Dear Diary

For as long as I can remember, writing has been my go-to outlet. I long ago threw out all my teenage diaries because honestly, no one needed to ever read those! I’ve had notebooks since then that were filled with pages of randomness, often with significant words written in large bold letters as my mind would wander. 

When my dad died in 2009, I turned to my computer over pen and paper. I would spend hours at night while everyone else slept pounding at the keys spewing every thought that came to my mind without care. Those documents are filled with both love and anger mixed together with questions and memories. I’m glad that I wrote those words as it gave me a way to express everything that I was feeling at a time when I wasn’t sure I was capable of feeling anything at all.

I started this blog on January 1, 2015, because I wanted a place where I could write down my thoughts that weren’t on a piece of paper or in a Pages document saved on my laptop. Over the past three years, my blogging has jumped up and down and all around in a flurry of me struggling to know where I was going. 

I started out writing random thoughts, but being careful about what I wrote. I didn’t want to offend anyone or cause people to question me in any way, so I always held back.

After a while, I started to notice that people were making money by blogging and I wanted in on that (I mean, who wouldn’t, right?!). I’ve been privileged to work with a few brands that I have loved and continue to love and on the flip side, I have written things that I am embarrassed about just to make a few hundred dollars. 

This summer I spent about a month thinking about how I could push my blog into a specific niche and what I wanted to write about. The only thing on my mind was how I could monetize my blog. I finally chose my favourite topic and said,

“This is it! I’m going to be a travel blogger!”

Then I wrote my first travel guide and hated it. I love traveling, have lived in three countries and visited countless others, but writing a guide was like dragging my feet through concrete. It felt heartless and more like I was writing a research paper. I had studied enough about the travel blogging world to know that travel guides are what people want. If you want to be a good travel blogger than you better write travel guides. BUT IT WASN’T ME! 

The dilemma continued as I thought about how much I love writing, how I could make money writing and what was really most important to me. During the weeks that all these thoughts were floating around my mind, I started listening to podcasts like crazy. As I did, the same theme kept coming up over and over and over again, 

Creating to try to please other people was sucking the joy and passion out of creating at all for me. 

Today that ends! I began this blog for myself in order to share my life and my thoughts. I wanted to share my ups and downs, my good and bad, my happy and my sad; but instead, I spent time worrying more about the outside world and what they would think of me. 

I have so many things to write about and I hope that you’ll be around to read them, but if you’re not, I hope in two years I can look back and read for myself about how far I’ve come.

I love you all in this online world. It really has made the world a smaller place and it’s pretty amazing!