10 Years of Blogging

I realized recently that it’s been 10 years since I started this blog. A decade of blogging. It’s insane. I couldn’t help but reflect that this blog changed the entire trajectory of my life, in so many ways.

First and foremost, I want to say thank you to anyone reading this, especially those who have been following me through all the twists and turns since it began. I am so grateful to you. It’s been a wild ride but it never would have happened without your support.

Secondly, fair warning, this is a long and meandering post. It’s a lot of my own reflections as I think about how something so simple, starting a blog, became so much bigger, and how I’ve related to it over the years. I also felt the need to explain why I stopped.

The media landscape has changed so drastically in the past 10 years and it’s been fascinating to try to keep up. It’s also been very hard. I think people are realizing more and more how much work goes into blogging/influencing/etc. When I began, almost every conversation trying to get sponsorship was an uphill battle. It’s a huge commitment, a full-time job, and many of the biggest influencers have whole teams behind them making it work. I’ve never had a team and never really intended to, but that means I wear all the hats. I write the posts, edit the photos, reply to the comments, send the emails, film the videos, network with the PR people, come up with the ideas, create all the strategy. When I didn’t know how to write a pitch email, I had to learn. When I didn’t know how to read metrics, I taught myself as I went. I’m sure there are many opportunities I missed and mistakes that I made because I had no idea what I was doing.

That’s the thing with freelancing or entrepreneurship. Sometimes it’s so much fun and you have so much freedom to do what you want. And sometimes, most of the time, it’s confusing and frustrating and you just want to give up. And with blogging, when your whole life becomes the brand, there’s never a break. You don’t clock out on the weekends. It never stops. It’s rewarding and exhausting and sometimes, despite your best efforts and years spent building it, it just doesn’t work.

Regardless, I’m proud of what I built and can’t quite let go of it yet…

HOW IT BEGAN

When I began the site, I was fresh out of high school, 18 years old, just moved to the big city for college. I felt completely out of place and awkward in my preppy Florida-girl clothes as I attended artsy photography classes at Tisch where I was very much the odd one out and knew it. It’s a shitty feeling to be the odd one out in a group of odd ones out like art school kids. I was convinced that everyone hated me. I’m still not convinced that they didn’t. Art school deeply injured my love of photography, something I’d been passionate about my whole life. Rather than inspired, I was being judged. I was being told explicitly and implicitly that I wasn’t any good at what I loved. I floundered.

I was deeply, deeply depressed. I mean, I’d always been. But the circumstances made it that much worse. I cried myself to sleep most nights, gulping down sleeping pills through sobs in my tiny dorm room bed so I’d get some semblance of rest before classes the next day.

I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

I don’t entirely remember when I decided to start a blog. I know I was obsessed with Carly the Prepster and The Atlantic Pacific. I was also a huge Tumblr girlie and idolized the cool images I reblogged there. I saw an ad for Squarespace on the subway one day with a discount code and I started playing around with a website.

If I couldn’t fit in in my real world, I figured, maybe I’d fit in online. And instead of conforming to trends like the cool girls I actually wanted to be, I’d double down on this “preppy” thing. Cutesy blonde Barbie girl in the harsh gray city. It had a certain spirit to it, I have to admit.

And that’s what I did. It was a lot of work but it was mine. It was a creative outlet not dictated by the whims of sexist professors and angsty students. There was no pressure, really, not at first.

I would go out with my friend Lena, a fellow Photography major, and we’d shoot some cute photos of an outfit in a park somewhere. We were both from the same hometown in Florida and had attended Tisch’s photography high school summer camp together the year before. I could not have started this blog without Lena’s help and though I know I annoyed the hell out of her sometimes, I’m very thankful for how much she put up with me. She’d take the photos, I’d edit them, and we’d both brainstorm ideas for the next shoot.

Any sense of style I had was dictated largely by brands like J.Crew and Lilly Pulitzer, which I thought were pretty much the most fabulous to exist. I’d grown up in Southwest Florida, after all. At some point in high school following a “scene” phase and a “hipster” phase, I entered a “preppy” phase and stuck with it.

I thought long and hard about the name. I’ve always loved a pun or wordplay, so I looked for something to tack onto my nickname, Em. At some point I’d had a social handle under “em_inent” because I thought that just sounded so cool. I would Google first a list of words starting in “em” then plug those words in and google “idioms with…” whatever the word was. So hmm, I pondered, eminent, empire, empress, emerge… Empire of Style? Wait, I was living in the Empire State… Oh my god. Empire Style of Mind! Brilliant! I’m honestly still quite proud of the name, not gonna lie.

