I’m back! After berating myself for realising I haven’t actually written a post for my personal blog at all this year and we are in May already, I realised I cannot be alone in this. The ‘t’inter-web-net’ as my good friend calls it, must be full of freelancers that are so busy with life and work that they neglect their own blog/social media. Beating themselves up for not devoting the time that they didn’t have to write posts that nobody really cares about in order to achieve and maintain a status in the online world that is imperative for business but is pretty much impossible to sustain in real life.
I (and probably many many others) are trapped in this cycle. It begins with one productive day, a spark ignites. You’re on top of your workload, the kids are entertaining themselves (or at school), your significant other is building Lego doing very important adult stuff (or is at work) household jobs and admin are complete and you’ve organised your workspace to the best of your ergonomic knowledge. You set up social media accounts on all platforms in a bid to tell the world who you are, what you do and why you do it. You start a blog. You smirk to yourself, imagining your business/project taking off and having hundreds maybe even thousands of followers. Sometimes we make it to a few months of regular posting, sometimes only a few weeks, sometimes we don’t re-visit after that initial day!
The reason for abandonment is quite often; work itself. Jobs come flying through the door and you don’t have the time to write/post content that isn’t directly linked to bringing work in. At other times, ill health or childcare or family takes up all your time and gets in the way and sometimes we just plain procrastinate prioritising caffeine, books, friends. Before we know it, we realise we haven’t updated our online presence for months and getting back to it seems impossible.
When I do finally get around to posting, I get a few likes and I promise to post content more often and make it riveting. In reality, I quickly get sidetracked by paid work that puts food on the table or I physically can’t write due to chronic illness or I have an EHCP meeting or hospital appointments for my kids. Weeks build upon weeks of not enough hours and the cries of ‘useless’ spin around my head as I tell myself off for failing, again. ‘I’ll never amount to anything at this rate. There’s no point writing anything now. No one is reading it anyway, except maybe your dad so what’s the point’. (I do appreciate you reading stuff dad)
Not this time. This time I am telling myself the truth. That life is busy, stuff gets in the way. I am by far not the only one who falls into this cycle. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t updated the status on my three Facebook business pages, YouTube Channel (alright it’s my daughters and I should never have committed to trying to help her become an internet sensation) or this blog. I just need to pick myself up, dust myself off and start writing. It’s ok to fail at something because that’s life. Failure is just a blip. It is not the end.
Any other freelance writers stuck in this cycle, my advice to you is ‘write something’, write anything because any writing is better than no writing and once you start you won’t want to stop. This post, for instance, is a few hundred words of blah but hey it got me typing. I can share it on my social media and putting it bluntly, people will know I haven’t fallen off the edge of a cliff somewhere, awaiting rescue. It might not be particularly newsworthy or even very well written but heck you’ve found the time to write something read it through, re-read it through to avoid the trolls screaming ‘call yourself a writer’ and hit publish and that my friend deserves a pat on the back.
So I’m back, but in reality, I never went away. I just stopped telling people I was here. So if you see a random blog post from me or you come across a few random social media posts, consider giving them a quick like will ya before you leave the online world for your own busy life. It’s good to be nice to one another so let’s encourage each other online whilst we all try and navigate our time here on Earth.
As you were people…
Everything Between 