It’s crazy when I think about it, but I have been blogging and sharing my life online since I was 19 years old. That’s literally half my life.
I laugh when friends jokingly call me OG influencer but seriously guys, I have been creating social media posts and writing online for 19 years.
It’s been a wild journey.
As a child, I grew up keeping diaries. Remember those lined hardcover notebooks you could buy that came with tiny padlocks and keys? (If you don’t remember, you’re probably gen z lol.) It was the thing then to write a diary and I had a dozen of them, starting from some time in primary school. Over the years, I’ve lost most of them but I remember pouring my heart out into those padlocked books; I wrote about every mundane thing - what the neighbors did, fights with my brother, what my mom said. I wrote about my ambitions, one of which was an animator at Disney lol.
When blogs appeared, they seemed like an extension of those childhood diaries and I naturally gravitated to them. Everyone had a xanga or a blogspot in those days. I had to be non-mainstream though and chose a platform called blogdrive which was meh to say the least hahaha. I started publishing posts during a nine month period when I had nothing much to do but wait to start college in the US, all my other friends who were attending Australian or local unis were busy with school.
In the States, I continued writing as a way to keep in touch with my friends and family back home and I never looked back.
Over the years, different social media platforms have come and gone (or stayed, depending on which platform you’re thinking of). Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Tiktok, I tried ‘em all. I adapted to taking aesthetic photos for Instagram - or trying to anyway - to filming vlogs to shooting Tiktoks and Reels. Considering I’ve been doing this for 19 years, my staying power surprised even me!
It’s really thanks to you guys, who are reading this. Thank you for following me (and then Fatty and the critters and the dog) all these years. I know a lot of you grew with me, grew up with me, had babies and started careers while still following my journey. Thank you.
Not everyone gets to do what I do. I do filtered photos and post videos but my first love will always be writing. I started off a writer, and that is still my biggest strength but somehow, I managed to adapt myself and stay…relevant?
I somehow carved out my own niche in a market saturated with gorgeous twenty somethings with glowing skin, limitless wardrobes and savvy photographer boyfriends, who could not only pose but speak to the camera and were hilarious to boot. If I’m going to be honest, it eats at you.
It got hard.
When I started blogging, I really just wrote whatever mattered to me. I didn’t feel the need to follow a trend because I was the trend. Lol. It wasn’t so much that I was a trend setter as I was just doing my own thing and it worked for me. It made me happy.
Fast forward to today: I definitely feel the pressure to maintain my influence, and it doesn’t get easier when there’s an income already attached to it. A lot of the newer content creators do this for a full time job, so they’re able to spend their time fully focusing on content creation and their content is really top notch. I don’t have this luxury. I’m not the only creator with a family obvs, but I may be one of the rare few who has a family, holds down a conventional job/business, started a coaching career and still monetizes my social media content. I would love to do more but I think I cannot hahaha.
All the pressure, competition and comparisons ate at me. Along the way, I found myself watching what other people did and trying to do the same. Then I’d see someone else doing something else I liked and I would try that too. I wouldn’t post if I felt something didn’t have “enough value” - if it was “not informational enough” or “not heartstring tugging enough”. I created posts based on what I felt my audience would like, not what I liked anymore.
Posting on social media turned into a chore. If you really stalk me, you’d notice this year I posted less frequently and almost listlessly, with no “heart”. Or maybe you didn’t notice and I only did cos it’s me hahaha, but I saw it myself, and so did my close friends. (Thank you friends who saw it, pointed it out, sat with me and talked to me while I worked through it ahem Careen and Shu Yiing especially.)
Writing, making posts, creating content did give me a lot of joy when I posted for myself as a creative outlet, and as a way to document my memories for myself. When I posted without worrying about my relevance, likes and views; when I didn’t worry if I had been overtaken.
Part of it stems from the disbelief that I have made it this far. It can’t go on much longer, I tell myself. But if it doesn’t, it just doesn’t. Is it worth taking something that used to bring me joy and turning it into a painful task to accomplish just to “stay on top of the game”?
The answer is I guess not.
I want to be more intentional about sharing my moments from now. Forget posting for an audience! Bu yao trying to live up to some invisible standard liao! If I fade into obscurity, so be it. I’m tired of sucking out my own joy.
Easier said than done, though because it’s how I’ve been living for years. It is going to take a lot of time to undo my own thinking and switch. But I gotta start somewhere.
As someone wise once said,
Dance like nobody’s watching
Except that now it’s Post Dance like nobody’s watching. Hahahaha.
Have you felt like this before though? That you had to keep up with competition and it sucked out a lot of the joy for you? What did you do?
Love,
Aud.
oh gosh. this resonated so much with me. I've always love writing but somehow, nobody reads much these days and I too,have to resort to creating contents like others via short reels and stories to stay relevant. It was emotionally and physically draining, thinking of the new trends and the things I ought to do to stay in the game. however, my creative juices stopped flowing when I started caring a little too much.
so I took a break and stopped posting for a long time until it didn't feel like a chore anymore and now, I also learn to be easy on myself, posting and curating contents just for fun, rather for the mass market. I think it did help.
I still love reading and writing though. nothing can take that away from me. thank you for this blog post. it made the reader in me happy.
reading your blog for 19 years now,
yuhhui.