Let me start off by wishing you all an abundant and positive new year! Welcome to 2023!
With the arrival of the new year, in the season of fresh starts and changes, your beloved blog is going through a few changes too. Life has recently led me to make these decisions and what better way to get started than New Year's?
Let's start from the beginning...
More than 7 months ago, around May 2022, I stopped creating. At first, I didn't even know why. I was naturally overburdened by my everyday life. I had recently started a new job and wanted to prioritise that along with balancing my personal and social life. With that, content creation took a backseat.
However, this was new to me. My new routine was fairly laid back compared to my jam-packed college days when I was busier and yet, had managed to post regularly. As months have passed and I look back on the obviousness of this reason, it feels almost unworthy, it feels incomplete. That's because there were reasons like gradual burnout, taking on more things than I could handle and the overall unfavourable phase of life that I was in, that contributed to this pause. But hold on, there was much more to it than I initially realised.
The timely break from social media
Then, a couple of months ago, I quit my social media apps, specifically Instagram and Linkedin. Those were the two apps I was using, rather aggressively, to push out content and to drown in the pointlessness of updates posted by other people.
A month into deleting these apps, things started to make more sense. The distance from them created a path of clarity. My purpose for Save Ourselves made more sense now that it was not fogged by algorithms and updates and follower counts. Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe in the power of social media but not necessarily in the short-term, short-form-ness of it. I think I am an older soul when it comes to that. I prefer 30-minute-long vlogs of my favourite YouTubers over watching 50 different reels. I love writing long blog posts like these rather than a 50-word Instagram caption for a photo you'll simply scroll past. I prefer reading books that take me days to finish over Instagram stories and Linkedin posts.
Before you cast me aside as a hypocrite, let me assure you that I have, on countless occasions, given in to the allure and novelty of all these platforms. I think I will continue using them in the future as well, but in a capacity that I see fit. They are not the enemy here, the enemy is the fragility of our minds.
What Save Ourselves started as
Even though Save Ourselves is called Save Ourselves, it started out with a pretty selfish motive which I still believe is its core purpose. The purpose is that I wanted to create a productive outlet for the constant barrage of thoughts in my brain. I wanted to reach like-minded people through the act of writing and storytelling. I found blogging and YouTube to be the two most suitable ways to get my points across as they supported my writing, storytelling and love of long-form content.
Today, this is still the main purpose of Save Ourselves. But it seems as though I have been focusing on the wrong medium to communicate. Focusing more on short-form social media platforms because that's what the internet favours eventually led to a lot of dissatisfaction. It made me feel like I was wandering off my initial path. What's the point of creating if I'm not focusing on its main purpose? I want to go back to how Save Ourselves began - in the form of longer narratives.
Here are the changes at Save Ourselves for 2023
From here on, Save Ourselves will primarily be a long-form creation. I will continue to create with a renewed sense of spirit through blogs, Youtube videos and newsletters instead of relying more on Instagram stories, posts and reels. I don't really want to be bogged down by algorithms and SEO-friendly content. I'm here for the long run, I'm creating because I want to create.
The main motive of Save Ourselves is to create a safe space to let you be and let you experience and enrich your own life. I hope you stay tuned for the upcoming content. Thank you for all your support!