Learning from Blogging Failures

Back in July, I started a pretty ambitious project as an inexperienced and disorganized blogger. For the Month of Masks I aimed to use one mask every day for the month of July, with weekly check ins here and daily check ins on my Instagram. And I did not last even two weeks. I did the daily check ins for a while, and then got behind, and I didn’t even get to week two of the weekly check ins. As far as blogging challenges go, this was a miserable failure.

As an ambitious person, I definitely took a hit to my ego from failing. And here’s the thing: I know this isn’t realistically a big deal, and this isn’t the end of the world, but I wanted to do well. I wanted to be successful at this, because I felt like if I didn’t, I was a failure as a blogger, more than I already feel. I really want to be a good blogger, and to do well at everything I do. It’s that damn Capricorn stellium I have floating around in my natal chart. And I get paralyzed from self-inflicted pressure so easily, and it happened again.

Part of me wanted to crawl in a hole because I judged myself so harshly for screwing up, and I did by the way. Went quiet on social media for a while, there was wallowing. But as I thought about how I messed up something I was honestly excited about, I realized I learned a lot about myself as a blogger. And I realize I wouldn’t have learned any of this if I hadn’t failed!

First off, I realized how valuable experience is in blogging. I only have what, twenty something posts on here? And only 100 or so pictures on Instagram that I’m really thrilled with? I really haven’t produced as much content as I felt like I had, so I was doing something brand new. New is scary and when it’s something you haven’t tried before, shit can go wrong. I didn’t know how to account for things coming up, and I haven’t perfected the art of content production and scheduling. Then, on top of all that, trying to run that challenge as well as putting up “normal”- strong word- content really wore things out. Fuck, I haven’t even been blogging long enough to really fail at a project before. No, we’re not counting the several hiatuses I’ve taken.

As far as content “themes” go,  I am not yet a marathoner. Doing one type of content for longer than a week just isn’t as inspiring to me. I love having a plan, and I love having structure, but I also appreciate flexibility. Feeling like I had to produce a certain type of content for an entire month, constantly, just kinda fried my lizard brain. (By lizard brain, I mean that kind of instinctual autopilot you run on when you’re tired or you got a lot of stuff going on.) After about two weeks trying to do the challenge how I wanted, I got bored at a very base level. I wanted to do new stuff but didn’t have the energy to make it happen, and then judged myself out of doing it.

Putting out content for the sake of content also fries my lizard brain. And that’s kind of where this ended up. Some people are amazing at having shit tons of content up and ready to go at a moments notice and (see point 1) I’m just not there yet. I admire those people, and I hope to get in that groove one day, but alas, today is not that day. And it probably isn’t going to happen this month either. Sorry, September. There’s a lot of value in being able to have that content ready to go, and I’ll work towards that slowly. So, for now, I want to focus more on working my flexible plan and just doing whatever the lizard brain likes and trying different kinds of content before I try and focus on one kind of content.

But mostly I learned that I am my harshest critic, and that I suck at letting myself fail when it’s something I’ll only learn from and won’t hurt me. Every failure I make and every move I try, I analyze to a painful, paralytic degree. My inner dialogue is… bonkers. I live under my own microscope, to the point where I think I also live under the microscopes of others. Part of which I think is agitated by the pressures of blogging and trying to break out and all the “advice” that’s rolling around in the internet. I got into my own head on this, and I kind of trapped myself into failing. Which put me into a catch-22, where I was dooming myself to fail, but I didn’t want to fail. I can’t have both, but I didn’t notice it happening soon enough to catch myself. But I’m happy now that I messed it up, because I was able to learn about myself through it. And, on top of that, I got out of my head enough to talk about it here.

Here at the end of it, I realized that there is a lot I want to change about my blogging style, and how I treat myself as a blogger. I learned about my internal dialogue, my planning process, and that the awful things I think about myself as a blogger and content creator aren’t entirely true. And that, even if someone thinks they’re true, it doesn’t really matter.

The bottom line is, you don’t learn from doing things right. The feedback is, “Groovy, keep it up.” When you do something wrong, or you fail at something, there are points to learn from. There are things you can change and do better. There’s something you can look at and say, “Yup, don’t do that.” There’s reflection that will spur change, rather than simply gratitude. Success is motivating, and failure is the fire under your ass. Success does not make you change, failure does. And maybe I’m thinking too much about this, but I feel like even if I am, the lessons I’m finding are well worth the extra effort.

Let me know about your blogging failures, and what you’ve learned from as a blogger. Or even life failures that you learned from. It’s freeing to realize lessons, and it feels nice to finally be open about them too.