Four Years of Life According to Francesca

Technically, the actual day I bought my domain was March 13th, 2014, but I made my first blog post (a really terrible and most likely inaccurate "about me" post) under this new "blogging era" for myself on March 12th, 2014, sitting alone in room 604 in Fenn Tower. The posts in my archive date back to July of 2012, back when I was in high school and was obsessed with the idea of a beauty blog but didn't have the time or motivation to work on a blog (or, truthfully, the talent), but I'd like to consider today the actual "birthday" of what my blog is today. 

If you haven't heard the story of the inception of my blog, sit back, get a cup of tea or coffee or your drink of preference. I like to tell it a lot. People like to talk about their kids (and I mean, I get it, they're your kids) and since I do not have any children and will not have any for many, many years, my blog has become my child, in a sense. The reasoning behind the original creation of this blog is still unknown to me, but I still know exactly why I decided to kick it up a notch and start taking it a little more seriously. 

I'm pretty open about my freshmen year of college being terrible. I really thought I was going to transfer or drop out. I just wasn't really happy. I thought I had wanted to go away to college. I didn't want to be stuck at home and go to local schools. I wanted to be young and independent and live in a city that has more than one Starbucks and one that wasn't attached to a hotel (we since have gotten a Starbucks with a drive-thru only a few minutes from my house, but still). And then I got to Cleveland and had trouble making friends and being social and school in general was just sort of bumming me out. I started reading a lot more blogs and much more frequently than I had. I read a lot of The College Prepster and by the time my spring semester rolled around, I was blogging more frequently. And then right before spring break, I had a light switch in my head. 

I was a journalism major. I knew I liked to write even before I decided to pursue that educational path (the wrong educational path for me, arguably). I needed something to do in my free time since I clearly wasn't doing well on the entire social aspect of college and wasn't really finding my school work fulfilling or challenging. So I changed my layout, made the logo that I still use to this day, and picked the first name that came to my head.

Life According to Francesca is not a clever or unique name. It's not a play on words, it's not creative, but it was the first thing I could think of and I was so determined to be a "blogger" (whatever I thought that meant) that I just wanted my own domain and so I just went for it. In retrospect, the only reason it was available was most likely because how many other bloggers do you know that have my name and lack of creativity? Kidding, kidding.

I blogged about...god know's what. All of my posts were crap. I didn't know how to take a good photo, my camera was terrible, I just didn't know what I was doing. Using your social media accounts to promote your blog wasn't like, super popular unless you were like a huge blogger. So I just wrote my blog posts and posted them on Pinterest and hoped that people would like whatever I was posting. I'm pretty sure my mom and maybe some of her friends were the only people who read my blog for the first like, six months. I know everyone says that but I don't think many of my friends knew I had a blog and I wasn't part of a blogging network at that point (that has since changed as of like, fall of 2014). 

I was always really into fashion during my college years, but I had no idea how to really blog about it. I didn't have friends to take my pictures, so I normally relied on mirror photos and sometimes had my mom take them or even my aunt if I was home for a family party and decided to actually get dressed. The fashion aspect, besides making outfit collages, sort of fell to the backburner while I wrote about what I knew about best at that time: college. I think, honestly, up until this past summer, all of my content was overwhelmingly college related because that's what I was living. It really threw me off when I didn't have that creative crutch anymore. Sure, I technically could still blog about college, but I wouldn't even know what to say about it anymore besides from an outside perspective and what it's like after college and what didn't matter so much in the moment. 

Over the summer, I sat down and really thought about my blog. I genuinely do it for fun. It's not going to be my career, it's not going to be a source of income. Sometimes it's frustrating to keep up but I've never once let myself skip a day because I love continuity and I'm also like, insanely hard on myself. There's been a lot of shit going on behind the scenes for the past, like, six months that's probably reflected in my content. It's been frustrating and sometimes it's just hard to focus long enough to create good content. I've, for the most part, felt like I was in a position where I just didn't have anything to talk about that I haven't talked about before. There's nothing new going on. I don't go shopping weekly because I'm trying to save money. I don't live anywhere exciting enough to blog about. My friends are scattered across not only the United States but the entire world. It's a part of post-grad life that isn't widely discussed, yet I sometimes hesitate to talk about it because I don't want this blog to be anything but a happy place on the internet. But, if I claim that I like being transparent and honest, then that should include little bits from behind the scenes and what's going on in my little old noggin, right?

I've been planning this sort of rebrand for a while. Or mini rebrand, I guess, since my name and general content is the same. My domain will stay. But, as you might have noticed, my blog design has changed. I've been dying for a more minimalist theme for ages now but have struggled to find one that I like. I know I just changed mine back in September, but much like the song from Hamilton, I can never be satisfied. I prefer the look of no sidebar and a more minimal and grid style homepage for my own content and I finally got what I wanted just how I wanted it!! Me being happy with the way my blog looks just makes me feel so much better about the content that I'm going to put out. 

I've been blog planning. A lot, actually. I don't find blog planning particularly boring, but I felt like it might have been a little forced in the past few months. I'd shoot outfits with no reasoning behind it, just because I knew I needed photo content to go along with whatever blog post I'd throw together the night before. Every week I'd have a couple of well-planned out posts and the rest I'd, admittedly, wing. I'd rely on my stream of consciousness to be enough to get me by. But it's been nice to plan posts that make me smile and that I actually feel like I could talk about in both an entertaining and informative manner. You know me, I'm never giving up my pop culture references or dad jokes or hashtags where they don't count. It's just part of my #brand.

My voice isn't changing. My content isn't changing. It's just...improving. I hope! God, how embarrassing would it be if everything went to shit and somehow got even worse? That would be my luck though...

For now, everything will still be Monday through Friday and Saturday for a new video. Will that change sometime in the future? Honestly, probably. It's been easy to keep up the five days a week schedule because, well, this is all I do all week. But if my circumstances change then who knows. I like to keep myself to schedules, but who knows if the number of posts will change. All I hope is that the quality doesn't change, unless like, of course, it's getting better. That would be a nice change...

Anyways, happy four year anniversary to myself for somehow keeping this up pretty much daily for four years. My blog can't eat birthday cake (just imagine if I shoved a piece of cake onto my computer, that'd be fun to explain to the people at the Genius Bar when my computer inevitably shuts down), but maybe I should just eat a slice for it myself...