2019 saw me rejecting more sponsorships than accepting them. I'm not sure if anyone noticed the change in my posting habits, but I've stopped posting as frequently as I did and stopped updating my blog as much. Admittedly, I hit a plateau. I started blogging at the tender age of 8, which essentially means I spent more years living my life online than I have not. I have more than witnessed the growth of social media — I was part of it. And now I'm surfeited with it.

A visual representation of how I looked when I first started blogging

Maybe I detest that my number of followers is the first thing people comment on. Maybe I hate the stereotypes that come with being an influencer — contrary to popular belief, I am neither vain nor good in front of the camera. Maybe I loathe being defined by a number.

No, I'm not an influencer. Never aimed to be one either. After all, I started blogging in 2004. Social media was hardly a thing then, much less the idea of earning a living via social media. It's even more hilarious when you realise that I only started a blog to list the names of my good friends then, and updated only when I wanted to remove those names that have fallen from grace LOLOL.

Over the years, I have written about everything from what I ate during recess to my thoughts on deeper topics like why we shouldn't romanticise teenage suicide. I was 16 when I received my first paycheck from social media advertising and started being financially independent.

I’m lucky that social media is no longer my sole source of income now that I have a full-time job, and that I had the foresight to not sign a binding contract with any company. I get the freedom to choose my clients and work with brands I’d truly endorse to my friends. More importantly, I can finally stop feeling the pressure to grow my followers and appeal to the mass public with brainless sunshine quotes on ~living life to the fullest~

Trust me when I say I haven’t grown any less opinionated. But... Things changed, I guess. I stopped being wilful and self-centred, I became more sensitive to other people’s feelings and, much to my own surprise, I grew reclusive. While social media used to be an outlet of expression for me, I find myself censoring my thoughts and softening my words so I don’t unintentionally hurt the feelings of anyone now. Throughout university, I always maintained and argued that self-censorship destructs creativity. Now I see that happening to me. It’s taxing — onerous, even — to keep backspacing and replacing my thoughts, so I end up not writing at all.

But more than anything else, I also learnt to live my life offline. I put away my phone when I'm with my friends. I stopped hunting for Instagrammable spots when I travel, stopped wondering if my readers would like a particular place, stopped worrying about how I write about a certain experience on my blog.

It’s a serious dilemma. While I don’t want to share every bit of my life online and live for my blog anymore, writing has always been my escapism. It was all I ever knew of as a young girl, and my love for writing has brought me to places I never once imagined.

I don't know how things would go from here, but I do hope that when I eventually write again, I can revert (yes guys, that’s how you use REVERT) to the proverbial good old days of writing for myself instead of worrying about SEO.