As college sucked, as I was bullied in my sorority and my high school boyfriend broke my heart, as I turned to sorority life and drinking too much at bougie NYC nightclubs, I willfully built myself the persona of the bubbly preppy sorority girl from the south. It was like a mask, I think, looking back. As if I realized no one was taking me seriously so I might as well appear unserious. And it was fun, honestly. I basked in the surprise when people would get to know me and realize I wasn’t like my shallow appearance announced me to be.

I was salutatorian of my high school class, after all, and a formidable member of our then nationally-ranked 4th in the country Model United Nations team. I was actually a total nerd who knew more about the political structures in Iran and international environmental law than the fashion industry. Though I’ve always been deeply creative and love art, I struggled with which side of my personality to pursue. Somehow every decision at that point feels final, like you’ll be locked in for the rest of your life so you’d better choose wisely. At least that’s how it felt for me.

I almost transferred from NYU after my freshman year and was actually enrolled at U Miami and looking at apartments. What changed my mind was my first job that summer, an internship at Getty Images where I worked in the research department. I still loved New York and I really enjoyed working and exploring the city. I even spent weekends taking surfing lessons out at Rockaway Beach. It was NYU I hated, I figured out. So I decided to try again with the goal of transferring programs. I looked first at International Relations but found the first class I took too theoretical. I knew I wanted business skills and I petitioned to double major at Stern, the business school, which was rejected. Finally, I decided upon Gallatin, which is ostensibly a create-your-own-major program. That way, I reasoned, I could take as many classes as I wanted at the business school as well as creative classes. I also applied around that time to study abroad and in the spring of my sophomore year, before my official transfer to Gallatin, went to Florence, Italy. I loved studying abroad, of course, and reveled in the experience. Italy also set me up for what I would do next.

One of the classes I took in Florence was about the fashion industry and included several trips to factories and marketplaces. During one such factory visit, the woman leading our class through the jacquard process was explaining their company’s efforts towards more sustainable manufacturing. I was struck and I immediately ordered a dozen books on “sustainable fashion” so I could start learning more. I knew right away this would be my major. Also while in Florence, I met James Ferragamo at a couple different events and he was happy to arrange an internship for me back in New York. All hail the power of networking.

Over the next two years at NYU, I combined environmental studies, marketing, and fashion classes, eventually titling my degree “The Marketing of Sustainable Fashion.” I was finally enjoying my college experience, to some extent, and working harder than I’d ever worked in my life. At one point I was working two internships—one at Getty and one at Ferragamo—had a full class load, and was trying to keep up with some semblance of a social life. As I learned more about sustainable fashion, I tried to gear my blog and my content towards teaching people about it as well. I took every opportunity that came my way and then some and I ran myself into the ground, averaging 3-5 hours of sleep a night and surviving at times on caffeine alone. It’s no wonder my mental health was so bad.

By the time I graduated from NYU in 2017, I’d done seven internships at a variety of companies, worked on a handful of sponsored blog content with global brands, and I’d really grown the blog into a fairly successful entity. I applied everywhere for marketing positions. I was met with two main responses: I was overqualified for entry level and under qualified for associate positions. Mentors have explained what this really means: companies did not want to pay me for my skill level right out of undergrad. In a way, my overachieving had shot me in the foot. I insisted to hiring managers that I was happy to start at a lower rate and work my way up but I was rejected over and over again. In the meantime, I continued some freelance/contract work I’d already begun during my senior year and I was pitching around to various agencies for blog collaborations. As the months wore on and job offers never came, I had to make money somehow. I’d taken entrepreneurial courses and knew what it took to plan a business. And so, I found myself freelancing as I worked to grow the blog.

WHAT IT BECAME

There’s a shift that happens when your art or your hobby becomes your livelihood that I think many creators can relate to. You begin creating not for yourself but for this mysterious pseudo-entity called “audience.” Unlike some of my influencer friends, I did not launch a blog with the intention to make money from it. I did it for fun and as a creative outlet. I soon chafed at the metrics and I resented having to take brand deals that didn’t align with my ethics for the sake of affording rent. I was following industry trends, building my network, and producing more content than ever before. But I didn’t have a clear enough goal. I wanted to do too much, be too many different things. I experimented and made it work somehow, but I was constantly in doubt, constantly insecure. I knew what audiences liked, I knew what worked and gained engagement, but I resented gearing what I did towards how many likes it would garner.

