The last few weeks have been quite full, to say the least. Living alone again took its toll on me and the lack of movement on the blog disengaged me. I guess I couldn't keep up with my plans to go through the Ghost Town Phase and felt like I needed a break for my mind's sake.
Let's talk about it, one thing at a time.
Interest and passion to keep motivation
Two of the main components when it comes to motivation are passion and interest. They work as fuel to keep consistency going.
Lately, though, I've been thinking they might not be enough by themselves.
A few months back, I wrote about passion and interest as driving forces to keep up motivation and consistency.
In that post, I tried to break down what these concepts mean to me and what their role in achieving a goal is.
What I realized when trying to understand my disengagement this past month, though, is the lack of a clear and achievable goal I had for myself, or rather, one that deeply made sense. What was I trying to get with blogging? What did I not get? And why was it so frustrating to me to the point of not having the mental energy I needed at the end of the day to keep going?
Stay with me now, let's open some small tangents for a second.
The Ghost Town Phase
This concept was coined by the fellas over at Income School and simply put, it's the phase where you're basically writing for no one.
You're dedicating time and effort to writing many good posts, publishing them, working on your marketing strategies, looking for inspiration, coming up with concepts, looking for good, royalty-free pictures, studying SEO and putting it into practice, making a posting schedule, and so on.
Even as a side project, as this blog is for me at the moment, we can all agree that that still is a lot of energy dedicated. Especially when no one is seeing it.
I got to a place of mental exhaustion when all of this started to become a chore and not something I looked for to reenergize myself, as it was when I first started.
And that also has to do with the goals I set for myself, which I didn't get to accomplish as of yet. I mean, I expected at least a handful of people to find the blog by chance, be interested in its content, and decide to come back every now and then to see what I've been up to. A little too self-centered, maybe?
I did know things don't quite work like that, but I guess I kept the hope seed and expected it to come true somehow. Coming back now, I hope to be more realistic.
My new routine is more demanding than it used to be
Although I feel super grateful and accomplished with my work, it is still demanding. I enjoy starting work super early, to catch up on what I might have missed during the night. I'm ok with the occasional 10 to 12-hour long work days because my priority is to close my laptop with the feeling that I handled everything I needed to, to start my night routine with a light mind. Light, but tired as you can imagine.
I've also been working on getting over patterns and traumas that no longer serve me and really focusing on bettering my relationship with work as much as I can.
As part of my burnout history, I've dealt and am dealing with an intrinsic comparison between me and other peers, imposter syndrome, sudden demotivation, and auto-sabotage.
This is not to pity me anymore but to recognize some toxic associations I made and work on getting through them, which I can confidently say I'm able to do.
I do have the support of an amazing leader and an amazing team and I decided that this time, I'm not going to ruin a healthy work environment with bad, toxic habits I had picked up in the past.
That is all to say that although I've working really hard, both during the day and in my relationship with my job, it does demand a lot of mental energy.
So, what now?
We all have a finite amount of energy to spend in a day. Both physical and mental.
When we're young, we don't always know our limits, but trying new things, routines, and mindsets and having life-changing experiences, either good or bad, will eventually teach us.
I entered my blogging journey with a lot of hope, big dreams, and an innocent expectation of what it would be like. I didn't know better.
That being said, writing is my outlet and I want to get my stories out there, even if it doesn't mean anything to anyone other them myself. I want to do it for me, I want to show up for me and this is the new meaning I want to give to this little space on the internet I call my own.
Now, as I did before, I'll continue to respect my limits and rest as needed, but I also want to rip the blog off of the expectations I had for it. I want to write for the sake of expressing myself, and this time I mean it. I now know it will take me a very long time to see results but I don't want to know how long. I just want to do it.
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