I’ve been seriously re-evaluating my thoughts about blogging recently.

I truly miss putting my thoughts to paper (screen?), like I did when I first started my site. It was more of a journal, chronicling what I did that day/weekend/week/whatever. Blogging has been an outlet for me since 2001. (hoo boy I am old on the internet, y’all.) It fulfills my writing needs, it fulfills my geek girl needs. I’ve always liked doing it. I never started doing this because I absolutely needed “hits” or “pingbacks” or “touches” or whatever the hell people call them right now. I did it for the outlet. I did it for myself. If others hopped on the ride with me, awesome – the more the merrier. My only issue is that I would feel like things were getting stale every once in a while and I would take a break, rejuvenate, and start fresh. Usually with a new site design.

When I originally decided to start writing about fashion, it felt right. I’d always been fascinated and slightly obsessed with fashion, even though I never really dressed the part for years. I figured that it would be a new thing for me, something that I could put my own nerdy spin on and show the world that plus-size nerd girls could rock the fashuns too. This time, I knew I needed to do something differently. I reached out, I commented, I joined IFB, I contacted local shops to do features, I tried to do all the things that a good little fashion blogger does. I sat down on Sundays and pounded out a bunch of articles that posted through the week. Then one day I looked at the graph on my WP Dashboard to see how many people visited my site that week, and I said the following out loud:

“I’m not getting enough hits.”

As soon as the words left my lips I realized something felt totally, horribly wrong. I wasn’t doing this for the love of blogging or writing. I was looking at nothing more than how many people visited my site. I wanted more interaction – more comments, more pingbacks, more links – not because they were driving discussion and allowing me to make new friends online, but because that was what drove up my traffic. Why did I think like this? I don’t know. Maybe because that’s all I saw on fashion blogging sites – articles like “How to Drive Your Blog Traffic Up, Up, Up!” and “Getting More Hits With Your Outfits” and things like that. (For the record, I’ve never seen articles with these titles, but if they’re out there, let me know and I will certainly link to them.)

I started really considering if I still wanted to write about fashion. I wondered out loud on Twitter last weekend:
“…as a 30-something year old plus size fashion blogger, I feel like a teeny fish in the sea of twee 20-somethings. It feels almost useless.”
I mean, it seems like everyone and anyone has a fashion blog these days. If you can get up and get dressed, you can have a fashion blog. I really wanted my site to be a very body-positive place, for those of any size.

I think that I need to not have a “theme” and just go back to what I used to do. I think I need to get back to just writing about whatever strikes my fancy – from random snapshots to lengthy diatribes to talking up my new Etsy store (more on that later) to recaps of my weekend to talking about my nerdy obsessions. Maybe there will be an OOTD post once in a while.