One Small Step to Feeling More Creative

So, if you hadn't noticed, the blog looks kind of different. Or rather, entirely different.

Whenever I decide that it's time to change my blog layout (which, admittedly, is very often), I start to think about it like, six months in advance. Minimum. Then I spend two months looking at different templates, wishing I could mesh six different ones into a singular layout that would serve all of my needs and aesthetic desires (oddly enough, this is very similar to how I look at men on dating apps).

During those two months, I might narrow it down to two, maybe three, and then sit on those choices for at least a month. This time around, I sat on two different templates for two months and then decided on Friday that I wasn't going to use any of them and impulsively chose what you're seeing right now.

It's not that I haven't had the inspiration to blog for the past month. I mean, I guess when you really break it all down I haven't, but it was really just a trickle down from seemingly endless fatigue and feeling completely devoid of all creativity that sometimes decides to linger in my mind when my brain is feeling cozy and inviting. Did any of that make sense? Likely not. And I even wrote that on a Sunday afternoon after caffeine and a short stack of pancakes I made for myself so there's really no excuses.

When I used to go into interviews, they would ask me why I wanted to do whatever job I was interviewing for, usually something regarding social media or influencer marketing or just the digital media landscape as a whole. They'd bring up my journalism undergraduate degree, my blog, kind of everything that was listed out on my resume that kind of added up but also didn't quite align. I don't think I really had an answer, but I came up with an answer a couple of months ago either while I was in the shower or standing on the subway, both of which are great places for me to think about things and then no doubt forget them 90% of the time.

My fake answer that has never been used as an answer as the opportunity has not arisen since is this:

From a young age, I always felt creative. I'd draw, albeit I'm not sure my parents were happy that my canvas happened to be the wall from time to time, paint, concoct disgusting messes in the kitchen just to call it baking. I liked to read, I liked to write, I liked to paint. I was like, fine at math and science but I wasn't really interested in it and then was really bad at math come the end of high school but that's another story. I grew up with what I thought was a creative mind but then I was never very good at drawing or painting, photography wasn't my passion, I could barely play the guitar let alone any other instrument and singing wasn't really my forte.

I felt like I never really fit in creatively, but also wasn't good at the traditionally "smart" subjects and had zero interest in pursuing them. I didn't hate writing and I wasn't bad at it (Am I bad at it now? Probably, due to laziness), but like, I didn't want to write as my job nor did I want to teach or anything so I was kind of stuck. I just decided to go to school for journalism because it seemed like the right thing to do. Okay, I think I actually picked it because I found out that my uncle used to be a music journalist and decided that since I liked music and writing that I would just write about music while living in downtown Cleveland with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And that, kids, is why we should not let seventeen-year-olds choose what they want to do and where they want to go to school!

Long story short, I struggled to find the thing that finally cracked my creativity code and it was a trickle-down of my obsession with social media and the early influencers (remember when Meghan Rienks was Meghanrosette and Grace Helbig had My Damn Channel?) which caused me to start my blog which then led me to use social media more often which then led me to follow more and more content creators which caused the center of my universe to be Instagram. Okay, that last part is a joke, but you get it. Maybe. Probably not.

This was a really convoluted way of saying that I like content creation too much to let it go. I just need my time away from it for a hot second so I can breathe and actually think about what's happening. Sometimes that time away means switching up the way things look to reignite that flame or whatever other cheesy lines I could possibly copy and paste into this blog post in an effort to sound a little more like myself.

I'm hoping this is the last of the "WAH I'M SO TIRED I DON'T KNOW WHAT WORDS ARE LOL GIMME SOME ICED COFFEE NIALL HORAN I HAVE WRITER'S BLOCK" posts on the blog for a while. I'm feeling (slightly more) energized again and have a few new post formats that will hopefully be rolling out soon to make things feel less, uh, como se dice stale.

But while we're here, I just want to list out a few new things on the blog that I'm excited for:

1. There is a new section on the blog! It's called "Chats" (for now) and that's where you can find, well, all of the posts like this if you for some reason don't find me completely insufferable and instead find me entertaining. I'm super excited to have a spot for these all to live, as they've become the main focus on my blog for the past year or so and, according to my analytics, seem to be the most popular with you guys so like thanks for not thinking I'm the worst? Unless you still do but you like to hate-read my posts. That's fine too.

2. Sub-categories are here! Under "Beauty" you can now search for makeup, skincare, or haircare. Under "Fashion" there's outfits which probably include a lot of the posts from "Chats" but if you don't care about the words and just want to see the clothes, then there you go, and style which are posts about fashion that are, uh, about styling stuff? Pretty self-explanatory! And then "Lifestyle" has home, entertainment, travel, college, and NYC, which again, all seem pretty self-explanatory to me.

That's really it, I guess. I'm just mostly really excited about "Chats" which could potentially just be a temporary name but I guess we'll see if it sticks around!

I guess that's how the cookie crumbles?