It’s the month of Awakening on the blog, and I’ve explored quite a few topics as the seasons begin to change.

I thought it was about time I let myself be a bit more vulnerable on my blog by talking a bit more about my personal motivations in a clearer way.

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Vulnerability isn’t something that comes easily to me, and it’s becoming apparent that this is a bit of a problem. My social media accounts – outside of my personal ones – are largely faceless and somewhat anonymous.

I think this is a remnant of my years as a teacher, where my life wasn’t fully my own and I was limited to my online presence lest I annoy parents or overly influence children. So the privacy of my accounts and the censoring of my thoughts and opinions has been part and parcel of that for the past few years and the habit has kind of stuck.

However, when I sit back and reflect on how I built any relationships as a teacher, part of that did involve letting my students know little bits about my life. Not my opinions, as that’s considered unethical to have undue influence over them, but I’d certainly share personal experiences when pertinent to the lesson of the day.

It is something I try to emulate on my blog and through the social media posts I make, but I think because I do this with words and images instead of actually through using my face it can make me a little harder to relate to. When the work I do is centred around personal changes and building community, I guess that feels a little off.

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When I was younger, I posted to the internet without a care in the world. My profiles were public, my online journals were brutal and scathing and didn’t censor names, my face was everywhere, I added random people on my personal accounts and would chat to anyone and everyone. Gradually, for a variety of reasons, I became a more private person.

I think part of this was because I started to rely less on the validation of other people in my personal life. I didn’t need random people to compliment my appearance. I’m a fan of that side of it.

But at the same time – rather paradoxically – this privacy also stems from being scared of the opinion of others sometimes. I’ve talked a lot about creativity on the blog and embracing being “bad” at art, but I haven’t always felt comfortable sharing my work to people I actually know. Perhaps it’s because I started placing too much of my value around my vocation rather than my appearance.

I think this is always going to be a problem when you work in creative, spiritual, and wellness spheres. As I mentioned a few posts ago, in a business class I was told the word ‘witchcraft’ would drive people away from my work. I know this is because of a misunderstanding that those people would have of the word, but I chose to rebrand anyway for simplicity and to stick to ‘spirituality’. I’m sure lots of people I know scoff at the things I post because they don’t believe in any of it, and that really used to bother me.

I used to get myself pressed about whether people would think I was faking, posing, that I was aa charlatan or snake oil salesman. Perhaps some would think I don’t have qualifications or enough experience or talent to be doing the work that I do. Perhaps they’d look at how slow the social media side of things seems to be going, or feel second-hand embarrassment over my work.

You know what? They probably do. But it’s not really any of my business what other people think, and chances are I don’t actually care about the people who do think these things. I know about my intentions in creating this space, and I believe that the work I’m trying to do – the career I’m trying to build – is something worth doing.

I’ve started sharing my work to my personal profile and I’ve actually been receiving some really positive feedback. It’s not quite where I want it to be yet, but I think I needed to just take that leap and be more open about it to stay motivated. I know there’s a risk that I may be existing in an echo chamber of people who want to compliment me rather than to keep me realistic, but there’s at least something that pushes me to continue on after the work I’ve poured into it.

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There isn’t really any actionable advice in this post, I just thought it might be helpful for at least one person out there to read about my own self-doubt and feel ready to cast their own aside.

I hope you’re all enjoying this beautiful start to springtime and that you, too, feel full of hope, inspiration, and action because of it.