Everyone is striving to be relevant.
To be popular. To be young.

I have never really written about me and pushed me as a brand as hard as others. I liked to write but not document everything I did with photos or selfies. Social media “influencer” posts often feel contrived and unauthentic. It’s why I chose to fade away from being a social media “influencer” when the trend was blooming Australia. But here I am, amid a global epidemic known as COVID 19, writing about me and why I went M.I.A. from blogging and life in general.

For those who are unaware, I’ve been AFK from life and friends for the better part of the last 2 years. Perhaps partly not by choice as I found people I considered friends slowly stopped contacting me because I wasn’t someone who would elevate their social or career ambitions.

I grew tired of trying as hard as I did when I was in my early 20s and needed a break from being there for people, coming up with new stories in an industry that basically recycles the same stories every year: “This mascara/cream/nail polish will change your life. Or you must try this new restaurant or buy this shoe because everyone else has.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love mascara, shoes and food, I just had a lot going on in real life with how I was feeling about myself, others and was exhausted.

As stated at the beginning, everyone is striving to be relevant. To be popular. To be young. So it’s a constant struggle when you’re pushing a brand, when you’re not an 18 year old Instagram model who poses in her bikini or her workout gear every other day and has 500k+ followers.

A full time blogger and social media person lives and die on whether you can bring in adverting dollars and a lot of brands aren’t interested the written word even though we all Google for reviews and stories about a new hot product. Instead a quick Instagram post by some young thing or story in the Daily Mail about how a Kardashian uses their product is “much better” for sales and marketing. Which I bear no grudges, they’re a business, they need to make money and gain brand recognition. That’s business. So I withdrew slowly and surely.

I was exhausted anyway, running the gauntlet from working a full time job and building my blog, to working part time and building the blog, to blogging full time with some freelance work on the side so my CV wasn’t all “I have a blog and did Instagram for myself”.

The early years of blogging and social media in Australia (2006-2010) was rough, many brands and PR agencies didn’t want to work with us, they didn’t see the relevance or results it could provide by using the internet as a marketing and PR tool. It didn’t help that print media people would constantly try to down play our influence (several of these people have now gone on to create Goop-esque websites) and the general public using the internet to search for more information and reviews on a item before they purchased. It took years of meetings and once a group of us held a seminar in Sydney with the help of Renee at Stellar.

Flick forward a few years, some young thing who randomly has 500k (fake?) Instagram followers and started her account seemingly yesterday, gets all the advertising dollars and pitched all the stories.

On top of that, so called friends turning out to be different people than I thought and I was dealing with anxiety & depression following a rough break up. I just wanted to sleep.

So I spent 2 years dealing with personal issues, or not dealing and playing a MMORPG with strangers, and hanging out with my super adorable rescue cat (who also has more followers than I do on Instagram, and its not from posing in bikinis). I’m not sure what prompted me to write this now, but here it is.

Criticize, sympathize or feel ambivalent, these are my thoughts.

I will be blogging again, occasionally, I started SASSYBELLA.com way back in 2002 because I was a nerd back in the day, I studied Journalism because I liked to write so I’m putting fingers back on the keyboard again and seeing what comes out. While I won’t write about the latest in fashion and beauty news as often as I used to, as other sites cover that amazingly well, they will be included as I will be writing about things that interest me or I think would interest others.

I’d love to hear your stories about blogging or being a social hermit before the coronavirus forced us all to be stay at home pet mothers.