Siquijor. August 2013
Hello there!
My, my, such a long time it has been since I last dropped by and posted something on my blog(s)—almost exactly one whole year!
You may ask (or may not actually), where have I been all this time? To give you a short explanation would just be to brush things off, but I know I won’t be able to go back to blogging just like that. I think answering the question “why did you stop blogging?” would be something I owe not just to the (few) readers of my blogs, but really, it’s something I owe to none other than myself.
It would be so easy to simply say that Life got in the way. Well, really, it did. From end of 2012 to today, there was everything else I had to deal with, to do and to be. Aside from traveling out of town or out of the country for at least once for every month of 2013, there was also having to deal with quite a few major life milestones: a health issue of a beloved family member as well as my own, the end of a six year relationship, more responsibilities at work, and basically just everything else that someone with a career, loved ones, spiritual and social life has to deal with: friends to see, destinations to travel, events to attend, Instagram (lol), books to read, lessons to learn, experiences to fully live in.
But for all of those things, I was grateful and continue to be grateful. Because at the end of the day, it all meant so many blessings that have come my way:
-Health issues paved the way for learning to appreciate up close and personally how good health is so important and being really appreciative of time with family and friends.
-Going through the whole process of a breakup led to relearning the lesson of Self-love. I realized that breaking up with someone did not mean that Love left me, because I already was Love (it’s either you get that or you don’t, and that’s ok either way). And realizing this simple but hard-to-find truth opened the way for Love (in another form, through another person) to manifest concretely in my life yet again.
-While the responsibilities at work in a career in travel did hinder me from writing about where I have been, it was precisely because of those work responsibilities that were largely the reason why I traveled to so many new destinations in 2013—destinations which I did not imagine going to so soon but serendipitously enough, was able to precisely because of work.
All in all, it was a very good year. But in spite of all those blessings that prevented me from coming back to this space, I have missed blogging too. I’ve said time and again that when I started actively blogging in 2010, it was really for no other reason than because I missed writing. I missed being creative. While of course, there is always some creativity in the practice of law, it’s a different type of creativity when one is only writing for one’s self—and writing will always be one of my first (and true) loves.
Everything else with how my blog turned out to be and all the fruits it bore—the readers, the praise, the ranking, the sponsors, the freebies—they were just all icing on the cake (but great, sweet-tasting icing nonetheless). To be honest, it got to be more than a little overwhelming. I had to turn down not just a few invites and events, I neglected to write about some products and services that I have received, I failed to answer a lot of emails about blog partnerships.
And here I must give my heartfelt apology. My explanation: the milestones and daily life reasons which I have already mentioned above. Writing about food or clothes or raving about a salon service could really not be a life priority when I had to drive around and accompany a beloved family member through different hospitals and doctors sometimes in a span of one day. Writing a new travel guide was not really something I looked forward to in the midst of the early stages of my breakup, when I only had to view my blogs to be deluged with photos and memories of the past which, at the time, I tried very hard to put behind me (the question of whether those posts and photos will remain is something which I do not want nor need to deal with at this point. But I really hope to find a balance between being fair and moving on). And blogging about my trips to Korea and Southeast Asia and local destinations had to be put on hold because I had to go on trips to the US and Europe for work.
But aside from the personal reasons, I must also say that another reason why it was not so easy to go back to blogging was because I felt that blogging is no longer as pure (for lack of a better word) as it once was. When I started writing in 2010 for my current blogs, blogging was quite a different universe than how it was when I took a hiatus a year ago, and certainly compared to how it is now. Back then, it felt like I was sending out radio signals to outer space, not sure if I will get an answer—and in fact, it didn’t matter, as long as I could write. There was a certain joy in the anonymity, the blessed lack of the link between blogging and social media, the freedom of not caring who will read about what I wrote.
As I said, I actively blogged in 2010 (and I mean in the current form my blogs are now, blogging as The Sunset Goddess, not the online journals and personal blogs which I had from so many years ago) because I wanted to write. Then, I realized that there were not just a few people who were interested in my posts—friends and strangers alike—because they got some information out of it, and some inspiration. I like it when people leave comments in my posts saying either they learned something from it or enjoyed it.
