We all have insecurities right? I started my first ever blog in 2007 as part of a journ prac exercise in university. It was a news blog and I kept it for about a year, commentating on current affairs, because after all, that’s what journalism students do.
I’ve started and deleted more than a handful of blogs since then, for myself, for others and even one which was a group effort. I first toyed with the idea of something authentically me in 2010 and have been fiddling with it ever since. In 2016 however I decided to take the plunge, do or die, fears aside, dive right in and create my own domain and take things up a notch, after all, as a new mom I had vowed that my son would not be the reason I put things on hold.
Life happened in 2016, if you stay the course with me on this blog I hope I get to show you the resilience of the human spirit. So somewhere along the line I pulled back from the things I loved all the while nurturing fears and insecurities. Then came 2017 and I had my daughter as a single mom and lost my mother and shrunk deeper into that dark tunnel we all go to hide when life is too much and misery thrives.
Among the insecurities I groomed were statements like: “you can’t blog at your age, early 30’s is too old, everyone who is making any impact is in their early to late 20’s”, “name one mom beauty blogger, single mom of 2 at that”, “you are too big to be infront of a camera”, “who want’s to listen to you”, “this person and that person are so much better than you at this”, “you will never be consistent”, “you don’t have enough of a following, you are struggling to scrape 100 subscribers on YouTube”, “you need data for this to work, how are you going to squeeze that into your budget”, “you should have taken your chance back in 2010, it’s too late now”, “your ideas are all over the show, you have to pick one aspect of yourself not all of you”, “this will never work”.
And so I made a home for my enemy within and as the months rolled by and as life continued to happen I let him win, this liar. What took me off guard each time is how, whenever my mind drifted towards blogging or YouTube I’d literally come alive, even during the saddest moments of my life. Last month it occurred to me that this is who I am, it’s that dream that never sleeps, always awake, always on my case, unaffected by life, change or fear. Slowly as the month progressed I began speaking new words to myself.
Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Vuvu Vena, blogger, vlogger, YouTuber, Mom of 2, student, friend, ‘single mom’, bibliophile, foodie, 30-something thick South African woman on a weightloss journey AND I have come to get it … all of it, backdated to 2010 and beyond. This is my time. Welcome to my world 😉
Find me here, on my bookish blog www.vuvuvenareads.com, on my bookish YouTube Channel Vuvu Vena Reads and on my beauty, hair and lifestyle YouTube channel Vuvu Vena.