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For months now, I have been in a major blogging slump. Blogging through a pandemic has been, like most things this year, difficult to say the least.

Half the time, I couldn’t even think of a single blog post that I might sit down to write. The other half, I couldn’t muster up the energy- either physical or mental.

March 13^th is a day that will forever be ingrained in my memory.

I remember that day, my husband and I picked up our daughter from school together- something we didn’t usually do, but he just happened to have been home from work early that day.

We got the news that schools were shutting down as we were sitting in the pickup line waiting for Harper. Pennsylvania was declaring a state of emergency. There was no warning, no time to prepare.

Driving home I said to Eddie, “We will never forget this moment for the rest of our lives. This is a moment in history that we are a part of, and 50 years from now they will write about this in textbooks.”

We could have never known what the United States was in for over the course of the next few months (and the rest of this year, no doubt).

The kids and I quarantined ourselves for over 90 days, not even a single trip to the grocery store. After that period of time, I began to venture out maybe once a week to get groceries.

I know I am not alone when I say how profoundly this affected me, specifically my mental health.

In the beginning, things were “good”. The kids and I did yoga, we went for walks, did crafts, watched movies… watched more movies. I was feeling alright in the beginning.

But as time went on, I started to feel a growing sense of dread that deepened as the days passed. It never seemed to leave me.

I started drinking more and more every evening, I completely stopped working on my blog altogether, and I stopped exercising. The kid’s screen time was pretty much all day because I was struggling to even function at one point.

Basically, this was me for about 8-10 weeks:

I have always been an introvert, but a long ass quarantine with basically zero human interaction is hard even for the most introverted of people.

I started therapy around the end of April, (virtually of course) and it has taken some time but I’m slowly starting to feel better and get back into a more positive mindset.

The more I started to think about it, I realized… I can’t be the only blogger out here struggling. Despite what my favorite Instagram Influencers might have me thinking, I KNOW that I’m not the only one whose work ethic just up and vanished for a few months.

But the thing is, I chose to start blogging because I believed that I could be successful at it. And it was the only thing in the world that I enjoyed doing for ‘work’. I have wanted to be a blogger since I was 20 years old, and I’m not going to let a pandemic stop me.

I’ll let a pandemic stop me from doing a lot of things, like going out to eat, shopping, missing out on holiday parties, seeing my family. But I realized that I can’t let it stop me from doing the one thing I have wanted to do my entire adult life.

It seems like blogging during a pandemic + quarantine situation wouldn’t be all that hard, considering the fact that we work from home all the time anyway.

But working from home and working from home while the rest of your family are CONSTANTLY there is not the same thing.

Before COVID, Harper was in school for eight hours a day. Asher spent a few days a week with my mother in law, pretty much for eight hours a day as well. Eddie never stopped working even when the state shut down because his work is considered essential.

I had a shit ton of time on my hands before, as far as stay at home moms are concerned.

Add in the fact that we were thrust into ‘online schooling’, which was particularly difficult given that the school district had zero time to prepare for it. Everyone was scrambling for a while, just winging it.

Blogging was the last thing on my mind if I’m being honest.

Yes, I occasionally thought about it- like, I should probably write something. I should probably reach out to my readers to see how they are, I should write about how we are dealing with this as a family.

But I just could not.

Every time I sat down at my computer my mind went blank. I certainly wasn’t in the mood to share a damn thing on Instagram.

When I am feeling low, I go inward.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I didn’t want to share anything with the world. I just wanted to hole up in my house, drink wine, and try to keep my kids alive and happy.

So that’s pretty much what I did for a long time.

Things slowly started to change when our state moved from the ‘red phase’ to the ‘yellow phase’. I started to feel a little bit more comfortable venturing out to the store (always with a mask), we allowed our kids to see their grandparents for the first time in months. We started to visit our parents a little here and there.

I didn’t realize how badly the quarantine had affected me until I started to get some of my ‘old life’ back. I was in too deep, but I gained some clarity when I finally got a little piece of normal back.

Even though I was feeling better, I didn’t jump right back into blogging the same way I used to.

It was a slow start, for sure. I started by just sitting down one night and designing a couple of Pinterest templates. This was sometime in May. The last time I had actually published a blog post was March 4^th, so it was a solid two months of doing zero blog work.

I designed maybe 3 pins that night, which isn’t much but it was a start. I was finally working on something, anything, after months of my computer sitting around collecting dust.

Slowly, slowly I worked on those templates. It took me a few weeks to come up with 20 pin templates for my email subscribers. I worked on them sparingly, only when I felt like it.

The thing about working for yourself is that sometimes it’s hard to force the motivation to get shit done.

When I worked for someone else, it didn’t matter if I was motivated to work. I had to. I had a team of people that counted on me, and they couldn’t do their jobs if I didn’t do mine. Even when I didn’t feel like it, I showed up and did my best.

But during this pandemic, there have been times that I’ve felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I cried for the people who lost their lives to Coronavirus, I cried for their families and the healthcare workers who continue to risk their lives to care for their patients.

I cried for my daughter, whose first year of real school was cut short unexpectedly.

I cried for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and every other black person murdered by the police. (please take a moment to follow these links to learn more and sign the petition for Justice for Breonna)

I missed Barack Obama deeply every time our current president held a press conference. (and still do)

There were and are so many hard emotions I was already trying to deal with, why would I also add in forcing myself to work when I didn’t necessarily have to?