So much so that there was a time when my lifestyle blog consistently ranked as a top-ranking blog in the country. And I think it was then that these issues about blog “purity” came in. As I’ve mentioned, the requests for blog “partnerships”, “sponsorships”, press invites what-have-yous, along with the freebies, came in. While I’m not in any way ungrateful for them (because they meant that my blogs were being recognized and visited, that my blogs were “ranking”), they did come with a price (pun intended). A price not just on my time writing some posts but also on what I really want my blogs to be about, and on an existential way, on what I am about. Was I in it for the ranking? Was I in it for the invites and product launches? Was I in it for the money?
And my answer to all three questions was a resounding “no”. I wanted to write in my blogs because I missed writing writing and I wanted to be joyfully creative—I wanted it to be fun, in a way with which the fun of writing and reviewing contracts and business letters cannot, in so many ways, compare. My practice of law is my passion and my career, but writing is one of the ways I follow my bliss, and to put in a very Oprah way, how I soothe my soul. And my soul was not, and cannot be, soothed by the thought of X number of posts I had to write just because this company requested me to do this and because that PR representative invited me to that event.
That’s just me. And I don’t want to ruffle any feathers here and I understand that it’s a “to each his own thing”, but honestly, with more reason that I didn’t have the gana, the mojo to go back to blogging when I saw that more and more, a lot of local blogs are getting exposure simply because of these PR machinations, and not because of actual good blog content. On the other hand, there are some blogs that get too personal, to the point that any serious reader will ask, “why even post this?” I shudder when friends complain to me about this blog and that blog, and why he/she has to write about this and that, what’s the point of this blog and that—and I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know that I would hate for my blogs to go in the same direction.
In certain cases, it’s some sort of a Catch 22 thing—because you write an informative blog, you attract readers and that drives your blog traffic and ranking up, and because you now have a good ranking, you attract the attention of PR people who now want to promote products and services through your blog, and the deluge of those invites and product promotions now hinder you from blogging as well (and as often) as when you started out in the first place. But I find it so disheartening when I see blogs that drive up their traffic and ranking just by promoting blog giveaways and giving out freebies through their readers. I’m ok with all that (and I’m not saying I will never do it), but just please make sure that there’s good, informative content in these blogs in the first place, and I hope these PR people only promote their products through bloggers who do. Not through people who are there in the events just for the sake of blogging or being called a “blogger”.
I know it’s an ongoing debate and the world of blogging is divided into extreme schools of thought on what blogging is about (and along with it, product and service promotions), plus the grays in between. But it is a conversation which any responsible blogger must engage in. One of the bloggers I do consistently follow and I think has struck a good balance between blogging and branding, Manila Fashion Observer, said it well some years back in these two posts (see here and here). One of the extremes I mentioned (absolutely no freebies) is another well-respected blogger, Market Manila, who enumerated his blogging principles so specifically here, here and here.
I apologize for this being such a long post. But please excuse me, after a year of not writing here, it felt as if a dam has broken and now I have so many things to say. What started out with a personal account of what I have been up to in the past year to has turned to a rambling about blogging philosophies. But I touch upon that matter because I think the whole time I’ve been away on blogging hiatus was also a good time for me to try to figure out my brand identity as a blogger and the direction in which I want to take my blogs (or maybe end up with a single blog again). And I’m still trying to figure it out actually. All I know is that I want my blogging to be all about balance—balancing writing for myself and for others, balancing my time for blogging and for the rest of my life, balancing sharing of information with being too personal. All in all, the act of balancing blogging as a brand and blogging as an exercise of pure joy, all the while hoping to always stay true to myself.
I don’t know if I can call this as a “comeback” post or maybe just my way of dropping by, saying hello. In the meantime that I am figuring out everything I want to figure out for my blogs, I hope I will be able to put out some little post here and there, about fashion, about food, and about my travels. Just taking baby steps here, much in the same way when I started out with my posts 4 years ago. It takes some skills and hacks that must be re-learned. But the experiences are all there, just waiting to be written.
I wish you all the best. And thanks for reading.
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