Writing is something that has always been on my mind, but blogging has been the one constant that I keep returning to. After years of starting and stopping my blogging, this post is about why I am coming back to blogging again – and why writing has always been tied to my mental health.
There have been so many silent moments of my days are spent thinking about potential stories I want to write, characters I want to develop, and blog ideas that I am just dying to get out onto paper. But for some reason I just struggle to make it happen. I can think and think and think about things all day but getting myself to actually sit down and write is another ball game entirely.
Over the past 8 years or so, since I was in the early years of high school I have had a blog. I started my first blog when I was about 14 years old, I was at a stage in my life when I was crippled with a myriad of mental health issues that still affect me to this day, but as I have grown older I have also learned how to manage them (to an extent).
Why I Started Blogging as a Teenager
As a 14 year old girl, life was so hard at my school and in my family life too, that I felt like I had no escape, i just couldn’t get into journaling because it felt risky to be writing down my deepest darkest thoughts onto paper that my family could find and read. Then I read Girl Online by Zoe Sugg and for me that was a defining moment in my life. This book aimed at young tween aged girls still means so much to me today because for the first time I felt like someone understood the anxiety I was feeling and my love of writing.
So I started a blog, and it was the first moment i can remember in my teenage life where i can say i felt like I had a purpose. I was communicating with people online by just sharing my experiences and things I have thought about and people were responding to it, and i felt as if i was making friends online for the first time, and in a time in my life where I was without friends in the ‘real world’.
Blogging for me became an escape and a way of still airing out my feelings when I felt as if i had no one to talk to, but then I just stopped. I got absolutely swamped with school work in my final years of high school, i started making friends at school and so my blog was put on the back burner while I lived my life.
Why I Stopped Blogging – and Why I Keep Coming Back
Years later, I have posted a blog post here and there over the years but then Covid hits and I decided to bring back my blog but once again I get distracted with university this time and my blogging ceases. This has happened many times over almost the last decade and multiple times I even re-made my blog to kind of act as a clean slate for myself based on the stage of life where I am at.
Starting Again at 22
Now here I am, at the age of 22, with so many new, exciting and anxiety-inducing things happening in my life and all I have been wanting to do is write about it. So for the past few months I have been writing my thoughts, based on different topics and things i have thought of but I havent posted any of them. I have waited until I felt like I was at a stage that i could comfortably post consistently and pay my blog the attention that it deserves. And i finally feel like I am there!
It would be my absolute dream to be able to write as a career, whether that be for a magazine, my blog or publish a novel, but for now I will write for the sole reason that I love to do it and it makes me happy.
Over the years my blog has been my best kept secret. It has been my one solace in life that no one has been privy to except for you all who read it. I have kept this blog anonymous since I began so that i could ensure that i could write as my authentic self without worrying about my friends or family reading what I have written. I know that if i am ever to write a book, it will most likely be under a pen name and not my own. I love the life of anonymity, i live life under the radar and that is how I like it.
I know this has been a long and rambly post and I appreciate so much if you were able to make it all the way to the end. Basically all this rambling is just saying that i am back. This might not mean anything to any of you because as this is my newest blog, lots of my old readers are no longer here so this just probably feels like another blogger writing another rambly post.
I am not going to make promises about scheduling that I may not be able to always keep, but i do want to aim to at least try to post once a week, whether that be about my rambly posts, about books or movies (my two great loves), but i want to aim to post once or twice or three times a week because this is what i love to do.
This blog is where I’ll continue writing about my life, mental health, books, and movies – and where I will keep coming back and writing because I love to do it, even when it is not perfect.
And if you are also a travelling fan, I am also starting a travel blog soon so stay tuned for that!
Thank you all so much for reading if you got this far. I love this blog and I appreciate every single one of you who reads it.
Talk soon,
– Soph xx