Here’s what 2 years of blogging has taught me about balance

2 years of blogging!

Today marks the day officially when, two years ago, I started this blogging journey. If you have been following the blog since the beginning, you might have read blog posts about traveling, personal development, lifestyle tips, student tips, bucket lists, and much more. Because here is the best thing about blogging: you can write about pretty much everything!

In the past two years, blogging has become my safe place to write about my feelings, lessons I’ve learned about life as a twenty-something, and ways to express my creativity and share it with the world.

For the past weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what this blogging journey has taught me. It sure taught me a lot about website building, meta stuff, SEO stuff, and other nerve-racking computer stuff. However, I wanted to seize something I struggled with and learned from blogging that can also be transferred as a life lesson. So as I was sitting in the bus for my day-to-day commute to school and wondering what my next post should be about, I thought about balance.

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What I have learned about balance with 2 years of blogging is that balance is not something steady. Pretty ironic, isn’t it?

What I have learned is that balance is a feeling. Balance is not something that can be calculated; there is no equation. However, if there is one thing that we can calculate about balance are the outcome we grasp from the different sphere of our lives.

The outcome of our work activities (whether money, accomplishments, or feeling of usefulness), the outcome of our studies, the outcome of our side hustles, the outcome of our passions, the outcome of our active time on our well-being. Each sphere of our life has its own value and, therefore, its own weight that we put on our scale.

By measuring the outcome of the different spheres of our life, we are faced with two interrogations:

1- Am I happy with each sphere’s weight in my life?

2- If not, can I change the form of a specific aspect of my life to find a better balance? Am I using the most effective way to create the outcome I wish for?

For example, I’ve been learning Spanish for a few years already. I was trying to learn by myself, whether with applications, websites, or books. I had a hard time finding a balance between my different activities and my goal to learn Spanish. Also, even if I put some time into my schedule to practice, I wasn’t happy with my progression. So I decided to change the form of this activity to find a better balance and outcome. I took some lessons with an actual teacher. I progressed way faster, and it took less time in my schedule, allowing me to find a better balance.

This is a personal example, but the same situation and questioning can be applied to a different sphere of your life. Maybe you are not happy with the outcome of your work activities, let’s say. Is there a way you can work on the form that takes this sphere of your life to find a better balance, grasp a better outcome, and make time for other things you value? 

Like weights we put at the two ends of a scale, balance is found with a trial-and-error process. By adjusting the form that takes each of our activities, we create the best outcome we can grasp from each of them and, therefore, find the right balance.

Remember when I said balance is not something steady? Well, what I have learned is that life isn’t too. While I was off the school benches for eight months, I had a lot of time for blogging, traveling, wandering, and, therefore, writing more content. In this particular period of my life, I increased the weight of blogging on my scale. Now that I am back in school, I had to reduce it back.

Balance is shapeable, and blogging has taught me that trying to keep the same balance for every sphere of my life, even when life changes, is like walking against the wind.

Finally, as a blogger and being out there in the social media world, another challenge I faced that links to balance is the constant pressure to create new content and publish more often. However, when I look at everything created in the past two years with Simplement Juliette, I no longer worry.

In 2 years…

• 51 blog posts have been written.
• A new bilingual collaboration with the writer Blanche has started, which I would have never thought would happen a few months ago.
• The blog has reached 45 countries, which means the world to me.

So if you are a student or a worker trying to build something on the side, keep going! We never have as much time as we would want to in a day, but there is one thing that stays, and this is passion.

Passion takes you a long way, and remaining authentic in what you do is the best measure of success.

Thank you for reading me during these past two years. I can’t wait to see what the next year will bring.

À bientôt!

Juliette