All my life I’ve been curvy. I never really felt that I was fat but I never really felt that I was skinny either. Just somewhere in between and I was okay with that. When I first started my blog back in 2013, I was at my skinniest. I was obsessively working out 5 days a week in order to lose weight, juggling a busy college schedule and working a part-time job which left little time to eat. Yet when it comes to my fashion blog, I never felt pressure to be skinnier. It’s a personal fashion blog, I focus on showing outfits and creating content for real girls. Not the magazines and movies that we see of unrealistic images of girls. My fashion blog is my creative outlet, a place where I can escape and feel happy again.
Yet something happened this past year: I gained a significant amount of weight. Sure, I’ve gained weight here and there before and still continued fashion blogging despite it – but this time around felt different. My self-esteem changed along with my body.
I no longer felt confident enough to post photos of myself in new outfits. No longer feeling creative or inspired enough to work with brands for new collaborations. I would shoot outfits and come home and look through the photos and hate them and would never make it on the blog. On top of it, even the shopping experience changed for me! It used to be something that I loved, now I was lucky enough to find something that fit and looked flattering on me from my favorite stores.
It feels even worse when you’re a fashion blogger who updates their content regularly. My face is the brand. All of a sudden, your viewers start to drop, your followers count start to drop, you start to feel this pressure to create content but you can’t which makes you feel 10x worse. How can you produce good quality fashion content when you don’t even like the way you look?
It took a lot of hard work and reflection, but luckily I’m in a better place now. I had to make a decision on what’s more important: continuing to pursue something that I love or feeling sorry about the way I look and having it stop me from blogging. I wanted to continue blogging and wanted to feel better about myself in the process so I started eating healthier, hitting the gym a few times a week (and not feeling bad if I couldn’t) and being more positive which is something that I still struggle with. It’s the little things like, not beating myself up over the fact that a pair of jeans doesn’t fit or trying on things I never would have before.
This also led me to start getting creative again with blogging. Trying things like different poses in outfit posts or writing about different topics that I’ve always wanted to write about. It also led to a new mindset about blogging: knowing that it’s not the end of the world if I don’t look good in one blog post or that it’s okay if some weeks I just don’t post a new outfit because I’m just not feeling it. Something that I think a lot of fashion bloggers forget is that blogging should be fun and give you joy. And as the years go on, life changes and so does your body. If it starts to feel like a job or makes you feel bad about yourself, then you should take a step back from it and pause. Reflect, take your time and don’t feel bad about it. You’ll come back better than ever. And if you don’t come back to it, then that’s okay too.
Thanks for reading,