My identity became entirely wrapped up in the brand and everything felt personal. Every rejection and mean comment and post with not enough likes felt personal. Somewhere along the way, I had lost track of who I even was and what I wanted. I’d pigeonholed myself into this identity that no longer fit. What had started as a side hobby had consumed my whole life. But as the platform grew, as I got more brand deals and partnerships, I was swept along with it.

It was a fabulous time, to be fair, and I was making some incredible memories. I attended dozens of shows at New York Fashion Week, met celebrities and designers and other influencers, sipped champagne from rooftop penthouses, and immersed myself in the fashion scene. My friends and I were well-dressed and relentless, talking or scamming our way into every event just for the satisfaction of doing so. It was the early days of influencers and the early days of QR codes and it was just too easy and too much fun.

By 2018/2019, I’d reached 115K followers on Instagram, an insane milestone I never dreamed of reaching. I was persistently networking, pitching, and creating content for myself and for social media and photography clients. I was at events almost every day trying to get traction and make new connections.

I was also intensely burned out and didn’t even realize how badly. I’d come home from an event, post about what a great time I’d had, then lay for hours on the floor crying into my rug. And I was so guilty for being so depressed, which made me even more depressed. From the outside, I was doing everything I’d ever wanted. My life looked amazing, didn’t it? But I was miserable and I couldn’t figure out why.

A series of events and coincidences that I can only call fate started to fall into place by mid-2019. Upon discovering a six month program to live and work abroad, I jumped on the chance. Within a month, I bought out of my lease in New York, packed most of my belongings into a storage unit, and boarded a plane bound for Croatia.

I cried as the taxi drove towards JFK and the skyline receded behind us. It’s like I could sense I’d just closed a door or a chapter for good and I didn’t know what came next. I couldn’t really explain why at the time, I just followed this gut feeling that I had to get out. What I’d been doing wasn’t working and I needed to try something, anything, new. The sense of relief I felt almost immediately upon arriving in Split was proof enough I’d done the right thing.

It was the best decision I’ve ever made.

The plan was to travel for six months to a different country each month then end up back home in Florida to regroup before flying back to New York to find my next apartment there. I had six and a half of the best months of my life living around the world in Croatia, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Chile, Peru, and Colombia. It was genuinely transformative and I didn’t want it to end. But by the time I flew from Cartagena to Miami in late February of 2020, I’d already booked flights to Washington D.C. and New York to get back to “reality.” We’d heard inklings of this virus situation while in South America, but our group was too busy soaking up the experience to worry about it. As it turned out, I’d made it to Florida just in time. By March 2020, the world was shutting down.

WHERE I AM NOW

Like many people, I spent 2020 unemployed and uncertain, living at home in Florida in my childhood bedroom. One month turned into six turned into years. My mental health was at an all time low in the beginning. I would have been sad anyways at the end of the amazing six months I’d just had and at the end of a relationship I was too attached to. Add quarantine to the mix and lock me in the house with nothing but my own thoughts and I was spiraling. It was hard to know what to do next. I was unmotivated and anxious.

But something interesting happened during that time, too. I went back to the basics and asked myself, “If I’m not working, what do I actually want to do with my time every day?” I journaled. I read hundreds of books of every genre including as many self-help books as I could find. I began gardening and learned about herbs and grew mint which to this day keeps popping back up in the pot I initially planted it in. I started seriously teaching myself Spanish and began a Duolingo streak that reached over 1,000 days before I lost it just a couple months ago. I cooked and baked and I made sourdough from scratch. I redecorated my childhood bedroom and the back patio of our house and several rooms in my grandma’s house. I FaceTimed with friends and we played digital games and tried to have conversations when the only updates were “I went to the grocery store this week, it was terrifying.” I spent time with my grandma, ran errands for her when she couldn’t leave the house for fear of infection, and learned more about her childhood memories. I spent every day with my aging dog, Lucky, time that I will forever cherish with him that I would never have gotten otherwise. I spent time working on myself in ways that I’d never had the freedom to do before and I worked hard to untangle the depression I’d suffered from since I was 9 years old, trying to rewire the negative habits and thought patterns and create better ones.

It’s weird to say, but in retrospect I am so grateful for that time during quarantine, especially the extra time with my loved ones. Day by day it was hard, but I know I'm incredibly lucky that I had a safe place to live and that my mom was able to continue working to support us. And of the places to be stuck, despite its craziness, Florida was actually pretty great.

