It’s been a minute! My last blog post went live at the end of April, and then… life happened. Summer happened. A toddler on holiday chaos happened. And here I am, several months later, finally coming back to blogging and sitting back down to write.
Now the real work, it turns out, is something else entirely: how do you come back? There has definitely been some guilt attached to my absence. Since moving to the country-side I have found myself to be quite lonely, even though I am never really alone. And blogging/making videos has been a way to show up for myself. So being absent, losing the motivation to work for myself has been hard. But at the same time, I’m learning to give myself some grace, because quite a lot happened.
Why I created Bloom with Mae in the first place
A little bit of backstory of Bloom with Mae. Before becoming a mum, I was very involved in music and had a creative lifestyle. Yes, I was broke, but I was happy. I was a singer, I did fun photo-shoots, music videos, live performances and even a concert, I was working towards my dreams, and I generally had an interesting life. Then COVID happened. I got tinnitus out of nowhere and couldn’t do music anymore. Then I got married, then there was the war in home country Ukraine, so many things that made me gradually step away from music. There were also disappointments with projects and canceled plans, and at some point I became a little disenchanted with the whole “hustle forever and maybe it’ll work out” life. I was putting in so much work and had very little to show for it.
But I still loved performing arts. I still wanted to create. I still had all these ideas about starting YouTube, content creation, travelling, and doing something creative with my life. Then I became a mum, and honestly, I lost myself a little bit for sometime. Not in a dramatic way but I really wanted to experience motherhood and family life fully. So I left my job and hobbies because I wanted to actually be there and take care of my child myself. Motherhood is beautiful and challenging, I love every moment of it but I also want to focus a little on myself. How to have it all? How to be a present mom and wife but also have time to experience new things, friendships, career, travel?
Somewhere along the way, I then realised that being a mum didn’t mean I had to stop being me. I wanted to be a mum and have something that was mine. I wanted to create again. I wanted to have my independence and maybe eventually some kind of income. I wanted to feel inspired and challenged. And after moving to the countryside, the job opportunities around me didn’t really match what I was looking for. So I started thinking: what can I actually do from here? What can I create? What can I learn? I watched an embarrassing amount of videos about blogging, affiliate marketing, Pinterest, YouTube, and working from home as a mum. And eventually, I thought: why not Bloom with Mae? So I started (although after some time it turned out to be not as lucrative as advertised, but that is a topic for another time).
And I actually did A LOT
Looking back now, I think this is one of the things I’m most proud of. For about six months, I was incredibly consistent. I created my own schedule and timetable, planned my tasks, and learned about SEO, Pinterest, and affiliate marketing along the way. I wrote blog posts, filmed videos, experimented with my hair, and worked on building the brand, learning things I had absolutely no idea how to do before. And I actually followed the schedule. I didn’t skip a day. Which is probably why stopping felt so strange. And also why I burned out…
I had spent months building this little world for myself, and now it’s just sitting there. I look at the Bloom with Mae social media and think, oh, the missed potential, I missed it.
So what happened?
Well. My eyes started giving me a bit of trouble. I was spending a lot of time in front of screens between blogging, editing, researching, Pinterest, YouTube, and everything else, and I started experiencing digital eye fatigue as well as noticing the pinguecula on both eyes, which honestly took me by surprise. It made me realise that I needed to take better care of myself and rethink how much screen time I was putting into creating.
Then summer arrived. Try getting anything done while being home alone in the middle of nowhere with a toddler on summer holidays… Writing? Difficult. Filming? Difficult. Editing? Absolutely not.
And then there was one other tiny detail. Oh, and somewhere along the way, I found out I’m pregnant with baby number two 😂. The first trimester was hardcore for me. I was exhausted, nauseous, struggling to eat and drink enough, and there were days when I genuinely didn’t feel like I could move. So Bloom with Mae went to the bottom of the list. And honestly? It needed to.
I still feel a little guilty about it
I think part of me kept thinking: but you worked so hard, you were so consistent, why did you just stop? That’s the perfectionist part of my brain talking. But the other part of me knows that I didn’t quit because I stopped caring. I stopped because life got very full. I needed to take care of myself. I needed to be present with my little boy. I needed to get through a difficult first trimester. And I needed to step away from the screen for a while. That is very important.
I’m still dealing with a little bit of the pregnancy nausea and tiredness, but I feel so much better than I did a few months ago. And summer is over. So I’m ready to slowly get back out there.
I’m not coming back perfectly
This is probably the biggest thing I want to change this time. I’m not going to come back and immediately try to recreate the schedule I had before. I’m not going to tell myself that I need to post constantly or that every piece of content needs to be perfect. I want Bloom with Mae to fit into my life, not make my life feel like a list of content deadlines. I want to create because I love creating. And I want to let myself be a beginner again sometimes. Coming back to blogging doesn’t mean recreating the old schedule.
Bloom with Mae is still growing with me
I’ve never really thought of Bloom with Mae as just a curly hair blog. Curly hair was where I started because it’s something I’m genuinely interested in and something I could build content around, but from the beginning, I wanted Bloom with Mae to eventually become a lifestyle space : beauty, hair, routines, creativity, music, things I’m learning, things I’m trying, the little things that make life feel good.
And now, motherhood and pregnancy are naturally part of my life too. I will probably share pieces of that occasionally, because it’s impossible for those things not to influence my everyday life. But I also want to keep some things just for me. And I think that’s an important distinction as Bloom with Mae grows.
So… Welcome back 🌸
I’m not coming back with a perfect plan. I’m coming back slowly. One blog post. One video. One idea at a time. I still have things I never finished sharing, including the final results of my three-month curl experiment, which I actually did finish, I just never published the third update. And yes, I’ve experienced some hair fall and lots of tangles so I have had two major trims since then. I’m very much looking at my hair journey from a different place now.
So I am ready to continue this journey with you. If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you for still being here. And if you’re new to Bloom with Mae, welcome. I’m really glad you’re here 🤍.
