I've only been away from blogging for a few days, but it's given me some desperately needed clarity.
I've been toying with the idea of archiving this blog and saying goodbye to plus size blogging. It's not so much that I wanted to walk away from the blogging scene, other bloggers or my readers. I wanted to walk away from the person I've become in association with this blog. More on this later.
I have this urgency to share all the good and bad stuff that happens to me - it's like a disease, a pathological need for catharsis which has to be bled out regularly for me to function in any way as a passable human being. I can be no other way. Silence is death.
Successful blogging is highly edited snippets of life shared with the world. PR-savvy bloggers skim over the less 'pretty' aspects of their lives to give the impression of perfection, and perfection sells. Because the last 6 months have been tough on my family and my mental health, it got to the point where I felt like all I was sharing was the dark, the ugly, the miserable. I believed the real me was too ugly to share and I had nothing left to offer. I felt empty and irrelevant, and a lot of that was because I was comparing myself to other bloggers who are better at keeping their shiny on show. Comparison is such a masochistic, self-defeating behaviour and I've decided to chuck it in the fuck it bucket because I like myself and everyone else a lot better without it. I've not been the person I could be because everyone else's pretty made my reality feel all the uglier, and that made me ugly inside.
I've been caught up in feeling bad about myself, my blog and feeling distinctly mediocre about all of it. Any failure for this blog to be as successful as I want it to be is in part down to my lack of likeability as a person, No, really. I hold my hands up and say I've probably burnt bridges in the UK blogging scene with my prickly nature. And I'm moving on from that.
There are other reasons for my dissatisfaction with blogging, such as the way brands have diminished the radical, political, outspoken side of blogging which I fell in love with it and encouraged sanitised, bland template people who amount to advertising and PR as they know that's what garners free product and attention best. Because so much of me appreciates radical fatness over materialism (believe it or not) this has been a hard turn of events to be surrounded by.
So I'm still here, if anyone cares. I need to maintain focus and concentrate on what I'm doing. How trends move on in plus size blogging is not my concern. I've got to be an island unaffected by the tide.
I got dressed today in an outfit that made me smile, not because I felt I HAD to do a blog post. I put makeup on because it cheers me up, not because my naked face is too ugly to share with the public. I felt happy again because I realised I'm enough. Comparisons need to die.
Thanks for reading.
Leah xoxo
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