In January of 2021, I went to get Invisalign which was suggested to me as a treatment for my TMJ. That’s when I met Dr. Varone, who I soon learned needed help with marketing for her orthodontic practice. I began a contract working part time for Dr. Varone that wound up being one of the most fun marketing jobs I’d ever done. I designed Facebook ads and made silly TikTok videos—several of which went viral—and revamped her digital presence across platforms. I was incredibly lucky to have found such a great role while many were still unemployed around the country and I’m very grateful to Dr. Varone for her trust as I worked remotely for the bulk of the role, which eventually allowed me to travel extensively while working. Over the next two years, I made just enough to travel and to keep exploring what I wanted to do next with my life. I considered many options. Should I go to law school? Get a master’s degree in history? I auditioned for audiobook narration at one point and was offered a job for a steamy romance novel which I turned down because it felt too awkward. I applied for dozens of remote jobs and interviewed for several, though in the end none worked out. I wrote up business plans for several ideas and followed through on none of them.

But in terms of the blog and social media, I couldn’t see the point. Who cares what the top 10 Instagram spots are in Valencia when the whole world feels like it’s in flames? I hated seeing influencers post frivolous images and I actively culled who I was following to people who didn’t just make me feel bad about myself. I questioned everything I posted and became less and less sure of my reasons for posting at all. I wanted to make content that had value past just being a pretty picture, but I was frozen by old insecurities and habits. Plus, I was good at taking the “pretty pictures,” at honing an aesthetic, at creating a brand. It’s hard to unlink yourself from that, at least it was for me. I felt locked into the “brand” I’d sold myself as. I think now that I was also worried on some fundamental level that people wouldn’t care about what else I had to say. I watched my follower count steadily decline and I posted in occasional bursts and I overthought what to do until I didn’t do much at all.

I read the book Atomic Habits three times and became obsessed with fixing my daily habits and routines. I set many habit goals for myself, many of which I still do to this day:

• drink enough water every day

• read at least 4 books every month in four categories: nonfiction, fiction, self-help, and history

• practice Spanish daily (in mid-2022 I added Arabic and French)

• journal daily

• go outside every day for at least 10 minutes

• move/be active for at least 30 minutes a day

• and more (I think I’ll do a separate post on this)

I kept coming back to this idea of impact, of purpose. On January 17, 2022, I wrote in my journal: “It would be nice to have some huge obvious impact on the world, to solve climate change or world hunger or something. Sometimes I worry that if I’m not doing something monumental like that, I’m not doing enough. But other times it feels monumental in and of itself just to try to live my own little life.”

Soon after I wrote that came one of the worst moments of my life, one I’d been dreading and fearing for years: the loss of my dog, Lucky. I’m still heartbroken thinking about it even now. There were numbers of other setbacks and difficulties and struggles over the past four years that I won’t share here, but suffice to say life was hard and I fell behind where I would have expected to be by this point in my life.

Somehow, in the late fall of 2022 while dog and cat sitting in New York and Chicago, I was again browsing graduate programs. Around the same time, I’d been asking myself what my favorite authors had in common and how I might be like the people I admired most. Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Kolbert, Naomi Klein, Eduardo Galeano, Joan Didion… they’re all journalists. Something finally clicked in my brain. During quarantine, when I wasn’t being paid and had no other obligations, I spent much of my free time learning. There was no particular theme, either, as I jumped from ancient Egyptian history to a biography of Alexander von Humboldt to the science of how canine brains think. Before each of my longer trips, too, I would read as much as possible about the places I’d be living, both fiction and nonfiction, so that I’d have some understanding of the cultures I’d be immersed in. I’ve always longed for a life exploring new places, meeting new people, and learning new things. And I want to write and create and share those experiences with the world. That’s literally journalism, I realized with a bit of a jolt. Duh.

I quickly Googled “best journalism graduate programs” and narrowed it down easily when looking at the options, to just one program. I think I completed my application to Columbia in two weeks, gathering the transcripts and references, submitting the paperwork, and writing my essays with the help of my friend Ashley, who has worked in admissions and gave me great advice. I banged it all out and hit submit a day before the deadline. Then, I continued on with whatever else I’d been doing.

