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Re-Reading My Blog (First Month)

By the time this post goes live, I will have been blogging for over 4 years. That’s a long time and it has flown by so fast, especially this last year. I was at a bit of a loose end with blog stuff so I decided to read some old posts. First thing to note, my intention was to re-read, edit, spruce up all of my blog to date. At the time of writing this, that would have been 46 months worth of blog content. In reality, that was a much bigger task than I could’ve anticipated. Way, way bigger! I eventually settled on the first month only and I’ll do intermittent revisits over time, in the future. Maybe.

I remember reading, and I think I mentioned it on this blog a little while ago, that I’d heard most blogs don’t get past 6 months. Well here I am…still. And when it comes to reviewing the blog and “fixing” it, I don’t think I’d truly grasped how many blog posts I’d written. Or realised how much SEO I hadn’t done. Or how many tags I could’ve used but didn’t.

Surprisingly, I’m not making the big sweeping changes I thought I’d have to make. I’m someone who writes something and then re-reads it 5 times before I schedule it to publish. And then for some reason after publishing, maybe to torture myself, I read it again and see things that I have no idea how I missed. But in this little review, I feel I’m actually changing very little. Some things haven’t read as well as I would’ve liked so there’s some re-phrasing, spell checking and adding of words I miraculously forgot to type out. But all in all, everything is staying in the spirit of how it was before.

But you know what? Even before the little changes, I thought this blog weren’t half bad.

I Was Prolific

After getting a bit overwhelmed with the blog a few years ago, I decided to have a posting schedule. I first decided on the 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th and 30th of the month but that stressed me out. So I created a new schedule which is the 1st, 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th which works much better for me and if I miss one of those dates, I just post on the next available date (i.e. if I miss the 21st, publish on the 28th). However, it looks like when I first started that I just wrote something, anything and posted it immediately. I even found 2 blog posts from the same day! I don’t know how I was doing that as I sometimes struggle to write at all these days!

Old Hair vs New Hair

My Old Hair Care Routine Vs My New Routine

This is mainly a hair blog so my first few months revolved almost exclusively around that. I was recently thinking that I have no idea what I did with my hair before the chop. Well luckily, I’ve got an app for that, well a blog post. And honestly, reading it back , it’s quite informative. And definitely a reminder of why I do or don’t do some of the things I do now because at this point, it’s routine. Back then, it was all new and wonderful.

Re-reading it all gives me some perspective. For example, I thought I was using too much product back then but I’ve recently realised that I don’t currently use enough. As soon as I’ve started being more generous, my hair has been doing so much better. Perhaps I started to overcompensate all those years ago and reduced my product usage just a tad too much! Now I look back and realise I probably had it right all along, but just the wrong products.

And now I can look back and laugh and shudder at some of the products I used to use.

Letting Go Of The Dream

Not my hair type, not my dream length, not even real hair but still #HairGoals – Boholocs

When I started this blog and this journey, I’d been consuming so much info regarding growing afro/ kinky/ type 4 hair long. I was so inspired, I wanted to be one of those long haired afro queens. I set a goal of getting down to tailbone length hair and in my head, I feel like I held onto that goal for far too long. Thinking that the idea of health over length was a fairly recent development for me but looking back, I realised very quickly that it was quite a lofty goal. In fact, there were doubts from day 1, which considering my general pessimistic attitude, sounds a lot more like me!

Apostrophes

It seems I never met an apostrophe until about 2017. Everything is “I am”, “can not”, “they have.” It all sounds very formal and something I do now is try to make sure I write like I talk. Which the blog readability analysis doesn’t like, apparently my sentences are generally too long and I use a lot of passive voice. I do it though, because I want us to feel like we’re having a conversation. So wherever I spotted this lack of apostrophes in those first few posts, it’s been expeditiously rectified.

I hope you’re hearing my (writing) voice louder and clearer over time.

I Almost Forgot…

That my fiction blog started here first. Woeful Writes is my semi neglected writing blog but it originally was part of Woeful To FroFull. When I started my blogging journey, I wanted this to be a place to share all of me (or at least the bits I was happy to have online) but the writing fiction never quite fit so I cast it out to it’s own dark little corner of the internet. Join me there…it’s fun?

Speaking of fiction, when I was going through my first month posts, I couldn’t even bring myself to re-read my first public piece. I skimmed over it and fixed a few spelling mistakes that had been highlighted but actually, really, read it? I daren’t.

Obsessed

I think I focussed on weight too much in the early days – I had semi-braggy posts about weight dropping off easily. Well that has come back to sit on my hips bite me in the backside. I haven’t been on the scales for a couple of months because the Pandemic upended progress, got me comfort eating, got me missing meals, got me sitting down for hours working from home. So I don’t want to see what the scales have to tell me now but at least I have the memory of being 65.1kg (and thinking I needed to lose weight 🤦🏾‍♀️).

Looking back, I realise as with many aspects of my life, I have to change my mindset so I don’t fall into old patterns or think and believe things that will stunt my personal growth. Changing yourself, how you fundamentally think is difficult but not impossible. That’s the journey that I’m on. It’s a mix of self acceptance and change. But the change is for my health, not so I look better (whatever that means), and yes, it’d be nice to fit into tighter/trendier clothes but I also don’t want to die. I think that’s a bit more pressing than fashion or feeling accepted. Whatever weight I am or dress size or category I fit in, I need to be healthier.

That’s a lesson I’m glad I’m learning but come the end of year exam, I think I might still fail. There’s always re-sits though, isn’t there?

Where Am I Now?

Some of my earlier posts feel a bit clunky now and I’m itching to make some changes. But that’s only because I feel I’ve grown. I’m finding out how to get my actual voice down in words although still not as much as I’d like. But with every post, I feel like you’re getting a little bit more of me – when it comes to talking about hair, skin, personal happiness. I don’t think you want to know what I had for dinner but I hope you can see (and like) my personality.

Plus, it would be inauthentic to change any old posts drastically. At this point, it would be better to delete it completely if I was that unhappy with it, rather than re-write it using my 2020 eyes and experiences.

But I’ve learnt to let things go.To not agonise over it. To accept that I’m constantly changing. And to be okay with that. I’ve learnt that I really do love writing, even if it is just about “stuff”. It brings me happiness and as long as it still does that, I’ll keep going. I’m sure I’ve said that a few times and I’ll keep saying it because it’s true. And it’s good to revisit things because you realise that you are actually on a journey and you’ve moved forward.

However, I can only imagine the cringe of reading my first blog post again at 10 years…yikes!

Let’s keep growing together!

xx Lee xx


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