A few weeks ago, my domain expired.
After almost two years of barely updating my blog, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue. I thought I would feel relieved, but instead, I felt a wave of sadness, of reluctance. I couldn’t get myself to say goodbye.
I had spent a long time telling myself that between board exams and starting my job as a doctor, I was way too busy to blog, that I had to move on and prioritize “more important” things in life. That perhaps this chapter of my life had simply run its course.
Yet, when domain expired and my website disappeared, I felt like something disappeared inside me as well. Like a piece of identity was ripped away from me.
Some of you may remember me from emixglobe, the name this website used to be before I rebranded it last year.
I had always wanted to become a well-established travel blogger. Ever since high school, when I was still living in Europe and my family was traveling frequently.
I was the girl who would stay up helping my parents plan our next trip for Easter break, for summer, for the upcoming winter. I genuinely enjoyed looking up where we were going next, searching for things to do, and falling down an endless rabbit hole of all the places I had yet to visit.
The anticipation of our next trip was almost as exciting as the traveling itself.
And somewhere between the depths of the internet, I discovered the world of travel blogs.
This was in the (late) 2010’s, which, in my opinion, was the golden age of blogging. I would spend hours reading about people’s adventures, discovering hidden gems all over the world, looking through beautiful photographs. All I wanted to be was one of those girls who seemed to have turned their adventures into a full-time career.
More than the beautiful photos, what I loved the most about travel blogs was feeling connected to the very real person behind the blog. There was personality, there were first hand stories unique to each blogger, and there were strange little adventures that led to a whole new world waiting to be discovered. The blogs felt like a window into someone else’s life.
So, in my third year of medical school, I finally gathered up the courage to start my very own travel blog. This was early 2022, when most of the world still had strict travel restrictions due to COVID. Where I was living, we were still in lockdown.
Nobody was traveling. Honestly, my timing was impeccable.
Initially, I was filled with ideas. I wanted to create everything all at once. I wanted to write beautiful prose, take breath-taking photographs, build a website, grow an audience, and somehow become the travel blogger I had always dreamt of becoming.
What I did not realize was that blogging is not quite as simple as it looks- it is definitely not just writing a post and pressing publish!
There’s the website…the hosting…the domain….so many technical problems…SEO, email-list (still haven’t figured this one out after all these years), social media (that one either…), whatever. You name it.
I spent a lot of hours trying to fix things before realizing I had somehow made them even worse. But despite it all, I loved being a blogger. It became a part of my identity, and I found it incredibly rewarding when people started reading my work.
One moment that has stayed with me throughout the years is when I received a message on Instagram from a girl who was planning a trip to Taiwan with her friend. She told me that she had found my travel content helpful, thanked me for writing it, and said that she was looking forward to reading more.
I remember being in disbelief. Not only had someone read my blog, actually found it helpful, and even took the time to write me a message??
That message meant a lot more to me than she probably realized, and it was enough motivation to keep me blogging for the next few years…until I slowly burnt out.
the falling out
The first reason is pretty straight forward. I was a medical student drowning in a never ending sea of exams…literally. (still preparing for an exam right now, after having graduated for a year already…) Then obviously came graduation and starting my job as a real doctor.
I do believe in the phrase: “if you wanted to, you would.” But sometimes, you simply have to set your priorities and decide what matters to you most at a particular point in your life. For the past few years, that was graduating and becoming a doctor.
That’s more than okay. You can’t do and be everything at once.
Second reason was…as a grade A perfectionist, I couldn’t bear to publish anything less than perfect. I have more unpublished drafts than published posts in my archive.
I was trying to put shakespeare in a blog; every sentence had to be beautiful, every word carefully placed, and every paragraph woven together.
The irony was that the harder I tried to make my writing perfect, the less I wrote. So now, I’m just trying to sound like myself.
The third reason I slowly stopped writing is actually kinda funny…and ironic…I just realized that I wasn’t a travel planner at my core. I am, in fact, a terrible one.
Yes, I did love helping my parents plan trips..by taking inspiration from the itineraries other people had made online. But when it came to creating an itinerary from scratch…let’s just say I was never a fan of making spreadsheets.
I could tell you about the restaurant I loved, the cute vintage cafe I accidentally discovered, or the new neighborhood I accidentally wandered into.
But I did not want to spend hours researching the most efficient way to get from point a to point b. I wanted to tell you about what happened when I got there. Which brings me to the fourth reason…
I am a storyteller at heart.
The longer I blogged, the more travel blogging began to feel rigid to me.
I felt like I was supposed to be answering a very specific set of questions:
Where should you go? What is there to do there? When is the best season to visit? What should you bring? How to get there? And the list goes on.
Obviously these posts are incredibly helpful and I love people who make them. But for me it was the unexpected conversations, the new friends, and the mysterious ways a city can stir up all sorts of emotions within you.
is travel blogging…dead?
Travel blogging feels very different from what it used to be.
Now we have instagram and TikTok feels and endless short form content showing us where to go.
I don’t even think AI is the biggest threat to blogging, I think it’s the internet becoming increasingly good at giving us the same answer.
The same cafe, the same photo spots, the same hidden gem.
It’s the lack of creativity, diversity, and authenticity. Is it still a hidden gem if you discovered it from another influencer?
I miss the individuality of the old blogs, reading about someone’s completely subjective experience of a place. Nowadays I feel like we’re all so afraid of saying the wrong things, all the reviews have unanimously become, “it was a beautiful, once in a lifetime experience”. I’m certainly guilty of that as well.
I also became increasingly uncomfortable with how transactional travel recommendations have become. I can’t believe the amount of travel bloggers who put a list of affiliate links in their post for hotels they’ve never even stayed at.
And I have nothing against affiliate links. Everyone deserves to be paid for the work they do, and I use them as well.
But if i give you a link to a place or an item, I want to have actually loved it.
Perhaps that is not the most efficient way to run a travel blog. But it’s the only way I would want to do it.
so, did I really fail?
I went through many trials and errors. I lived the life and I learnt from it.
It took me four years of self exploration to discover the kind of writer I actually want to become.
Maybe this is what my blog was supposed to become all along.
At the end of the day, does one ever really ‘fail’?
If you’ve somehow found your way back here after all these years, thank you.
I’d love to know,
Do you still read blogs?
And if you do, what keeps you coming back?
xx,
Emily
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