I have a new banner for my website. I am not that good at taking evocative photos and I am rubbish at drawing things, so I decided to commission two artists to create my website banner and Twitter avatar. I didn’t really provide very detailed instructions and I didn’t proof the banner while the artists were in the process of making it. I wanted to be surprised.
I am inordinately happy with the result. I have a tendency of taking things too seriously and I was feeling a bit bogged down in my blog. I wanted my blog to be taken seriously and be viewed as professional and high quality. But in the process I lost some of the joy that I used to get out of blogging. I certainly lost my inhibition when talking about things that matter to me. And this has resulted in less blog posts, as I never felt good enough to blog anymore.
That’s where this image comes in. It reminds me that blogging should be fun for me. Sex is fun, or at least should be. Female empowerment (which I am hoping to concentrate more on) should be celebrated and while there are still a lot of serious issues that need to be tackled, I want to have fun with my blog. And I don’t want to be so serious.
I am extremely grateful that my blog is becoming a bit more popular. I am still not anywhere close to the amount of hits some of my fellow bloggers are receiving (even those who started after me), but I am getting okay traffic and my Twitter following has grown as well. I have even been commissioned to do some paid writing work. All of this is fabulous, but I really don’t want to lose sight of why I started this blog in the first place. I started this for me. Not for anyone else. It started as a way of expressing myself, of providing myself with a place where I could be me without filters (apart from me not putting my face and real identity out there).
Not worrying about what other people think of me helps me write better. It’s hard to balance, because of course I want people to like what I write and how I write. I love getting commissioned for paid writing work, and that can’t happen if what I publish on my blog is rubbish. But if I am too worried about what people think, nothing will get done. I will just shut down and question everything and the result is that nothing gets written. That is certainly what has happened in the past weeks, despite me being part of the Summer 100 Blog Challenge.
I hope I can avoid falling back into seriousness. But hopefully, with the help of my new, cheerful website image I can keep the fun and avoid becoming too serious about this blog again.
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