Celebrating 10 Years of Blogging || What Changed, What's the Same, & Why I Am Still Here

I've officially completely 10 years of blogging!

A whole decade of my life is partially documented online. That's over 1/3rd of my life. I may not have shared every detail of my personal life but all of my passions and brief obsessions are recorded in blog posts. If I want to reminisce about my life in 2016, I can easily do that by reading my old blog posts. I find out which media I loved or hated at a specific time, and even how I felt back then. How cool is that?

I don't read my old posts very often. But when I do, I feel a melting pot of emotions. It's nostalgic, strange, fascinating, sad, funny, astonishing, surprising, and familiar. Sometimes, a part of what I wrote is so familiar and other times it feels like someone else wrote it.

My first blog post was published on 16th January 2016. I was studying for my last finals in high school. The best time to find new obsessions, of course. Apparently, I quickly figured out what blogging was because I wrote "Blogging: to me" in 10 days where I said, "This might be the virtual world, but I’m accepted for who I am, completely." It felt like I could shared all of me for the first time.

In a "if we were having tea..." post from May 2020 (I used to write such casual & chatty posts often!) where I said, "I miss voices." In the height of the pandemic and lockdown, blogging felt like shouting into the void and hoping I hear something back.

It's now 2026 and blogging still feels like a shout into the void. Who knows if anyone will read what I say and whether I'll get a few words back?

I've already written about my blogging journey (upto 8 years) so I won't rehash all of that. Although there have been quite many changes in the 2 years since, it's not enough to write a whole new post. Instead of going through the whole journey and history, I want to talk about how things have changed. I want to talk about how blogging used to be for me and how it is now.

This post is inspired by Hannah's post about her blogging has changed. Shoutout to The Artsy Reader Girl for hosting the Top Ten Tuesday which kicked off posts with this topic.

what stayed the same

Let's kick off with what has not changed in 10 years, and probably won't in the future.

1. i'm still wordy

I've always had the gift of gab in writing (not in talking in person, lol). Although my posts were much shorter when I started blogging—average 603 words per post in 2016—I was still able to easily write a lot about one thing. I know that writing more is a struggle for some people but I suck at writing less.

Essays with a word limit in school only worked because the word limit was kept a bit higher and we didn't really have "short" writing requirements. In fact, for a majority of my exams, the number of words and the score was proportionate. (Yeah.. I'm not happy with my education system. It's why I don't want to study further 🙂)

Is the above paragraph necessary? No. But it came to my mind so I wrote it. And, at the end of the day, this is my personal blog so I'm going to write whatever I want to even if it's mostly useless. It doesn't mean that I intentionally write too much everywhere, just that I don't hold myself back from adding details. Even random details can add a lot of context and personalisation.

My posts slowly grew longer as I started posting lesser and became more picky with what I write about. The average number of words increased by 100-200 every year. In 2025, I wrote 4k words per post, on average. We've come so far from 600 words.

2. i still like planning and a schedule

Soon after I started blogging i.e. when I began college, I started using the bullet journal system. Every month, I'd maintain a page with the month's dates. I'd fill in tentative post schedules and topic with pencil and fill it in with pen if I'm sure about posts. I visualised blogging and would often fill in a few post ideas for upcoming posts beforehand. It's also how I kept up with blog memes like Top Ten Tuesday (I participated a lot back then).

I'm a planner at heart. While I have periods of spontaneity, I prefer having a plan more often than not. It helps me understand how much energy I need for something coming up and helps me plan my days. Blogging has taken more and more effort over the years and planning helps a lot with that.

In the initial few months of blogging, I blogged every day. When college began, I posted 3 times a week. The schedule slowed down bit-by-bit over the years. I posted every 8th day in 2025.

Funny enough, I'm currently not on a schedule. This is one of my periods of spontaneity, I guess. I decided to write what I want to when I have the energy for it. I'm sure I'll get back to a schedule at some point.

3. i still format my posts for readability

It didn't take long for me to begin emphasising certain parts of my posts with bold and I've kept it up until now. At one point, I did it because I cared about my post being "skimmable" for readers coming from search engines. I wanted to make sure some points are not skipped.

