For that Kinda Shy Girl

Hey loves!

I am currently reading Cleo Wade's Heart Talk* (thanks to one of my lovely friends who got me the book as a gift) and this one quote stuck out to me:

Clean out your thoughts -

they have the power to cover

your entire life in dirt.

When I was younger, I was quite shy and I guess it was mostly due to my insecurities and not feeling 'good enough.' Over the years, I have realised that everyone has their insecurities, but most of us try not to talk about them as if that would make them go away. Writing this blog has really helped me to 'clean my thoughts' by simply being honest about my insecurities and the things that did not go well for me. I opened up about the things I used to wish I could change about my body and I made a video about my mental health issues that I experienced earlier in the year:

Since I have become more honest about things that bothered me, I learned to let them go. Weirdly, telling the world about my issues has significantly reduced them. It has given me more confidence because I feel like I can be my honest self with people without having to pretend that there is nothing about me that bothers me. And from all the messages I receive on social media and through my blog, I know that many of us struggle with insecurities and mental health issues. It can be hard to open up about them and I am not here to tell you that the internet will always be the right place to do that - by no means!

I guess it just worked for me because I built a community through this blog since 2015 and this website means a lot to me. I see it as my creative space and I want to be as authentic on here as I can be. My YouTube channel, which I really started to work on once I started studying at Cambridge, has started to be an important thing in my life over the past year and since my channel is mainly focused on my experience as a university student, it felt right to share that I was taking a break from university for mental health reasons on there.

Social media as well as this website used to be places where I tried to be as perfect as I could be, but I have changed my attitude towards this. Instead of trying to be perfect, I have tried to be honest. My Instagram feed may not be as pretty as it would be with false smiles and lots of filters, but it is a much more real representation of who I am and what is going on in my head. I made this change to both my social media and my website with the shy and insecure girl I used to be in mind. What made me so insecure is that I thought no one around me was struggling - no one had any issues or insecurities. But that was not true. And we all know that in the back in our minds, but it is hard to really believe it when no one around us is honest about their struggles.

At this point, I reach a few thousand people a month and I want to be honest with them because I wish someone had been more honest with me when I was younger. I try to create content that I would like my fifteen-year-old self to read. So the next time you click 'post' on your next social media post, think about whether it would help your younger self if it followed your account. There is no need to open up about everything, but there is also no need to fabricate a fake reality.

If you would like to contact me, you can send me a message here.

Lots of Love,

Elena

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