Maybe You’ve Missed Me

Susie — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 17:18:24 +0000

Hello to my lovely readers,

This post is going to be more personal than usual, so if that isn’t your thing, feel free to click away and read some tutorials. I’ll even link to some of my favorites to make it easier for you:

DIY Green Tea Scrub
Homemade Glass Cleaner
Kitchen Organization
DIY Halloween Boo Shirt (it may be December, but I wore it just the other day)

All right- if you’re sticking with me, here goes.

I miss you! It’s been a long time since I’ve been posting regularly on the blog.

I usually try to stick to my main topics on the blog (green cleaning, natural beauty, crafts, and organization), but for some reason I’ve been having trouble finding inspiration within those categories. I still love and am passionate about them, and I’ve been doing lots of projects in the interim, but I haven’t been posting about them. And so I’ve been contemplating why that is.

For bloggers, there’s a lot of difficulty in separating your personal life from your professional life. The lines can get really blurry. I’ve had a hard time trying to find where the line should go. I could post all the time about every detail in my life, but then when would I actually live it?

At the same time, there is a desire to present a curated picture. You want to show off only the best parts of your life. So you find yourself living your life like it’s a performance. Sure, my blog is about me, but it’s about the version of me that I show to you. I feel like in trying to create the best me to present on the blog I’ve lost the inspiration that I have to write. I’ve been lost between the desire to live my life fully without stepping back to take pictures all the time and wanting to show off the best of me and my family, and it’s left me feeling like nothing I write is right.

And there’s also another reason that I haven’t been posting often on the blog, and that is my health. You’ve probably noticed that I write about living with a chronic illness from time to time, and that’s because it’s a very big part of my life. I live with an illness called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or POTS. Basically my autonomic nervous system has a mind of it’s own and likes to do silly things like make my heart beat way too fast or make me feel like I’ve run a marathon when I walk to the kitchen. In addition I also get migraines, which can really knock me out.

Living with a chronic illness can be very unpredictable, and I go through good and bad phases. And I’ve been having a rough go of it for a while now. We’ve had crazy weather this year, which definitely exacerbates my symptoms, but sometimes I just have times when for whatever reason my symptoms are worse than usual. Some days I can wake up and feel relatively like a normal functioning human being, but some days I wake up and can barely get out of bed. And lately I’ve been having more of the bad days than good. I seem to be on the upswing now, but it hasn’t been a great time.

I’ve made my peace with my illness but I’ve never gotten good at talking about it. Writing about it on the blog definitely helps with me learning to communicate about my illness, but I try not to talk about it unless I have to.

Sometimes I feel like two people- one who is optimistic and energetic and loves going out and doing things, and one who just wants to stay home and take a nap. And honestly, I think that is something that most people can relate to, whether or not they have a chronic illness. We all try to present our best selves to the world, but we’re not our best selves all the time.

Lots of bloggers will tell you that there is a lot of pressure to present your best self on the blog. The less I feel like my best self, the less I feel like I can share my projects with people.

So, enough of that. I’m me, and I’m not always my best. I’m going to be getting back into blogging, and I’m going to share the things that inspire me.

I hope that you’ll like what I decide to write about now, and I’m going to try to be even more true to myself and my passions. And I’m excited!

Lots of love from your fellow procrastinator,

Susie

The post Maybe You’ve Missed Me appeared first on Pins and Procrastination.

How to Hone your Pinterest Home Feed

Susie — Tue, 17 May 2016 12:13:57 +0000

You may have been a bit frustrated with the Pinterest smart feed update this year… I know I was! Especially in my home feed. Instead of new and interesting content, I was feeling like I kept seeing the same pins over and over. I stopped using my home feed altogether! Until a few days ago when I had a realization that completely changed my home feed for the better.

You probably follow a lot of pinners on Pinterest. I know I do. Since the smart feed update, I haven’t been seeing the pins of people I follow as often. It took me a while to figure it out, but I realized that the Pinterest smart feed now favors “topics” more than people.

So just what are topics? They aren’t always easy to find. If you go to your profile, and click following, you’ll see the topics that you follow. The topics can range from the general, like DIY & Crafts, to the specific, like Recycled Paper Crafts. Each topic has its own feed of relevant pins.

So I figured that instead of following people, I should follow more topics. That’s how to get more pins that are relevant to my interests in my home feed again. And let me tell you- it worked!

I knew I had followed a few basic topics already, but not very many. I tried to find more interesting topics, but I was having trouble finding Pinterest topics that were relevant to me. There isn’t a topic search feature on Pinterest. You just have to go through each category clicking on “related topics” that are close to what you like or refreshing to see what other related topics are there. There isn’t as much variety as I had hoped, but I kept searching.

This trial and error searching and refreshing took up a LOT of time, but I did it anyways…

And now I love my home feed again! All it came down to was digging for the right topics to follow. Pinterest didn’t make this easy, but I want it to be easy for you.

So, because I love my fellow bloggers so much- I decided to list out the most relevant topics for DIY/ Craft/ Homemade bloggers! Now you don’t have to do all the digging that I did. Until Pinterest makes it easier to search for topics, this is a great resource for what Pinterest topics you might want to follow.

To follow any of the Pinterest topics below, just click the big red follow button on the page that opens. And then pins relevant to those topics will start to show up in your home feed!

All right, here are the topics:

DIY

Crafts

Homemaking/ Cleaning

DIY Beauty

Organization

Decor

And this is just the very beginning of topics! This is where Pinterest is going in the future. I’m always updating what topics I follow, and my home feed is so much better for it now.

If you want to see what other Pinterest topics I follow, you can check those out here.

Good luck pinning!

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