Reflecting On Old Blog Posts

I see these kinds of videos on YouTube all of the time. People go back and watch some of their first videos that they posted, react to them, the whole nine yards. It's probably much easier to do so when there's actual, like, footage to show, but since we're approaching the five year anniversary of this blog (before it was Life According to Francesca) I thought it would be funny to throwback to some of the posts that I made when I was only sixteen. I feel like a completely different person now at twenty-one and know just how cringe-worthy a majority of the posts (and photos) are. Since I'm a big proponent of publicly embarrassing myself, let's just dive into the self-roasting session.


My first official post that appeared after my "about me" post was a nail polish review of OPI's I Eat Mainely Lobster. I thought the post would be longer, but nope, it's actually only two short paragraphs. The photographs are the smallest I think they can be and they're not even aligned or centered. I...just what was I even thinking? I don't even want to link to the post, but I feel like I should just so you can witness how boring my writing was. What are these sentences? Like if monotone was text, it would be this blog post. I didn't even make a convincing argument as to why it was worth buying! And if I'm being completely honest, I think this blog post might have been the last time I wore this nail polish.

One of my following posts was about my travel makeup kit and dear lord, what are these photos? I distinctly remember buying the pink neon striped cropped top and being so stoked about it. I don't think I ever wore it for longer than two seconds. What the hell was I thinking? I cannot believe I even used any of these products. The only one I genuinely remember liking was the Maybelline Sexy Curves mascara and they discontinued it and my eyelashes have never been the same since. Again, we have unaligned photos and CAN YOU SEE THE GAPS BETWEEN THE PAPER I WAS USING? God, so embarrassing.

I mean, despite this next post being absolute sh!t, at least I have similar interests today as I did years ago. I dedicated an entire post to the tiny notebooks I had. I...why? I don't even see how this post was helpful in the slightest. I just took photos of the notebooks I had in my collection. I don't even say what they're good for. And in all honesty, I didn't even use those notebooks! I hated how small those moleskins were and how they didn't have lines and I never even touched that travel notebook. I think I finally threw it out in May when I moved out of my apartment. That notebook came with me for every move and never once got used.

I think my biggest problem with all of my blog posts (besides everything) was the crappy lighting and the bland writing. I started off as wanting to be a beauty blogger. I was really starting to find my footing and niche and at that time, makeup was something that I was really passionate about. This was before I started to get into fashion and reading other lifestyle blogs that incorporated advice and tips into their posts. At this point, I think I was really just watching beauty videos on YouTube in my spare time and wasn't even reading other blogs besides maybe Man Repeller from time to time. It clearly shows in the disarray that my blog ended up being.

Things started to pick up when I moved to Cleveland for college, though the writing barely improved from there. It's kind of funny to look back on this, to see what mindset I was in. You can clearly tell which posts I was into and which posts I just was not feeling at the time. The beginning stages of blogging every day was tough. I mean, it still is. I have days where I wonder if I should cut it down to only a few days a week. I think that that day will come, maybe when I move to New York, maybe after that. I can't really say. That's another blog post for another time. Let's continue with the self-roasting! It's my favorite thing to do.

I had a mini blog series that died fast (RIP to all of my failed blog series, Positivitea, Francesca's Focus, Campus Style, the list goes on and on...), my how to do something without really trying series. I'm fairly certain I stole that title from the Broadway musical so like, please don't sue me. I was young and dumb and obsessed with Nick Jonas and know that he was the main character in the musical for a short bit. I talked about being homesickness, blogging, moving out, whatever was going on at my life at the time.

That's one thing I've always appreciated about this blog. I will fully admit that it's not always a fashion or beauty blog. I mean, some days I just want to talk about myself and myself only. It's the downside of being a lowkey narcissist. For me, at least, when I read my old blog posts (which I don't do frequently because #CRINGE) I know what was going on at that time. I can gauge my mood, where I was in my headspace, what things were going through my head. I could tell I was with my self-confidence, what style phase I was going through (was anyone around long enough to remember my preppy phase? So not me), how I was feeling about what was happening in my life. I pretend to be a closed book and not open in the slightest, but when I see the titles of old blog posts, I can see how vulnerable I've let myself be over the years.

The moral of the story is that most of my old blog posts are complete crap. Even blog posts from the past year have been crap. If every blog post I wrote was solid gold, we would be living in an alternate universe. The whole point is to continue to grow, expanding my writing abilities, photography skills, even my ability to come up with fresh and new ideas (I mean, even this post isn't a new idea, I copied a YouTube trend). I think there'd be an issue if I looked at a whole slew of posts from a year ago and thought "Oh wow, those are great, better than anything I've written now!" I'd like to hope that I'm on a rollercoaster that's only going up from here, which is also a terrifying thought because heights are the worst...

I would say all jokes aside, but this last one is a joke. Kind of. I mean, this part is serious. One of the posts in my top ten most popular posts ever on the blog was meant as a joke. Unfortunately, this joke caught on and, as I said, remains in the top ten. I wrote a post about how to achieve Harry Styles' signature headscarf look from 2013/2014 and tracked the history of it. This post now haunts me forever (seriously, Google Harry Styles headscarf and see what comes up) and since we're talking about embarrassing blog posts, this has to be the most embarrassing of all time.

Anyways, hopefully after that post you'l still be here tomorrow to check up on what I've been loving this week!