So the blog posts have been few and far between this Summer. I spoke about why in one of my posts just over a month ago but I hate saying it over and over so I won’t. In short, I’ve not been my happiest ever self this Summer so I decided to ride it out and wait for things to get back on track.
Let’s sidebar (swear I keep doing that in posts atm): I wrote this post before my previous one about the lil dip I’ve had in my mental health recently so you probs already know this stuff but I’m not repeating myself cos I wrote this one first lol. And if you’ve not read the prev one it elaborates a bit more on what’s been going on with me and why I haven’t blogged because of it. This current post was inspired off the back of this tweet and the suggestions that came with it so I initially wanted to use this as my ‘comeback’ per se, but went with the world mental health day one because it seemed more honest and appropriate.
In hindsight (wouldn’t it be nice to have some hindsight in every tricky situ you get yourself into?), I think it’s stupid to have assumed that things would just get back on track. I thought that I’d wake up one day and be over it, or that I’d go back to uni and a switch would flip and anything that was a mood-killer would just be gone because I’d be back there and not at home with far less to do. Even if the switch hasn’t flipped in my life, it’s flipped for good ol’ yasmin stefanie dot com (I NEED TO STOP!!). I’m over not blogging and I love venting about my life or tennis or what I’m loving or why you should do things for yourself instead of for boys, so that’s what we’re gonna do again.
jumper – brandy melville [sold out in this design but still available in loads of others] // shorts – pretty little thing
Three things I like to ensure that I always have are a good work ethic, drive and ambition. I don’t even like listing these traits here because it seems a bit bait-girl braggy. I will never not want to do the best possible, I will never be happy unless I’m doing well and working hard, but I don’t like to say it because 1. I don’t need to big myself up and look like a fucking divvy and 2. imagine how stupid I’d look if I bigged myself up but then other people were like lol but you have no work ethic and ur work is shit?? Bit embarrassing like.
I like being hard-working, so letting things come to a bit of a standstill on the blog over Summer after I spent all of my final semester coming up with amazing plans for the blog that I could put into place in Summer once all my deadlines and exams were over made me feel like a slacker, like those people you get thrown with in group work who do nothing and end up getting a good grade anyway because you basically carried them because you didn’t want to compromise your work ethic or your want to do well. You know how it feels when you get people like that, it’s a part of life but it’s a pure annoying one, so nothing feels worse than to feel like you’ve become that person yourself.
I’m sure we’ve all read countless blog posts and articles and tweets and ‘gram captions telling us that we all want to appear busy at the moment, that we fear we’ll look unsuccessful if we aren’t busy all the time, but that being that busy is actually draining and damaging af and will lead to some serious burnout with a huge breakdown on the side. It’s sort of the thing at the moment, one of the topics we’re all talking about and writing about, and I guess this ties in with that. If you take a break from something and take time away from it, you might worry that you’ll look like you can’t handle it. I know I did.
It can be a bit disheartening when we feel like we can’t handle that one extra thing on our plates at the moment but we can see that there are plenty of others who can. Comparison is the thief of joy, and I know it’s one of my downsides when it comes to silly lil negative things that I shouldn’t focus on but I can’t help that I do. We can all sit here and know logically that we can’t compare ourselves and our ~journeys~ with anyone else’s because we’re different people so the comparison doesn’t work and things will be different for them than they are for us, but it’s hard to actually apply that when you’re in the thick of it.
If you’re someone who likes to work hard and who prides themselves in that, you’ll feel like you’re compromising that part of yourself when you decide to take a break. You might be taking a break almost against your will, not wanting to but knowing you’ll need to for the sake of your sanity or for the sake of something else you need to prioritise. You might be taking a break just because you want to but, as much as you want to, you have a hard time starting because it feels like it goes against every fibre of your being. But here’s the thing I realised, if you’re so worried that taking a break will compromise that hard-working nature of yours, it’s because you ARE hard-working no matter what. If it’s a trait of yours that you care about, so much so to the point where you might think that you can’t take a break because of it, how can you not be hard-working? You could take five whole years out but if that mentality is still ingrained in your head then you will always still be a hard-worker.
