How much is that Blogger in the window?

Hello loves.

I want to talk about the two-headed beast that is blogging.

Blogging can be truly wonderful - you can discover people with common interests, make friends online which can transcend into real relationships, pick up awesome tips about a multitude of subjects, be inspired, be informed and share common lusts. I'd go as far as to say reading/writing blogs can add value to your life in some way. Being a blog writer can be a wonderfully fulfilling hobby, and for some, it even turns into a full-time job. As a reader, it's a chance to escape into someone else's world for a few minutes, and best of all, it's free to read! What's not to love?

But it can be very easy to get swamped by the weight of being a blogger. When you blog, you're in the spotlight. It's lonely there. You have to reveal yourself in the hope of connecting with someone out there. There's a nakedness about it. It's easy to feel insecure about your blog if you compare it to other blogs, it's easy to feel excluded from blogger cliques, it's easy to wonder what your place is in the blogging world, it's easy to feel you don't have enough money to be an exciting and varied blogger, and it's easy even to lose sight of the reason you started blogging in the first place. It's easy to doubt yourself and far harder to believe in yourself.

Because of my mental health issues it's possible I feel the down sides of being a blogger perhaps a bit more than average. At a certain point in my menstrual cycle I start to feel the need to withdraw from social networking and blog reading because I start to feel inferior and wonder why I blog at all. When this happens I remind myself comparisons are masochistic and futile. Comparing any aspect of life - blog life or otherwise - is daft because you can never know someone else's story. That blogger who spends hundreds of pounds on clothes and make up each week might be 20K in debt because of their shopping addiction. That blogger with the 'perfect' life might be dying inside and hoping no one notices their smile is plastered on like a rictus grin. We only see the parts of other people they want to show us, so comparing ourselves is a really bad idea.

Whenever I start to feel it's I should stop blogging I know it's time to withdraw from Twitter, step away from reading blogs for a couple of days and concentrate on what I do and why I do it. I remind myself why I started blogging - purely for the love of writing - and why I continue to blog - interaction with my readers and hoping to connect on some small level, even if it's only in shared slack-jawed and dribbling lust over a pretty outfit or some bargainous make up.

The thing with blogging is you have to choose how much of yourself to leave out and how much to leave in - in essence, how YOU you make your blog. For some sensitive souls like me, that's a constant work in progress. This year, rather than spending a couple of days a month in self-pity like an idiot when this blogger fog comes over me, I'm going to spend it on ideas of ways to improve my blog - new features, ways to improve my photography, thinking up outfit posts, and dare I say it - SELF CARE! If I'm feeling crap I need to step away from the pc, take a breath of fresh air, remind myself this is a HOBBY, have a cuppa, email a friend, dance around like a wally for 5 minutes or call my mum. In other words - perspective!

Lastly, blogging should be fun or else what's the point? If it's got to the point where blogging is a chore, stop. Give yourself a break - have a hiatus or even change your blog direction to something totally different.

If you blog, do you ever get a bit fed up?

If there's anything else you want to say about blogging or blog reading, have at it in the comments!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. There are no windows, nor bloggers in them, I just thought it was a fun title :)