was not expecting to have to test my practical and technical mind quite so much. SEO, statistic tracking, web code, DA, what Google – apparently the most sensitive little princess on earth – does or doesn’t like… Thankfully I have my in-house tech support aka my husband on hand, but as a control freak, I mean independent woman, I like to do as much as I can myself. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I weren’t already busy being a writer, publicist and social media specialist.  

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not moaning, honest. I love what I’m doing, and this past year has been an incredible journey for me. I started out on Facebook, self-conscious and hesitant, nervous of revealing all to family and friends and wondering if anyone, anywhere would actually be bothered about what I had to say any way. But I was blown away with the response I got. People relating to me, feeling the same. All sorts of people, from total strangers to old friends, messaged me to share their own experiences. I’m no Mother Theresa, but it genuinely began to feel like I was doing something necessary, important and beyond just myself.

And the more I did, the more I wanted to do. All of a sudden, I found myself taking it more seriously than I’d originally intended and started to imagine – just for a second – that I could make a career out of this. By summer, I had a couple more social media channels, my website up and running and a little network of contacts that was steadily growing and all this has helped me as a person no end.

Confidence

The process of this year has done more for my confidence than anything in my previous 34 years and – like a good diet – the change is for life, because it’s been slow and steady: this woman is sticking around. I’ve been able to actively put myself out there and make new connections, when previously I struggled to give someone my business card. I’ve pitched ideas – and pitched myself – without the crushing fear of failure. I still have the fear, but now it’s just more bruising than crushing.     

Self-esteem

The slow development of confidence and the warm, complimentary feedback that I’ve received has also massively helped my self-esteem. My whole life, if someone had asked me what I was good at, you would’ve heard me answer “nothing” and any sense of my own worth was often tied to appearance. Whilst becoming a Mother has no doubt helped with self-belief, blogging has allowed me to discover my talent, accept it, instead of it brushing away like a compliment I don’t believe, and to take pride in it.

Self-development and understanding

If you’ve read my previous post about self-development, you’ll know that I used to be a sceptic. Blogging has helped me to become much more open-minded, to understand the importance of mindfully growing and not to dismiss working on yourself as a self-indulgent joke. And allowing my creativity to flow through my writing, especially writing about such personal subject matters, has given me the chance to get to know myself a bit better: the bits I like, the bits I don’t, why all of those bits exist and how I might like to change them. That in turn has helped to give me decisiveness and a sense of direction that I have just never had before.

Wellness & self-care

Through that exploration, I’ve discovered all sorts of wellness ideas and approaches that I never knew existed, that have given me scope to experiment with what might practically aid my mental health. Many I haven’t even tried yet, and in a weird way it’s exciting to think about what new technique you could discover that may make a big difference to your life. And one of those wellness ideals is self-care, which I now understand a lot better and think very differently about. I know we hear tons now about prioritising self-care, but it won’t hurt to say it one more time.      

Building the career that I want

All of that leads me to this point. The memory of how unhappy I was in the corporate world. The flame that’s been ignited through writing. The positive changes it’s helped to inspire in my life. I want to be a writer. I have the talent. And now I have the skills and the belief to make it happen.

And one year on, I’m so proud to say that I’ve secured my first retained client. It’s a small (but perfectly formed) business, but everyone has to start somewhere. As my Mom said, “from little acorns, big oaks grow.”