I’d given notice to Dr. Varone that the end of 2022 would be the end of my work with her, so I entered the new year in 2023 with no plans and no idea what I would do next, but with a surprising sense that it would be fine. Within a few weeks, a travel friend invited me to join her Mexico City, which I agreed to immediately with no hesitation. I’d actually been considering moving to Mexico City so it was perfect to see how I liked it. I wandered around visiting museums, eating the best food, speaking my now conversational Spanish, hanging out in cute coffee shops, and making new friends around the city. I also booked my next trip and a one way flight to Morocco, where I knew I’d spend a couple months but I left open-ended. After a few weeks enjoying Mexico, I flew back to Florida for a week to repack and refresh. The day before I left for the airport, as I was running last minute errands and sorting out what I’d need for North Africa, an email from Columbia popped up on my phone. I’d gotten in. I was floored. I had applied on such a whim and never quite dared to imagine what would happen if I were accepted. Either way, it would have to wait. I was heading to Marrakech.

I wavered over Columbia for a while. I talked it over with my mom, with friends, even with people I met in Marrakech who barely knew me. For one thing, they offered me not a cent of financial aid. I worried a lot about the cost. I wondered about the value and necessity of a graduate program for journalism. Technically I didn’t need a master’s degree to be a journalist, but I’d also never had any formal training and had no idea where to start. I looked up reviews and rankings and alumni and professors. I’d be lying if I said the prestige of having an Ivy League degree wasn’t a huge appeal. I’ve long been insecure about my legitimacy as a writer, but surely, I reasoned, an Ivy League degree proved I was doing something right. And I knew based on my time at NYU and working in New York how crucial networking is to a career—I was sure to make incredible connections at Columbia. Plus, in a lot of ways, I missed school. I was good at school. I missed having a community of peers and joining in intellectual classroom discussions and working towards similar goals and having the support of those who were successful in the field. In the end, of course, I accepted my admittance. And I’m so glad that I did.

It’s a short program, only 9 months, sometimes described as a journalism “boot camp.” I’ve just begun my second and final semester and will graduate in mid-May. It’s been challenging and a hell of a lot of work and the state of the media industry is bleak, to put it mildly. But I’m sure I made the right choice. After a lot of trial and error, I finally feel like I’m working on something meaningful. I’m surrounded by some of the most inspiring people, both my professors and my classmates, who are doing amazing work to bring light to the most important stories of our time. I’m in awe of the efforts and the ethics of journalism that I never quite grasped until now. And I’m having fun interviewing people I never would have met and learning about topics I may never have otherwise looked at.

Of course, as you may have seen on Instagram, I am writing this as I sit in bed icing my knee following surgery just two weeks ago due to a bad ski accident over the holidays. This injury has thrown a huge wrench into my plans and set me behind before the semester even began, which sucks. But I’m doing my best to stay on track and stay motivated.

It also gave me the time and inspiration to write this post, so there’s always a silver lining I suppose.

So coming back to this blog…

Of course I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck with it. I never did make enough money to cover my expenses, always had to supplement with other jobs. What if I’d been better about following the metrics and just sucked it up and made content for the sake of engagement? What if I’d doubled down and negotiated larger brand deals? Maybe I would have made it profitable and continued growing. More likely I would have continued to struggle until I snapped from the burnout that I’m still trying to recover from.

That’s not to say I’m giving up entirely. I just needed to take a step back to see the bigger picture again.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

That is the perpetual question, right?

I’ve debated if I should start from scratch and begin a new site altogether. I don’t think I’ll do that, but I do think I will make some changes soon, when I have more time to redesign it again. I’ve tried to gear my recent social media content with more intent towards travel advice and stories highlighting the culture of the places I’ve visited. I still have a desire to create but I overthink the what and the how. Idealistically, I’d like to share more about sustainable travel and use my new journalism skills to highlight stories around the world of how the travel industry is addressing climate change challenges.

Travel has been one of the most rewarding and transformative aspects of my life. I feel most myself when traveling. Traveling with curiosity breaks down barriers and stereotypes and fear and misunderstanding. I want to inspire and help others to travel so that they can experience that transformation as well.

At Columbia, I’ve focused my reporting on climate and environmental topics and I love the idea of working for a publication like Inside Climate News or Grist to find impactful stories about climate change, probably the biggest story of our time. I still love travel, of course, and have drafts of pitches to outlets like AFAR, Condé Nast Traveler, and National Geographic sitting in a folder on my computer. On a practical level, I may need to consider jobs in marketing or social media to support myself for awhile. I’m applying to positions left and right and have already begun to accumulate the rejections. So I don’t really know where I’ll be by the end of this year. I’m still figuring a lot out.

Stay tuned, I guess…