This month, I finally reached my first big milestone of
hitting 10,000 followers on my Instagram (yay! Thank you everyone!) However, in the wake of this I have
become quite critical of my feed and what I’m doing.
In hitting this goal,
instead of looking back and seeing how far I’ve come I’ve instead been looking
at other similar accounts and how they are ‘better’ than mine.
Of course whether they are better or not is completely
subjective. I have to keep reminding myself that some of the people I’m
comparing myself to do this full time and have more experience and have been
going for much longer than I have.
With blogging, it does take a lot of content and patience to
build a level of awareness around yourself and there really is nothing to speed
that up; it’s just the nature of the industry. Especially now with so many
amazing bloggers, there’s a lot of competition, so growing your influence is a
slower process than it may have been a few years ago.
What I realised in thinking all this is that I started doing
this because I enjoyed it. I started
it without any pressure or with any means to an end, but purely because it was
something I wanted to try my hand at.
There is nothing to say I am better or worse than any other
blogger or Instagram influencer. Everyone has their own other time constraints
and everyone is moving at their own speed and creating their own sort of
content.
Luckily what I find when I do attend events and find time to
socialise with other bloggers, is that this scene is generally very positive
and supportive which is always helpful. It’s always great to hear other blogger’s
journey and experiences of how they’ve got to where they are to help put my
progress into perspective.
I’m generally quite critical of myself and have never been
one to find positive thinking easy at all - I've always been a glass half empty sort of
gal.
But that’s not to say that my perception of what I’m doing is
necessarily accurate. There may be some who read this that are looking to my
milestone and hoping to hit it within the near future and seeing my successes as
motivation.
So I'm now consciously turning my negative ‘why am I not there
yet’ into ‘how can I get there’. It’s about positive ways to improve my content
while remembering my successes, how my content is my own and how it is not necessarily
comparable to others.
When it comes to life, it is easy to compare yourself to
others and it’s easy for admiration to turn to jealousy or even bitterness. At age 24, I have quite a few friends that have taken different
routes in their lives, whether it’s starting a family, chasing a career or
travelling the world.
These are all paths I admire and there are certain
achievements my friends have that I would like to someday have as well.
But just because I don’t have them right now doesn’t mean I never will. With the fear of sounding too philosophical or ‘fake deep’ - we are all
moving at different paces and moving towards different goals, or even the same
goals just in a different way.
There are some things that I know my friends and others have
done that I haven’t, but this also works the other way. It’s key to look over
other people's achievements as separate from yours, and if anything they can act as a motivation
for your future.
Celebrate other’s achievements and don’t let that happiness for your friends successes turn into
envy as to why you haven’t done the same. Work hard and motivate yourself to
reach your goals instead of sitting on negativity that isn't good for you or your mental health.
It's hard to do but important to remember that there isn’t a right or wrong way to live your
own life. If you're moving towards a goal, no matter how slow, it's a move in the right direction and a reason to focus on what you are doing and no one else.
