Welcome to my blogoversary celebration! For the next ELEVEN days, I’ll be sharing guest posts with a huge giveaway on the last day after a post shared by me. Keep track of all the posts in order to enter the huge giveaway at the end!
Today, we have Rachel from As Told by Rachel sharing how blogging has changed her life!
First off, I want to say HAPPY BLOGOVERSARY SHELLY!!! If you didn’t already know, Shelly is pretty awesome. I haven’t known her that long, but she is by far one of the most intelligent and fun young adults I know. I’m really happy that we’ve gotten to know each other these last few months, and I’m honored that she invited me on her blog.
How did blogging change my life? This is a difficult question for me to answer. I can’t even begin to imagine what my life would be like had I not began blogging almost two years ago. When I first started blogging, I had no clue what the hell I was doing. My blog was mainly for my IRL friends. I was always the girl people came to for recommendations and I was happy to share my favorite books with people, but there was one problem. I have an absolutely terrible memory when it comes to books. As soon as I’m done reading, I pretty much forget the entire plot, characters, everything in a day. So I had the idea to start a blog so that they could just read my thoughts and I wouldn’t have to struggle to remember what I read. About a month or two in, I was surprised to learn that other people blogged as well! I can’t remember much about that first year of blogging, but I do know that from the time I became involved in the book blogging community, my life changed drastically.
A very large majority of my friends are from the blogging community. I’ve been lucky enough to meet many of these people in real life and some of them have become my closest friends. My social circle, both in real life, and online would be ENTIRELY different if I didn’t blog. The same goes for what I do on a daily basis. I probably wouldn’t go to book events, I wouldn’t read as much as much as I do, and I can almost assure you I wouldn’t be reading YA (I’m not saying I don’t like YA because I obviously do, I just know myself and before blogging, I was not reading YA). My life would be different in every single way if I hadn’t become a blogger.
But there are also the little ways in which blogging has changed my life. Blogging helped me find my voice and become a better writer. I just graduated with a degree in media studies. The short explanation of what that means is I’ve studied how to critique the media and examine it in different ways. My absolute dream job is to one day write cultural analysis pieces for a national online news site, like the NYT or Salon. Basically, I like writing. The pieces I wrote for school were much more technical and academic than my book reviews are, but at the core, reviewing a book and critiquing a media text are pretty similar. Blogging is a safe space for me to refine my voice or experiment with a different type of writing. I’ve always been a writer in the “I used to write critical essays for fun” sense, and through blogging I can do what I enjoy and share it with other people!
I could honestly go on and on about how blogging has changed my life, but I think you get the picture. Without blogging, I would not be the girl I am today, and I quite like who I am. 🙂
Wow, this post was just so awesome! I’m glad to see that blogging has changed so many lives but for the better. Also, I really need to give Rachel a hug now. Tune in tomorrow for another guest post!