Now, I do it out of habit. Over the years, I've learnt my style of formatting which I believe makes my posts more readable so I do that without thinking too much about it. While writing, I know what point I think is the most important in a section so I highlight it. It's often the point that summarises what I'm trying to say.

I don't really play around with formatting anymore because I try not to spend a lot of time on it. I don't go back through the post to format things I missed anymore. Once I finish writing a post, I'm done, goodbye 🫡

4. i still don't stick to a niche

I started blogging writing about everything on my mind. My first few posts were book reviews. Then a poem I wrote. Short stories came a while later. In between it all, wrote about blogging and life. I wrote about my college and my friends.

In 2016, I wrote that I'm grateful to be myself completely—all parts of me. I'm still grateful for it and I will take advantage of it. I know that a lot of people prefer sticking to a specific niche and many don't like following blogs that don't. That's okay. I know that a lot of people are like me too.

In the end, this blog is mine and it's for me. I'm the only one who's going to read this post 10 years down the line reminiscing about who I was. So, I continue to write about whatever's on my mind.

what changed

1. no more emotions in personal posts

When I started blogging, it was under a pseudonym so, with some clever hiding of details, I could bare my thoughts completely. The blog was very helpful during my transition to a college student because I had a lot of things going on. In some posts, I pretty much bled my emotions on page. It was cathartic, yes. But it meant my blog was secret from everyone.

I wanted to start telling people about my blog so I made a bunch of posts private and decided to not write everything anymore. I still wrote quite a lot about my personal life—I only held back stuff about family and other relationships. 5 years ago, when I moved to self-hosting and started from scratch with the content, I decided to be very careful about personal details.

Over the years, I slowly grew to hate putting raw details about myself online. Not just here—on Instagram too. I don't want to rant anymore or talk about things that I want only select people to know. Someone I know found this blog by searching "sumedha blog" so it's not like what I write here is in confidence.

I still want to talk about my experiences and memorable highlights, though. So, I decided to write things only if I did something. Less about how I felt about things. What I do is usually okay to share. I do carefully consider what to share and not in that as well. It's a fine line but I've been managing.

This way, I can still look back and reminisce in the future without being embarrassed or hating that I put something out for everyone to see. The blog was my only safe space in 2016 but I now have close friends and a good journalling habit 🙂

The only post where I went a bit more personal was the Japan trip log. I still shared what I learnt about myself but not other things. I actually wrote stuff and cut it out.

The above has also meant that I stopped doing purely chatty posts like "if we were having tea..." and other musings. I used to write a lot of them earlier, so that's a big change in content.

2. no "quick" posts

For example, blog tags. Although they were quick and easy to write, I found that I didn't like writing them. I definitely could have added more to make it something I like but, out all what I wrote, tags were my least favourite. I also never go back to read them so that showed how much they meant to me.

Similarly, I stopped writing other quick posts too. Things like simple book lists where I'm not really passionate about what I say or book reviews about books that I'm meh about. I'd rather spend 2-3 days writing a post I like and consider worthy of reading. If I don't have much to say, I don't say anything.

3. no book promo

No blog tours, no reviewing advance reader copies, no cover reveals or other promo posts, and no requested reviews.

I didn't get into blogging for any of them. I got into them after seeing others participate and it lowkey felt like I had to. Weird peer pressure on myself to fit in and prove myself, I guess?

The first hurdle was not being able to get books I'd actually like because things were stacked against international reviewers on Netgalley. I wasn't popular enough to get paperbacks from publishing houses here. That led to me requesting books that seemed interesting but I rarely enjoyed. Often, by the time I received the books, my mood would have changed and I'd struggle to get back to the book.

A few years ago, I happily pulled the plug on my Netgalley account. I stopped signing up for ARCs unless I really think I'd love the book. In 5 years, I only signed up for one and actually liked it (Love Below Zero).

I was open to review requests until about a couple of years ago. I started with being very selective about accepting and eventually nothing caught my eye so I stopped. My contact page has said "not open to review requests" for a long time now. I still get review requests in my email and I happily ignore them.

I know that many readers love doing some or all of the above and they're good at it. I don't enjoy it. I read for the sake of reading the book. Writing a review is secondary.

