What I’ve learned in 10 years of blogging

A few weeks ago, I had this realization that I have been writing on this blog for a long time. I’m talking about before I discovered Facebook kind of long. Instagram wasn’t invented kind of long. One of my children wasn’t born kind of long.
I looked at my archives and found out I had overlooked my own 10-year blogging anniversary. Apparently, time flies when you are having fun!
During the last decade of sharing my life here on this blog, so many things have happened. People sometimes ask me why I even want to write about my life in this way. While I’ve had my moments of asking myself that same question, I also love to look back and see how much life has changed. I’m so thankful that I took the time to record our stories, my thoughts and my ideas in this way.
I love that some of my readers have been with me since the beginning and still read my blog!
I read all the time about what I should be doing to have a successful blog. I should develop a niche. I need to write about one particular topic and stay hyper focused to attract an audience. I have learned through the years that just isn’t for me. I love writing about the real stuff that happens in our life, and it’s crazy how those topics have changed dramatically the last 10 years.
For example, some of the topics covered here have included:
Our decision to home school and then our decision to stop home schooling
The story of how my husband and I started dating
The surprise announcement that I was pregnant at the age of 40 and my struggles with “advanced maternal age”
Lots of interesting anecdotes about different types of shoes
My obsession with the TV show, LOST
My quest to become an organized person and my many organization projects
And my recent health journey and effort to eat real food
I thought about writing about the top five things I’ve learned after 10 years of blogging. But I realized that it all really boils down to just one thing.
You can’t worry about what other people think.
The hard thing about blogging for someone who is a perfectionist (like me) is that it’s so easy to overanalyze things. You can check your stats to see how many people read a blog post. You can fixate on your Facebook or Instagram likes and you can worry about how many people follow you by e-mail or through Bloglovin’. You can write what you perceive as an amazing blog post and then the reality hits that it is getting zero traffic.
If I followed all of the blogging rules, I would write more posts with five tips to do this or five tips to do that. But the thing is, I really blog for me. I love chronicling our lives here so I can look back at these memories later. I love the good feeling I get when someone tells me she was inspired, motivated or helped by something I wrote. I love connecting with people, and I get overly excited when I write something that others can relate to.
One of the biggest changes to my blog during the past 10 years is that I really don’t write that much about being a mom anymore. Once your kids get to a certain age, you really can’t infringe upon their privacy by exposing the details of what happens within a family. It’s kind of crazy that just when parenting reaches its most difficult stage, you also have to stop talking about what’s going on.
Because of this, I’ve been thinking about changing the name of my blog. But everydayMOM has become a part of who I am, so I’m not sure if I can bring myself to do it!
Whether you have been reading for the past 10 years or whether you are brand new here, I just wanted to say, “Thank you” for reading! I really do appreciate having you along on this journey.
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In honor of my 10 years of blogging, I would love to hear from you! Leave me a comment and let me know how long you have been reading my blog and how you found out about it. Thanks in advance!