A Very Honest Update….

It was July when I last blogged here. Life has been lifein’. I don’t want to go into too much detail but life has been so full on the last few years but this year especially. Something had to give and after a big move and my attention being taken towards family matters my photography business was suffering and I had to channel my energy where I had the most immediate earning potential but also just where it was right to channel my time for that particular moment in time.

Running an Instagram account for this blog comes with a lot of emotional load as well as the actual work making the content and running it. The guilt and forcing of ideas all of the time was eating into my mental health and I had to take the decision to pause that account and instead use that time to keep consistent here on the blog instead. This post is the start of that. But it’s not just been the workload, there’s been lots of factors in play.

Life got overwhelming.

Most of you know my Mum has Alzheimer’s. It was the main reason for moving back to the Midlands after being away for over 25 years. I don’t want to go into it but while I really love where I have moved to moving back up here has come with some big emotional challenges. But also, after putting so much work into my finances to hug the house and get out of debt I found myself tumbling back into a place with finances that felt scary and unstable. For so many reasons, including the house renovation, I had taken my foot off the gas with my photography business and it got to a pretty critical point where something had to change.

I had to channel my time.

For the reasons above, I needed to simplify my income streams and work out where my time was best spent. After a lot of thought I came to the conclusion that focusing on my photography business to stabilise the income was less risky than making this platform full time. I really love both my photography business and this blog but I just couldn't feel confident enough to call this a business yet - while I am making a little bit of money through some affiliate links it’s not enough to cover bills.

I had completely underestimated how long it would take to get established in a new place and had taken for granted how much of a network I had in Brighton. I’m not going to lie, it’s been testing in many ways including finding my self worth again but after some soul searching I found a way forward then managed to put an effective marketing plan in place. This means now things are rolling again I can take a breath and start picking this platform up again.

Some big life stuff has happened.

For most of this year I’ve been going through the assessment process to be a foster carer. It’s something I’ve very much wanted to do since 2019 after having a chat with someone who was fostering. I’m very happy that I’ve been approved and am moving into the placement stage but it’s been a hugely time consuming process and one that needed my attention and dedicated time to reflect and digest.

As I mentioned above, life with a loved one with Alzheimer’s is full on, emotionally and logistically. I’ve had to give myself some grace on processing this year and started therapy which has been hugely helpful but calls me to do a lot of reflection.

My outlook has shifted.

When I first moved in to the house I was following interior accounts and pinning like mad. But with so much going on these past few years I found that all the magazine worthy interior content was starting to jar - which was a condundrum being as I was working on interior photography projects at the time. Some 3-4 months ago I made the decision to remove interior shoots from my portfolio and as soon as I did that I started to see why I was struggling with The Humble Home so much - I no longer wanted a magazine worthy home. I wanted something different - a home that was tailored to my needs and if your home is always trying to live up to a magazine standard you’ll constantly be fighting a losing battle to keep it looking like that - by letting go of the minimal and choosing to go for lived in I know my home will be much more welcoming for foster placements. I’ve always been mindful of creating spaces to support the life I want to live this was different and I actually set about removing some of the aesthetic from my home and items I had bought because that’s what was trending on Instagram or Pinterest. In the past few weeks I’ve had a reshuffle and while it may not look as beautiful in photos my house feel sooooooo much nicer to me and the people who visit - the trendy vases have been replaced with my Nan’s brass herons, the watercolours that are beautiful but bought because that’s what everyone else is doing have been replaced with gig tickets and less aesthetic but more loved photos. The minimal space is now being filled with an abundance of plants and I can still have a home that feels lovely and calm that I can still photograph in for work but that is true to me.

And so then scrolling through feeds I was following on The Humble Home’s Instagram account felt a world away from how I was feeling. Because if there is anything the last few years has taught me is there is so much more to life than ploughing all your money into a house looking like a Pinterest board. The little money I’ve had I’ve wanted to better myself and help others. I just don’t want to be seeing endless consumerism or pressures to have the latest thing, I want to be happy with my lot and not always exposed to comparison and pressure around material things.

I simply couldn't run two Instagram accounts.

We all know Instagram has changed. It is a beast. And to make an account worth having for any business venture means a lot of planning, work and time. I simply couldn’t do it for two accounts. My photography account has 6.5k followers and the hope is that in the next few years my portrait photography business is running itself enough that I can start to move the account into a catch all account for my life - my photography work, my photography art, The Humble Home and my life in Derbyshire. So I made the decision to pause the account for The Humble Home and instead focus on this blog for The Humble Home. This decision alone reclaims over 6 hours a week which is huge. I’m now posting updates for this blog on my broadcast channel.

I also started doing the social media for my local community benefit society (which includes my local woodland and community garden) and I love it! And find myself filming and capturing content for that and there’s only so many hours for capturing content each week.

I’m feeling liberated by not having to worry about the Instagram account. It means I have had more time to think about what I want to post on here, I’m back and raring to go!