4. no creative writing

In 2016, I posted a few poems and short stories that I wrote. They weren't bad but I realised that creative writing is not really my thing. I like imagining stories but I don't want to figure out the details, you know? I'd rather read or watch something and write other stuff.

But I won't lie, there's one poem that I wrote in the heights of teenage angst which is still makes me emotional every time I read it. It's now made private along with all of my posts from the first 5 years. Only I get to enjoy the cringe 😌

5. no more gifs and memes

I think that was the time when GIFs really took off? A lot of bloggers used GIFs in their posts, including me. I found them really fun too. GIFs made posts more fun and humorous. I used to spend a fair bit of time trying to find the perfect GIF to add. It was creativity in its own way. Similarly, I used to add memes within posts.

Now, I very rarely add anything other than illustrations to break up text. Lately, since I stopped drawing new illustrations, I've been less inclined to add them in posts too. I think I format well enough to not make it seem like a big block of text. If you still find reading my posts hard, consider it attention-span training 🙂

6. i don't proofread anymore

This is a big thing considering all I do is write 😂 But yeah I just don't do it anymore.

For a long time, I proofread posts myself. I also roped in my best friend to proofread posts for me whenever he had time and he's send me screenshots with corrections. Both of these took more time and effort.

I used Grammarly for many years. Slowly, I found that Grammarly often highlighted things that weren't actually wrong and missed a fair bit of actual mistakes. It also wasn't meant for the way I write. It often said that my paragraphs were too wordy i.e. not concise (that's my writing style!) and did not understand many of my sentences (I try to keep Indian/Bangalorean English to the minimum, but stripping it away totally is like stripping away the way I talk). I also found it's suggestions distracting while I write and noisy if I turned it on afterwards. In short, I got fed up with Grammarly.

Listen, it already takes me 3 days (on average) to write a post. This includes only the writing. Including planning, any prior outlining/note-taking, formatting, adding images, it takes even longer. I also write long posts. By the time I'm done writing it, I'm ready to be done with the post. I don't want to think about it anymore. I find proofreading boring and annoying.

Sure, if I read one of my posts later for any reason and see a mistake, I'll correct it. But I don't actively proofread my posts. It's tiring and I think any mistakes made are small enough to be understood by everyone. So, if you've seen think instead of thing or other typos/missing words/duplicate words in my posts, now you know why.

why i am still here

The reasons why I continued blogging throughout the years varies. In 2016, it was a shiny new thing and it gave me space to say things that I couldn't say anywhere else. During my college years, it gave me a place to grow and reassured me that it's worth it to speak my mind. During the pandemic, it helped me feel less lonely and tried to make up for the sudden severe reduction in daily conversations.

Currently, I like blogging because it is completely different from my job. I'm a software engineer and all of my work is in my head. There's no manual labour. It's completely knowledge work which means I sometimes think about work the entire day. Unless my mind is fully occupied in something else, there's a good chance I'll be thinking about work. There aren't many ways to do that other than consume content. And there's only so much I can consume without getting tired of that too.

I'm not saying that blogging is creative and my work isn't. I actually think that software engineering is very creative because almost every problem has multiple solutions and many ways to do every solution. Sure, there's quite a bit of analytical thinking, but it's also creatively demanding. That's why it can easily take up all available brain space.

Blogging is a way to be creative that doesn't let me think about work at the same time. If I started blogging about software engineering or coding, I would. But because this is a book, drama, etc. blog and not about work-related things, it gives my mind a reprieve by giving me something else to figure out. Some days, I find blogging too tiring after a whole day's work because I'll either be tired of seeing a screen or tired of thinking. But more often than not, it helps.

So, 10 years later, I'm still blogging because it's different from my job. The reason is different from 2016 or 2018 or 2020 or 2022 and I write about different things accordingly but end result is the same. I have no doubt that, if I'm still blogging 5 or 10 years later, it'll be for a different/new reason. Change is the only constant. And sometimes, those changes lead to the same decision.

I look forward to the next change and what I'll do with it 🙂

it's your turn to be wordy

Have you done or been doing something through different phases of life? Did your reasons for doing/liking it change? Did you change how you do it over time? Have you kept up with doing something for 10+ years (hobbies, sports, travel)? Tell me in the comments!