Hello!

As per everything at the moment, I’m a little bit late to this, but September 2024 marks 10 whole years since I started this little blog! It all came about because I was looking to study journalism at university and every course I spoke to said that applicants should be writing a blog, so my YouTube channel name extended to a website and 10 years later, I’m still here!

It wasn’t until the following January when I started a project where I wrote a blog post every single day for a year (in a year where I took my final A Level exams, went away for four weeks on a trip to Ecuador and then started university) that I was properly bitten by the blogging bug but bitten I was!

So much has changed in those 10 years – I finished school, moved across the country to uni, met the man who is now my husband, finished my undergrad degree, moved home for a year, learned to drive, moved out again, started a masters which I finished in the height of lockdown, moved again, got engaged, got married and most recently, got a date for my autism assessment because apparently I’ve been neurodivergent this whole time! It’s been a rollercoaster, with all the ups and downs that come with life, but it’s wild to think about the nearly-18 year old I was when I started writing and sharing compared to the woman I am now.

Lots of big things are changing at the moment – after getting all my academic qualifications, I’m taking a total change and exploring options that would see me going back into education at least a little bit to get some additional qualifications and I’m seriously considering exploring my entrepreneurial side and starting my own business.

But more important than the way in which I earn money to pay bills, I really feel like I’ve grown at a person – I don’t think I’ve changed that much, at my core I think I’m still very recognisable but I’ve definitely expanded. Realising I’m autistic has changed my relationship with my brain and given me the space to be more understanding of my differences and how they can be strengths. Finding someone who enjoys life at a similar pace to me makes me feel better about not necessarily doing all the things I see other people my age doing on Instagram.

And of course, I’ve rediscovered my love for books – I was the child that snuck out of bed to stay up late reading, the teenager who grew up with developing social media and opted for watching YouTube before bed rather than reading, but in 2019 I set myself a reading goal of finishing one book per month and after only managing 9 of 12 books, 2020 was the year I tripled the number of books I was reading and firmly cemented books as one of my special interests and here I am five years later having read literally hundreds more books (I didn’t think it would be literal, but I’m pleasantly surprised it is!).

I’ve published over 1000 posts (ironically, a third of them were in that first year!), I feel I’ve really honed my personal style and after years of deliberately not narrowing myself to a niche, I now almost exclusively write about books, reading and journalling. Blogs are definitely less common than they were when I started writing mine – I can’t imagine any journalism professors telling their prospective students that they should be blogging, they’re probably encouraging them to make TikToks or write headlines on Twitter, but I love reading people’s thoughts. I love reading book reviews and lifestyle blogs, particularly the ones with a focus on sharing an organic experience of being in your late 20s/early 30s and all the feelings that come with being on different paths to others and trying not to feel inadequate.

There’s so much of myself at 17 that I’m proud of, there’s so much I pity her for because she shouldn’t have had to go through it, there’s so much I’m glad she gets to experience and so much I wish she could forgive herself for, but if there’s anything I’ve learnt in 10 years of blogging is that I’m not done growing at 28 and arguably, I don’t want to ever be done growing. I want to keep developing and learning, trying new things (within reason), meeting new people (in specific circumstances) and accepting that I can change and still be me.

10 years is a long time. It’s a lot of blog posts. But I’ll be here for a little while longer yet!

Thank you so much for reading,

Sophie xx