Post-Hiatus Report: What I Did on My Blog Vacation

Hello, hello again, welcome to a new year! As you know, I took some time off to relax and decompress**, so let’s get back to lingerie blogging!

**”haha,” chuckled 2017 to herself, “buckle up, dummy.”

Yeah.

When last we spoke, prior to the Women in Power: Celestial Queens editorial and gift guide, I was stepping away from the blog for a while. I was sad all the time, my anxiety was coming back, I was feeling uninspired here at ol’ Sweet Nothings HQ, I was struggling with both mental and physical health, and I couldn’t think of a better solution than a few months off, where I could focus on my “real” job, do some self-care, get my health back in order, build up some savings to reinvest in the blog, and come back refreshed and reinvigorated.

2017 had other ideas.

Kicking things off, my apartment was infested with roaches for nearly five months, bringing weeks of sleepless nights, bugs crawling on me when I did not want them crawling on me, constant and obsessive anxious-cleaning, and dreading being in my home. Worse things have happened to people, but y’all, it was miserable. Then, not two weeks after publishing my farewell-for-now post, my sweet Ruby cat started limping. She died one month  to the day later, and I wiped out my savings account and went into debt trying to save her. I got sick a lot, and I had bouts of the worst insomnia I’ve ever had. I cried a lot, especially, weirdly every single time I set foot in church (including Christmas Day, happy holidays to all!). I gained probably twenty pounds, reawakening some body-image struggles I thought I’d laid to rest. The final blog project of the year, that I’d been hoping would be a highlight and a source of pride and joy in an otherwise shitty year, presented disappointments and challenges I couldn’t have foreseen and which complicated my feelings about the final results.

What does this mean going forward?

I’m feeling the desire to start writing again, I just may be a little more purposeful and a little more infrequent than I was in past years. I’m still working to begin to rebuild some savings, so I want to make sure I’m investing money in posts that I’m passionate about. One of the reasons I wanted to step away for a bit was I was starting to feel that I had to constantly plug new styles and brands, that I got caught up in the seasonal retail hustle,  and that I needed to push products or review cool things first before anyone else did. That’s no fun! I want to write a post because I’m excited to write it! This blog never turned a profit anyway, so I don’t want to chase an impossible financial goal and lose the enjoyment of it all.

I want to do a little bit of a reset, a back-to-basics. Despite how much the lingerie landscape has changed in the last decade, the questions I get about lingerie haven’t really changed too terribly much. People still get worried when they get fitted into D+ bra sizes, people still wonder how to tell if their bra fit has changed, people still wonder if they’re “allowed” to wear certain lingerie pieces and styles, and people still aren’t sure where they can find bras in their size, taste, or budget. I get really sad when someone feels angry or sad or embarrassed about their underwear, and I want to try to find solutions for people who feel like they have no choices.

I do still want to review products and plan photoshoots, but I want to make sure the things I’m reviewing are pieces I care about, whether because the fit is outstanding, I love the style, or I think the piece will hold a lot of interest for readers. I’m also still open to working with collaborators on posts, and especially to using lingerie to tell different stories. Instead of posting once or twice a week, you may hear from me more like once or twice a month, but I hope the posts will be thoughtful and fun to read.

I know blogs are apparently not cool anymore, but let’s all pretend it’s a TinyLetter (I mean, you can subscribe to get posts by email, so it almost is?), or like we time-traveled back to 2012 when a certain person wasn’t president. That would be fun, right?

I have a rough plan of some of the posts I’d like to write in the first half of the year, but are there any particular topics you’d like to see covered or revisited? I’ve thought about getting a little more personal or silly and covering some one-off topics, like half-marathon training or my skincare/beauty product diary (god I love reading people’s product diaries, we are all so different, humans contain multitudes), but I also want to make sure you’re getting that hard-hitting lingerie content you crave. Oh, except, I should probably make this a disclaimer, it is highly likely that I won’t do a full Curve NY trend report after the upcoming show, because they take FORABSOLUTELYEVER to write/prep and I have a job to go to and a race to train for, ahem, I mean a social life? (no I don’t), but I will be diligent about sharing snaps and details on the Sweet Nothings social media channels, so you can follow all the fun there. So what are you excited about this year, lingerie-wise? What do you want to see?

Gus says hi.

February 5, 2018 by Sweets | 16 Comments