I feel lucky, of course, that I was able to take a step back from working to focus on my family and myself during this time. So many people didn’t have such a choice, my husband included.

So, I chose not to ‘fake it til you make it’ my way through blogging during the pandemic.

That being said, I definitely still beat myself up about it. I’m extremely hard on myself in general, so even though I knew that I should give myself some grace, I was still really disappointed in myself for not working harder.

I’d see all these other bloggers and influencers on Instagram still creating content and showing up for their audiences and I’d think: ‘Why the hell can’t I just be like them?’ ‘Where do they get their motivation from and why can’t I find it anywhere?’

But seriously? Comparing myself to other women on social media was certainly doing NOTHING to help me find my motivation. It was actually pretty detrimental, because comparing yourself to someone else, particularly through the lens of social media, is never good for your self-esteem.

You can’t worry about what other bloggers are doing, or not doing. That’s their journey, not yours.

I stopped looking at social media altogether for a little while. I got rid of Facebook completely, and I don’t spend a whole lot of time on either Instagram or Twitter these days.

Taking a break from social media was a huge part of how I was able to start focusing on my blog again.

It gave me a chance to reflect without all the extra noise.

I have enough to worry about being a mom, I can’t be worrying about what every other blogger is doing on social media.

Just because some other bloggers were able to continue working through everything going on in the world, that just wasn’t possible for me.

And that is okay.

Now that I have some of my motivation back, I wanted to share my experience with blogging during the pandemic. I wanted to let others who might be struggling know that it’s okay to take a break if you are able to.

I also want to share what my plans are for getting back to blogging full time over the next couple of months.

Some things I think can help any blogger stay focused and be more organized, which I hope will make us a bit more productive.

The Plan Moving Forward

– Make my health a priority

I don’t know about you, but when I feel like crap, the last thing I want to do is… anything. If I don’t feel good, or I’m tired or hungover, I find it so hard to motivate myself to do very much at all. I start feeling like crap when I don’t take my vitamins, drink too much wine the night before, don’t get enough sleep, and don’t get in some kind of physical activity.

When I make it a priority to do all of those things, it’s definitely much easier for me to find the motivation to sit down and work on something. Plus my mind is clearer, which is better for my creativity.

– Use Social Media to Connect, not Compare

Like I said before, comparison is just useless. There is no sense in comparing yourself to filtered and curated images on your phone screen.

There’s no use in comparing yourself to anyone else, period. Whether in real life or online.

For a while, I considered deleting all of my social accounts and just washing my hands of it completely. But connecting with others is hard enough for me as it is, so why not use these tools to try to connect with other moms/bloggers/friends instead of just silently comparing myself to them?

My goal moving forward is to start making true connections on social media.

– Work Smarter, not necessarily Harder

This is a big one for me. As much of a perfectionist as I am, I am really unorganized. I don’t do well with schedules, time blocking or any kind of real structure.

I fought this for a long time, not wanting to accept the fact that I am just not a schedule person. I have always wished I were more organized and could adhere to a schedule, but it’s just not in my nature.

Once I accepted that about myself, I realized that I could still be quite productive even without structure. I work best when I feel like working.

As a blogger, part of my job is writing. Writing a blog post is something I take seriously- I want to connect with my readers in a real way, and I can’t write authentically if I’m not in the mood to write.

Working smarter for me means finding ways to utilize my time in a better way, when I do work. I’ve decided that when I do work, I need to find ways to pack as much as I can into that period of time.

I will never be the kind of person who says ‘I am going to work from this time – this time’ and actually stick to it. Every time I try to set a schedule for myself it fills me with anxiety about trying to stick to it.

So, moving forward I am going to make a plan to work as much as I can and as smart as I can. Key words being ‘as I can’.

– Be Louder about things that Matter to Me

This one is hard for me to share, and I debated whether or not to even write it. It’s always been hard for me to stand up for things I believe in, publicly and privately, out of a fear of backlash. Also, I am 100% a people pleaser and I can’t stand the fact that someone might not like me.

But after a lot of introspection and therapy, I’ve started to realize that maybe if I were more vocal about the things that matter to me, like BLM, police brutality, racism, and homophobia, maybe I could start to build real connections with my audience.

I don’t think it’s possible to build authentic connections and friendships when you are hiding parts of yourself just so you won’t upset anyone else.

I also want to use my platform to stand up for these injustices, because I am privileged enough to not know what it feels like to be hated for who I am or what I look like.

In the future, I hope to build a real community with this blog. I have connected with some amazing people through blogging, but I know the potential to grow my audience and truly connect with my readers requires sharing parts of myself that I have so far kept hidden. I know that in order to achieve what I want to achieve with this blog, I need to be authentically myself- and if some people don’t like it, that’s okay.

I want people in my corner who share the same values and morals that I do. People who care about the same things I do, people who I can learn from and who can maybe learn from me.

In the end, I’ve come to realize that taking a step back from my blogging through the pandemic was probably the best thing to happen to my blog.

I’ve learned so much this year, and maybe I wouldn’t have if I didn’t take some time to really slow down and think about what it is that is actually important to me and how I can use this blog to help others.

Blogging through a pandemic is something we never thought we would be doing when we first started blogging, and we’re all just figuring it out as we go.

Our journeys are similar in so many ways, but so very different in profound ways as well.

The most important thing is to just show ourselves a little bit of grace. We’re all just doing the best we can, and that doesn’t have to look the same for everyone.

XO, M

beginner blogging bloggers blogging coronavirus covid-19