Let’s get a lil bit real and candid and personal now. Taking a break from this blog and barely posting all Summer made me feel pathetic. Literally pathetic. It’s not like I was doing a whole ton of stuff to the point where I didn’t have time for my blog, and to those who don’t actually blog themselves but follow me for whatever reason – whether it’s because we know each other somehow or because they’ve stuck around since my Script days (lol) or something, then it probably seems like it wouldn’t take much out of me to write some words and snap a few pics of me wearing clothes in a street because, like, who doesn’t go out and walk down a street wearing clothes every day? Can’t be hard to take a pic or five whilst you’re just out and about, right? The reality is, blogging is hard work and unless you’re doing it you’ll probably never fully understand it and also, idk about you, but I can’t blog if I’m not feeling like myself because I can’t just turn it on.
I didn’t shoot outfit photos for about a month solid because I couldn’t bring myself to, I don’t even know what it was but I just couldn’t (spoiler, I know what it was. anxiety. can we tell this was written before I decided to actually just be honest and open on world mental health day? lol). I didn’t want to write posts because I write mostly from my own life experiences and thoughts and feelings, and I wasn’t going to sit here and vent about my hashtag strugglez. Wanna know a secret? The outfit photos from this post were taken whilst I was having a panic attack on the street trying to get the shot. It was the first time I tried to take outfit photos in over a month, I had the blog post itself written and planned for ages. I’d been so super excited about my new points to defend series, I wanted to get it out there ASAP, and some of the topics were really relevant and current at that moment in time so I didn’t have much time before some of the points became outdated and irrelevant. I had absolutely no photos I could attach to that post and I knew I needed it up that Sunday, I tried to go out and take photos for it several times in the week before and just couldn’t. And then on the Saturday – the day before I wanted the post to go live – I knew that enough was enough and I needed to take those pics now because it would be raining on Sunday and I needed the post up on Sunday. I left it until the day before, got there, felt all the pressure of having left it until the day before, and had a panic attack on the street. I wanted to shrug it off, bun the post off and stop taking the pics, just like I had for the whole week before when I’d start getting ready to go shoot and then never even make it out because I’d give up. But my mum aka my blog photographer was like we’re here now, you may as well try and get a few pics because you’ll be even more upset if you go another day giving up on it. So I’d let it all out, compose myself enough to take about three pics, let it out again, and repeat. I left hating the photos and deciding I wouldn’t use them and that I’d brave the rain on Sunday to try and take a couple to go with the post, and then I woke up on Sunday and decided that actually, I liked them. Actually, I wanted to use them. And so I put them on the post and got up my first points to defend. And dya know what? I got the most compliments for those photos than I have on any others for a while.
Why am I telling y’all this? I don’t really know either lol. I may as well be honest about how things have been and why it’s stopped me from blogging over Summer but, also, I don’t want to appear like some absolute no-care-in-the-world gal who just goes and flaunts it on the street outside of a pretty white house or a photogenic pink wall. It’s important to me that you know it’s not like that, that I’m not spending my life holding a Starbucks in one hand and a piece of my hair in the other, happily posing in a brand new Topshop outfit, and I need to be a bit more open so that I don’t give off that vibe. And when you hear the story like that, you’re going to think that of course I wasn’t wrong for taking a break, I had no other option if every attempt of putting together a post went like that. When you look at it that way, taking a break didn’t make me any less hard-working, it was just something I needed to do. So insert your own scenario here, whatever it may be. Look at it as if it were someone else in your position and ask yourself if you’d see them as any less of a hard-worker for taking a break, I bet you wouldn’t.
And, ok, in my personal situ you might just be like ok but why did you think you even needed to take photos like that for your post lol ur just conforming to the blogger street style photography rules x because I know how it sounds, it sounds stupid and vain and like I’m creating a problem for myself all on my own, but I’d rather not do something if I’m not going to do it properly and, for me, doing it properly involves taking those pics.
The TL;DR of it is just that you should just take the break if you need or want to, and not bother worrying about it. It won’t make you look any less hard-working so you may as well save yourself the time and energy that you’d spend on contemplating whether or not the break was worth it, and take the damn break. If being a hard worker is part of your nature, you won’t lose that just because you need a few weeks or months or even years to take some weight off your shoulders. If it was anyone else, you most likely wouldn’t change your opinion of them for taking a break, so why do it to yourself ykno?
Give urself a break!
♡
Yasmin
