Five years ago I hit publish on my first post.
That 300 word post took me over two weeks to put together, and a few more days before I got the courage to actually hit publish.
Never did I think that my new little hobby would bring me so much over the next five years.
To keep it short, my blogging experience has brought me:
* A creative outlet that has taught me SO many new skills
* The chance to connect with individuals from all over the world
* Wonderful opportunities like going inside a glacier or on a delicious food tour through Amsterdam
* A detailed diary of my first years in Iceland
That last point is my most cherished one, but all of these things have brought me so much joy these past few years.
When I decided to start my blog my only goal was to give myself something to do as I navigated my way through surviving my first Icelandic winter. I mean, what else was I going to fill my time with while I waited for my work visa to be approved???
Writing and reading is something I have always been passionate about since I was a little kid so when I discovered the world of blogs shortly after moving to Iceland I was hooked. This was the hobby I was looking for! I loved (and still do!) reading about the daily happenings of others from all over the world. I mean how cool is it that I can sit in my house in Iceland and read about the life happenings of someone who lives thousands of miles away and feel like I am talking to a friend?!
Thanks to my blog over the years I have been lucky to meet several bloggers in person when they have traveled here to Iceland. Every single time I was so nervous it would be awkward, and every single time I was surprised at how quickly I felt at ease, it was no different than meeting up with an old friend.
And I have my blog to thank for one of my best (in real life) friends, the lovely Jeannie from Life With a View. She was a reader of my blog before she made the move to Iceland and I am so lucky she found me online so that we could meet up in Iceland! We became instant travel partners in crime ;)
Needless to say, as soon as I discovered blogging, I was beyond hooked.
In fact, I would wake up at least an hour earlier than needed just so I could have some time to work on my blog before heading into my 9-5 job. And when that alarm went off I never once felt like I wanted to hit snooze, I was just excited to get some time to work on my blog and connect with my readers.
As someone who never would of labeled themselves as a creative person I sudden felt like I couldn’t turn off the creative side of my brain until I got all my ideas out. My mind seemed to be a never ending flow of post ideas and I couldn’t wait until the weekend so I could spend the days getting lost in my writing.
Sharing new places I visited in Iceland on my blog quickly became one of my favorite things to write about. I was constantly dragging my Viking off for random weekend adventures. Sometimes these adventures were a huge success, other times we never could find the place we were attempting to find, or the weather took a turn for the worse cutting our trip short. But these little trips of ours, they have ended up bringing some of my favorite memories here in Iceland.
And to be honest, these weekend adventures truly helped me keep my sanity that first year away from my family. With each new beautiful place we visited I felt my love for Iceland grow and it really helped me appreciate my new home.
I feel so lucky for all the places I have been able to visit around Iceland, and that I have the stories and pictures on my blog to always look back on.
After a few years of fun weekend adventures the Viking and I traded in our weekend adventures for school work when we started our MBA program in the Fall of 2016. At the time I had no intention of changing anything about my blogging. But with each week that passed and the list of assignments and stress piling up I found myself getting less and less time to write for my blog.
It wasn’t long before my blog started feeling like another task on my never ending to-do list. Feeling like I needed to write something in the limited time I had made me come to resent blogging and took all the fun out of it. But then I would get a bit of a break from work and school and the first thing I wanted to do was to write for my blog. So I just told myself one day I will have more time for my blog again and kept on writing as often as I could.
Then something else happened that completely rocked the Viking and my’s world.
We found out we were expecting our little H.
When I started my blog the Viking and I made a deal that I would keep the personal details about him to a minimum, hence his nicknames the Viking or H. And if I am being honest I struggled with (and still do) the amount of personal information I wanted to write about myself. Pretty early on I decided I would go with my gut and if I felt comfortable sharing personal information on my blog then I would, if not I would just keep it to myself.
This balance between what I did and didn’t share about my personal and family life seemed to be working great. So when we found out we were expecting our little man I just assumed that I would continue blogging as normal and share whatever information I felt comfortable with.
And then little H was born.
Once our little man joined our family I suddenly felt very uncomfortable writing about our little guy and our family life for all to read.
But at the same time I wasn’t ready to give up blogging.
And this begins my blogging stalemate.
Time kept passing by and I still felt uncomfortable writing about our family life. I started thinking I needed to change my blogs focus completely. So I spent some time attempting to work on my blog with the idea that it would be an Iceland only blog. But that just isn’t me and my motivation for writing quickly died. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing about Iceland, but I didn’t start my blog to only talk about Iceland. My favorite posts to write are usually those about my daily sheeningangs so I knew I didn’t want to stop writing these types of posts, I just wasn’t sure how I wanted to write about them with little H in the mix.
This past summer brought a crazy busy schedule so I decided it was the perfect time to take a complete break from basically all things social media and blogging. The idea was that this would give me time to rethink things and see if blogging was something I still wanted to do, or if it was time to say goodbye.
So I spent several months pretty much social media and blogging free. In fact I don’t think I opened up my wordpress site for over four months, that hasn’t happened in years! During this time I basically decided that I was done with blogging, and since I didn’t feel like I was missing it (obviously since I never even opened my blog) it seemed to be the right choice.
Fast forward to a few months later, we are back in Iceland, I am back at work, little H is in school and life has settled into a nice routine.
But after just a few weeks of this nice (aka much less stress thanks to no MBA) routine, I found myself itching to do something during the evenings and little H’s nap time. So one day during nap time I decided to open back up the blog just to see if I was interested. Before I knew it I had wrote for the entire nap and felt like I could of kept writing all day.
All it took was this one writing session and I was reminded why I never official called it quits on blogging.
Writing for my blog makes me so happy.
Ever since this nap time writing session it was like a switch flipped and suddenly new ideas for posts came flowing back into my mind. I have now been spending my evenings writing down ideas, playing around with photography and coding and wow how I have missed all of this!
I still have no idea how I want to share my family life on the blog, nor how active I am going to be able to be, but for now I am just enjoying feeling passionate about my hobby again.
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If you have made it to the end of this long winded post about my blogging journey, thanks for reading. This post truly has no real purpose other than the fact that I just had to get these words out there.
And to end this post, a picture of my little man on a recent adventure to Þingvellir to see the fall colors. Now that little H is running everywhere I have so many places I want to take him to, I can’t wait to watch him explore.
Question of the Day?
If you are a blogger has your blogging style changed over the years? What is your favorite types of blogs to read; lifestyle, travel, family?
