This month, I’m dipping a toe in the water as a freelancer again to see how it feels.
I’ve got just one client and am doing a pretty light amount of work, but I have to say, it’s been really enjoyable so far.
It’s also a way to lift the burden off my blog as my sole source of income, and I have to be honest, it’s a relief to know that freelancing is easily within reach should I ever need the extra income.
Thanks to my past freelancing endeavors, I’ve built enough of a reputation to still be receiving referrals from friends and fellow bloggers.
Prior to going all in with my blog, I spent a few years working as a Pinterest VA and thankfully, there is an ongoing need for this service among bloggers (and any business that has a website, really).
So once again, I get to spend time creating beautiful graphics, scrolling through travel articles, and putting my hard-won Pinterest knowledge to work to help a fellow blogger reach their goals.
It’s one of the places I feel really comfortable and confident in my abilities.
I made the decision last April to begin blogging full-time, but over the year that followed, I grew to resent my blog more than anything else. I guess I liked the IDEA of being a full-time blogger more than I liked it in practice.
The pressure to grow my income month over month wound up sucking all the fun out of an activity I once loved.
Writing became a chore; I felt as though I had to conform to what the blogging experts told me to do (Stick to your niche!!! Never stray from your niche!!!1!!1) and the words that once flowed freely from my fingertips left me in a puff of smoke.
I wrote a few blogging income reports, which many people found useful but ultimately weren’t motivating me in the way I hoped they would.
It took me many months and a lot of quiet contemplation before I would let myself admit that full-time blogging wasn’t actually the path I was meant to take.
From where I sat, it simply looked like I was failing.
My traffic remained fairly steady, in spite of my best efforts to improve my SEO (even investing in SEO consulting for many months), use better keywords, be more active on Pinterest, get my name into big publications and so on.
I poured tons of energy into building my existing Instagram account, trying every new strategy I could think of, including many I always swore I’d never use. In the end, I made very little progress and started to forget why I even cared about Instagram success in the first place.
I also began questioning exactly what kind of influence I really wanted to have on those reading my content, and whether my current posts were accomplishing that.
In spite of the lack of growth in terms of followers and traffic, I continued to have plenty of opportunities to partner with brands that I love, which was probably the one thing that kept me moving forward even when my heart was whispering to me to chart a new course.
But the sheen of all of that slowly started to fade.
I hated how much I cared about numbers and how much of my day was spent worrying about my blog. If I wasn’t working on it, I was thinking about it–all the emails I needed to respond to, how to improve this or that, an old blog post that needed to be updated, or how I was going to boost my income in a sustainable way.
I hated how often I was on my phone. I hated that checking Instagram had become my first priority of the day, before I ever even got out of bed in the morning.
It became blatantly obvious that blogging this way wasn’t making me feel good anymore, and it was still hard to change my mindset around it.
For example, the frustration of losing followers on Instagram just because I didn’t post for a few days never stung any less. Reading “inspirational” stories about bloggers earning 10K per month never ceased to depress me.
And although I compare myself to others far less often now, I still have moments of weakness–I still let others’ success (or numbers, rather) make me feel inferior, every once in awhile.
I’m only human, after all.
I’m able to see the whole picture much more clearly now though, and I know that my blog stalled simply because my heart wasn’t 100% on board with my plan.
I have other passions I want to pursue. I need to give my mind, body, and soul the nourishment they need, and those needs are not being met through full-time blogging.
There are bigger and better things out there for me. I might not know what they are just yet, but I’m moving into the second half of the year with an open heart, ready to receive the gifts the universe has in store for me.
I’ll never think of the last year as a mistake, but as just another stepping stone on the path to where I’m meant to be. Progress.
Freelancing is another one of the stepping stones I’ll take to reach my next chapter.
If you, like me, are experiencing a period of transition right now, know that you aren’t alone and that it’s perfectly okay to experiment with as many things as you like until you find something worth pouring your whole self into.
In fact, you owe it to yourself.
