The Journey so far

As the year begins to wind down to a close and we begin embracing the unknowns that will whisk us into a new one, I wanted to take some time to reflect on things I have learned this year.

I'm EmpressTiramisu, and welcome to the Cursed Kiss Café where we like to sit back, grab our favorite snack and let ourselves just be.

 It's been ages since my last blog post, but I promise I haven't forgotten it. This year for me has been a year of many breakthroughs and revelations. While the year is still not out yet, I am sure there is more to come in the remaining two months.

However, this post is not about all the shenanigans in my life. More so I wanted to share what I've learned on my content creation journey. For the longest time I've been struggling to find the stepping stones that would allow me to feel confident in building both a community and platform with it. Mental health  problems aside, though just as important to the conversation, I was struggling with finding my niche, my thing. You know when you hear a particular creator's name, you instantly can relate a particular kind of content to them or their brand? I was looking for that, have been looking for that, for a very long time. 

Everything I tried, felt like it wasn't the right fit. Content creation is a lot of trial and error and I don't think we as content creators document that enough. It doesn't matter what your lane in content creation is, we all struggle at some point to feel like we're having the impact we want. It's easy to celebrate the wins, but it's also just as easy to wallow in the losses and feel like any effort we've made it for naught. 

That is how I was feeling for such a long time. As I described it to my best friend it felt like "I have the plans, the schedule, the passion, the drive but no way of focusing it." In other words I had the structure but no material to fill it with. I was grasping at this phantom and it was making me feel like absolute gutter trash.

I want to say it partially stems from when I first ventured into content creation in the late 2016s. It was at first to fill a hole that another content creator was leaving for the community I was apart of at the time. I and other members began this hot potato of keeping the community going. That then grew into a urge to foster my own community but I was limited by technology and my living situation. As those things improved I found myself getting more and more lost in the storm of content creation.

Not to say I lost sight of what I wanted to do, but I lost my footing in developing a stable path. Since then, I've just been all over the place is this community right? is this game right? can I add anything? All these questions would constantly plague me and I had no one to turn to. No one to share these thoughts with who truly understood the dilemma I was facing. I would spend nights googling advice and reading reddits, watching advice videos from other content creators, but none of them really touched on the journey. 

Every journey is different but there are usually resources you can scour for that could give some kind of insight, and it felt like I just couldn't find it.

At one point I was honestly starting to lose hope and thinking it might be time to hang it up. Even though I was aware that many creators don't get their "big breaks" for a long time, that sometimes they go years before their work is recognized, What's worse is that I believed luck is when preparation meets opportunity. However, how could I prepare for anything when I couldn't stand in anything? How could I expect to build a platform when I wasn't sure what building blocks to use? 

This year has really opened my eyes to taking the plunge and hopping for the best.

I could plan, and plan, and plan until I was blue in the face, but  if I did nothing with those plans what was the point? I couldn't be afraid of everything forever, otherwise I needed to hang it up and hang it up soon.

I don't know why my friends and close ones have so much faith in me but through them I also gained the courage to keep trying different approaches. I knew what I wanted and I knew some of the advice floating around went against that; don't pigeon hold yourself into one game,  work the streets of every social media platform that comes out, do variety, don't do variety, do limited variety, start it as a hobby, don't invest too much into building a brand, build a brand. 

At the end of the day, I had to come to the realistic conclusion every creators journey is so vastly different you'll never know what does and doesn't work for you unless you try it. That was part of my problem, I was too scared to try anything and whatever I did try I needed to be perfect and see results right away or I had failed.

Content creation is a never ending journey with so many twists and turns and sometimes you find out early it's not for you. Other times it takes several years. Still there is always a chance of that break in the clouds where everything aligns and you accelerate to that point you want to be at. 

Anyway, I say all of this to encourage other content creators to document their journey, stop and take stock of where you are at and the progress you have made, make a plan and do your best to follow through with it. Someone, one day, is going to need to know something you've learned or maybe you'll need a reminder of the things you've tried that didn't work and may want to try again.

Do not be afraid to fail, to start over, to keep trying until YOU feel like it's right. 

7 years.

Feels like it took 7 years of trials, tribulations, personal growth, environment change, being afraid, and being on the edge to finally feel like I'm finding my grove, I'm finding my impact and most of all I am finding my happiness and it can only go up from here.