This time last year I was a blogging addict. When I wasn’t typing up a post I was scrolling through Instagram and any evening that I didn’t spend on a blogging twitter chat just felt like a waste. Then a month ago it all just stopped. I stopped uploading on here, I stopped uploading on all my social media’s, I just completely fell out of love with blogging.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks really trying to figure out why that is. I’ve started working full time so I thought maybe I was just busy but I still have time in the evenings so that wasn’t it. I’ve moved away from my art uni so maybe I felt less creative but I’m still in a design job so that couldn’t be it either. Then one day it just hit me, I stopped blogging because I got too jealous.
My Twitter was filled with people getting “exciting emails” and every post on my Instagram feed seemed to be an amazing collaboration that another blogger had got. They were getting invited to events and flown out on incredible holidays, they were taking stunning photos and writing incredible blog posts, gifts seemed to be arriving through post box after post box and everyone seemed to have a solid group of blogging bffs. I would grumpily scroll through Instagram and glare at the screen because someone had 10 more likes than me and at that point I realised I needed to step away. I didn’t like the person that I was when I was in the blogging sphere, I felt like the grinch scowling down at the jolly bloggers from my empty WordPress lair. So I stopped. I cut myself off from all of it and felt ashamed of myself for acting like I did. It felt almost as if I didn’t deserve to be a part of the community anymore so I ran away.
I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t want to give up on Outofteabags but I just felt way too bad about my jealous ways to have any motivation to write anything. That was until today because today I realised something, just because I wish I had all those amazing opportunities doesn’t mean I think that the bloggers that did have them shouldn’t. For example, blogger A posts a photo of a new collaboration on Instagram and I would think “that’s so incredibly amazing for them I wish I had that” what I wouldn’t think is “they don’t deserve to have that but I do” and I’ve now realised that there’s a big difference in that. I wasn’t actually being spiteful or mean in reality I was just being a whiney and in all honesty a bit stupid.
I think it’s actually such a natural feeling to look at someone else’s achievements and wish you could have the same luck, I mean let’s be honest who didn’t look at Lily James in Mamma Mia 2 and think “I really wish I was her”. I’ve realised now it’s time to change my perception on those feelings and start using them as inspiration to push myself on rather than putting myself down for getting a bit jealous. I am so immensely proud to be part of a community where people are getting the opportunities they are and working their butts off to achieve amazing things and I am now more determined than ever to crawl out of my lair, hold hands with all the bloggers and join in a festive song around the giant Christmas tree (go and give the end of the grinch a quick watch to get that reference)
I’d love to hear if you’ve had any experiences with jealousy in the blogging community and your views on it.
Go and grab another cuppa on me, Em x
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OUT OF TEA BAGS 