Seeking Validation Outside Myself
It has been a little over 40 days since I last put up any content on my blog, podcast or video log. In reality, it has been longer than 40 days since I wrote anything for my blog and even longer since I had a new video on my YouTube channel. So what was the problem? Why did I abandon my babies for more than 40 days? The answer is quite simple…but very complicated. I fell into a rut. You see, I started blogging in 2014 after a friend urged me to go beyond writing on Facebook. I was green-eyed, eager to get my work in front of new audiences and burning with a need to carve a niche for myself. I came at blogging like a child with a piñata; I was excited at the possibilities! As I put out content, the statistics started to excite me. Every day, new people were reading my work! And beyond that, they were liking, commenting, sharing and exposing my thoughts to audiences I didn’t even know existed. I began to receive emails from people in the United States of America, France, Netherland, Japan and more. It didn’t matter that my blog views were minimal (usually around 500 per month). All I cared about was that my work was being read by people around the world. I was elated! I looked at what other bloggers were doing and read stories of how people made money off their blog. I was piqued…but not overly so. I imagined that my content was not ‘worthy’ enough to make any money. Quite frankly, I didn’t even know what to do to make money. I was just happy to be putting out a little bit of me and getting major feedback. As 2015 began to wind down, I thought of diversifying the platforms with which I disseminated my stories. I thought of doing something radio- and television-like. At this point, I was a radio and television presenter in Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria, and I had decided I was going to leave because I didn’t feel appreciated there. So I wanted to do something that kept me doing the things I loved the most and on platforms that appealed to me. But beyond that, I knew that while many people can adapt to all formats of information, some people just wanted to hear you and others, see you. So I conceived the idea of doing something along these lines to further widen my reach. At the beginning of 2016, I started my podcast which originally was an audio version of my posts on the blog. By April, I shot my first video log. I was beyond excited because I was doing something new, expanding the number of my skills and gearing for that big gig that would change my life; literally. By this point, my blog had begun to do poorly. The number of people reading my pieces dropped. I began to wonder. Was I doing something wrong? Were my posts no longer interesting? Was it too much? But then I rationalized; I didn’t write often; I didn’t have a defined posting schedule; I talked mostly about feminism (which many of my audiences found repulsive); I am a long-winded writer and many people’s attention span wasn’t more than 30 seconds; my posts were serious and about issues that ‘mattered’ etc. While this explained what was happening to my blog, I couldn’t for the life of me explain what was happening to my podcast. The short story…people were just not listening. I could spend hours on end recording, editing and putting it out there and not get a single listen. I was running mad. What could possibly be wrong?! And even though I could rationalize – many Nigerians were not into podcasts yet, there was no mobile data for the heavy files, many had already read the posts I converted to podcast episodes – I didn’t. Instead, I saw it as a failure on my path. The video log was doing really well at this point; for someone just starting on YouTube. Each new video view sent me to cloud nine and left me smiling like a fool all day. But…I couldn’t keep up. It took hours on end to record each episode and editing was the absolute worst. As with everything that has no consistency, my views began to drop. So I was at a place where my blog, podcast and video log were all doing poorly. The irony was that, my blog views kept going up. I say it was doing poorly because the engagements – likes, comments, shares, feedback – were no longer flowing in. Any blogger knows that beyond views, engagements says a lot about your site. When I got to the middle of 2016, I had walked away from a job I originally loved for something I thought was my big break. The offer was juicy, the package was to die for and the opportunities were what I had been waiting for. I was so ready to start a new phase of my life until…I discovered it was a scam. I was hurt. I asked myself questions that I couldn’t answer. I wondered if I had been cursed to remain poor all my life. In that time frame however, I put out my best work on my blog. Pain is my biggest inspiration and so, to drown the contracting walls of my lack of a paying job, I worked harder than ever on my blog. I kept churning out content, putting out stuff, getting my voice out there. The views starting going up again. I was hitting a regular 2000 views per month with great interaction. Then the ‘high’ faded away. I was getting burned out. I didn’t have money. I could barely survive and if I wasn’t living in my father’s house, I would be starving. And because I am a bit of a worrier, I began to long for my days on
