From 14 to 31: My Journey into the Blogging World!

I've been wanting to run a blog since I was in middle school, back in 2006/2007. I was taking a computer class in 8th grade, and we had to learn how to learn about HTML, that was considered basic knowledge for some reason: starting a website or the basics of starting one. I got really interested. My dad introduced me to a computer engineer, Marvin, who was working with him at the time. Marvin introduced me to BlogSpot and Hubspot, told me that was a way for me to start writing and eventually possibly earn income. He explained to me what a blog is and what people do. I was about 14 or 15 years old at the time.

The thought of having a blog stuck with me. I didn't do anything about it though till I had graduated from college in 2015. In 2016, I decided to do it. By that time, I had reconnected with a friend from high school who had apparently studied computer science. The timing couldn't be more right. He was kind enough to sit through a video call with me for hours, walking me through the steps of starting my own website using WordPress. He taught me everything I needed to know about starting a website, and I'm forever grateful for that -- I started 5 more sites (this being the 6th) after that.

Anyways, so after completing the site with my old friend. I started blogging. I took it wayyy too seriously though. I tried to make it perfect. I would write essays like I did in university, edit them, take photos (so that I wouldn't use anything that wasn't mine, because I'm an artist and felt ashamed for not using my own art), I would maintain the website, run 5 or 6 different social media accounts on all platforms to promote my blog, and it drained me. This went on for 3 months, where I wouldn't sleep just researching, writing, editing, and posting on social media daily and on my blog twice a week. I stopped it eventually. Although I received a lot of positive feedback in such a short amount of time. The blog was about 4 main topics: Relationships, Parenting, Work/Management, and Self-Development. Encompassing the 4 main areas of our lives (family, work, love, and self).

I decided I would continue once I got married, because I had recently gotten engaged at the time and knew I had busy times ahead. However, once I got married, a lot changed. I started working, I was married (obviously), was living away from my family, and reacquainting with the city of Dubai and the UAE in general after having left just a couple of years before, post graduation in 2015.

Marriage alone was not what I expected. I had learned and researched so much about relationships, I felt like I knew everything there is to know about the subject. However, my efforts in my marriage were not working as I expected. I realised that no matter how much I knew about relationships, it is useless if the other person did not implement or want to work on the relationship as well. Basically it needed to be reciprocated, the effort needed to come from both sides. It sounds simple, but I only came to this conclusion a couple of years into the marriage. I didn't pick up writing again as I felt confused and lost as to why my efforts were not working and what was going wrong. I thought I just didn't know what I was doing or that I wasn't putting enough effort, or that I was doing something wrong all the time as there was no reception to my efforts from my partner.

-- I will go into more detail on relationships and my experience in other posts that will be more focused on the subject. --

Work was also not what I expected, everything I knew about management just went out the window when every manager I had seemed to know nothing about the role they were in. No managerial training was ever given to managers and I say this confidently after working in 6 different companies (by choice). The managerial level of all companies needs to be reassessed and people need to be promoted along with a training to teach them how a managerial title comes with a lot more (human-skilled) responsibility and not just an increase in pay and less technical work. More about this in other focused posts...

I thought about doing videos along the way, and the thought of wanting to spread my ideas and experiences never left my mind. The more I went through, the more I wanted to speak and express, and the less I felt I could from the insensity of the circumstances and situations I was going through. I had friends and coworkers along the way to whom I've expressed this to. However, I never had the courage to speak as I felt that it would expose whatever I was going through which already made no sense to me at the time.

So you can understand why this would deter me from writing. Five years went by, seven years from the time I started my first blog, and now I feel much more confident about sharing my experiences. Now I am coming from a place where I genuinely feel like I understand myself and my life more... a least way more than I did when I started my first blog. So I picked up my laptop on December 10, 2023, and decided "It's time".