My Struggles and Insecurities About Sharing My Love of Beauty and Fashion

When I started this blog in 2017, I was not a novice to blogging. I have another blog, found here, I had since 2011 that focuses on my art, sewing, knitting, and photography. Even though I love talking about my art, crafts, and photography, I always had an interest and love of beauty and fashion. The problem is I have insecurities about talking openly about it, especially on a blog.

Social media is a place for anyone to be whoever they want to be. Back in high school, fellow classmates would use Myspace (Remember it?) to connect with people all over the world… and pretend to be someone else. I knew of one girl I used to know that created different Myspace profiles just to participate in roll playing games online. Even though she believed there wasn’t anything wrong with it, doing this never made sense to me and I never wanted to do anything online except talk about stuff I was interested in.

As grew older, I saw the problems with having an alter ego online. They needed to keep the image of their alter ego going, so they would go to great lengths to look good on social media. Nothing was as it seemed to be on their profiles and they would go to great lengths to hide themselves.

I’m guilty of being mistaken by others as hiding myself though an alter ego online, but, to me, there is a huge difference between having an alter ego and being misjudged because the whole truth is not available at the time of the post. I try my best to be as honest online without airing my problems online. God knows I had so many problems I could vent about in detail on social media, but didn’t because my problems involved multiple people and I didn’t want to talk about certain people on social media openly without their consent. For many years I treaded a fine line between talking about my private life and what I feel comfortable talking about on social media, with many people I believed to be my friends claiming that I was putting out an alter ego online and completely ignoring the fact that I would be completely open in person, if only they would hang out with me or call me on the phone.

After a years long cyber bulling problem with the way my former friends believed me to be online versus in real life, my confidence in talking openly online was shaken. In fact, my confidence was so shaken that I decided to micro manage what I talk about online. Because of this, I became withdrawn from my social media sites and my then only blog. I hated not posting because I enjoyed talking openly about the topics that I talked about on them, but I was so spooked by what happened to me that I didn’t want to risk trying to speak openly about anything online out of fear I would get judged harshly or be at the receiving end of a new, revived cyber bulling campaign by my ex-friends.

But things changed in 2017. 2016 was a tough year for me because, in addition to a death in the family and other personal problems, the cyber bulling climaxed to the worst I ever experienced (Including high school) but things calmed down enough by the end of 2016 that in 2017 I began to rebuild my confidence and courage to be myself on social media.

One of my friends suggested that I start a fashion, travel, and lifestyle blog. He believed I could be a great blogger beyond my art blog and, since I was so interested in fashion and knew many lifestyle tricks that I could talk about online, I could use this blog as an outlet to conquer my fear of talking more openly about myself online. So, The Estella Initiative (A combination of one of my nicknames, Estella, and a quote taken from the 2012 movie Marvel’s Avengers) was born.

I need to admit, I’m still very nervous about posing my thoughts an opinions, but as I’ve grown more confident in what I talk about on this blog, I became more confident about my art blog and other social media profiles, including YouTube. Sometimes it is a struggle, but it is getting easier, and I’m happy about it.

The more I push towards opening up about myself, the more I know I’m becoming more and more the person I am meant to be. And by sharing my knowledge and experience in life, beauty, or some other way, I know I am helping others by teaching them something they did not know. I know I will never be able to share everything that is happening in my life or convince everyone about how honest I am, but I do know that I am so happy that I feel so much more confident about who I am and that the cyber bulling I used to experience years ago will never stop me from being me ever again.

That’s all for now! I hope you feel inspired and enlightened about my struggles and how I tried to overcome them. I know I didn’t go into a lot of details about how I overcame my insecurities about running this blog, but I hope anyone who feels insecure in talking about something they love online finds the confidence to talk about it online.

Thank you for reading!