Evening all, I write this while my red wine reduction sits on the hob downstairs, so I'm sorry if I sound rushed. You see I am on limited time.

I've just returned home from the lovely Chloe's focus group for her dissertation. This consisted of much chat about what it is to be a fashion blogger, our relationships with brands and the ethics that surround our little pieces of the interwebz. Being in a new city, sharing a flat with my boyfriend and working from home everyday means I don't get too much conversation about blogging anymore so it was nice to be able to process my thoughts out loud and with a group of other lovely, and opinionated, ladies.

Thing is right, I kind of learned something about myself that I hadn't necessarily thought about before so bear with me while I try to articulate it. You see, I've been in this game a long time. I've been blogging, although not necessarily in a fashiony capacity, since around the year 2000 and I've seen the blogging world in many different incarnations. Right about now, I don't think I particularly like it. I still think it is a wonderful place to be and there are a whole lot of really brilliant young women (and men) to meet and speak to and learn from and be inspired by, but it's a lot more incentive based than it used to be. It's a lot about stuff. Now, that's not something I fundamentally disagree with, in fact, I bloody love stuff. I started as a fashion/beauty blogger after all. What I think has happened though, is that I've forgotten which stuff I like. I kind of like a bit of everything now. Possibly not really heinous things like Uggs and bootcut jeans, but a lot of stuff. At the risk of sounding a bit like Joey off of Dawson's Creek - I think I've lost my way, followers. I think I may need to go on a voyage of self discovery.

I've not been posting a lot recently. I've lost enthusiasm, and I thought it was just because of the amount I am blogging for work, but I'm coming to realise it's not because of that at all. I've stopped enjoying it. That's ok I guess, I think a lot of us go through patches where we fall out of love with the blogging thing, and god knows I have shared my opinions on this before. The thing is though, I'm changing as a person. When I was younger and I started this blog I was fairly creative, arty even. I drew a lot, I wrote a lot. I spent a lot of time by myself because I was stuck at home recovering from illness while my friends were at uni. I spent my recovery days rummaging in second hand shops, reading zines, buying second hand books, listening to sad songs. I was a stereotypical romantic teen, but I was 20, and everyone I knew was growing up at different ends of the country. All that being said, bearing in mind months of bedridden recovery followed by months of a soul destroying office job, I think I was the happiest I have been. I was blogging/livejournalling almost daily, wearing mental combinations of clothes because there was no one to criticise me. I was using new make-up and listening to new bands and reading books I wanted to, because I wasn't being influenced by the friends that had always taken up my time before. [As a sidenote, I know this might seem a bit pathetic, but as opinionated as I may appear, it's very important to clarify quite how self-aware, sensitive and influenced by others I am, it's a curse and I'm working on it.] After that, I decided to move up and onwards and so I reapplied to university. I moved there, and met wonderful people and did hilarious things with them and wrote long essays and got top marks. I stopped drawing. I stopped writing because I was writing for uni. I had hardly any time for myself and when I did I just chain watched boring boxsets for hours on end before I could go out and drink and dance again.

And by the end of first year I pretty much hated myself. I don't think I realised until the end of second year but I'd willingly shed a lot of elements of my personality. I was living with girls who I truly loved and had fun with but fundamentally I was different to them and I struggled with it. I realised I'd been conforming to them (through no one's pressure but my own, it's important to note) and I'd lost all the things I loved about myself and gave me self worth. I spent third year going through lots of inner turmoil, culminating in several panic attacks and a diagnosis of "depressive anxiety" for which I refused drugs but agreed to counselling, trying to have fun, failing and taking it out on everyone because I wasn't who they thought I was and it was my own fault. I met Matt and he started bringing me back to myself.

Now I live in Leeds. It was a clean, though unplanned, break and it turned out to be just what I needed. At the risk of sounding like a dick, I'm starting to be me again. I'm starting to listen to music I really love again, I'm getting interested in issues I'd always pretended I didn't care about before, I'm starting to rediscover what I care about. The point of this post is to say that to be honest, what I care about is no longer what products everyone is using and what dress I can buy from Topshop on the weekend. I don't mean to imply that this is what fashion blogging is all about, as I said earlier there are hundreds of interesting and hugely intelligent bloggers out there who are an inspiration to many. It has just become this for me. So this, this, is why something is going to change.

I think this all might come across as terribly self-indulgent but I still feel the need to share it. I want to let you all know that although I definitely don't mean to say that I've been lying to you all for years (I definitely haven't), I've definitely not been showing my true colours. And that's because, if I'm honest, I didn't know exactly what my true colours were myself. So I am going to find out what those true colours are, and share it.

I'm going back to my red wine reduction now, but I thought it was important to tell you that for me, and in light of what we were talking about tonight at the focus group, blogging isn't just about brands, free stuff and invitations. It's about expressing who you are, and I'm going to go back to using it as such.

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I thought I might take this opportunity to give you a few little updates on the blog, and well, on my life too!

First things first, I am slowly settling myself in here WordPress. Things have been a little bumpy. The road was not even, dear friends. But I'm here now and I have some things to clear up.

• www.astorminateacup.net is now the URL for the blog. If there's anyway you guys can change any links you may have to me, I'm sorry to be cheeky, but I would be terribly grateful. At the moment the blogspot address is redirecting but for analytics/stats/seo purposes, as well as just general catchiness, I'd really like astorminateacup.net to be the one and only from now on :)
• Bloglovin readers: well, if you're reading this then you've probably worked it out anyway, but the lovely people at Bloglovin helped me by updating the problem with my feed. You were without me for a while but now I should be back on your dashboards. Hopefully for good this time!
• There's a small glitch with the LinkedWithin widget I have below my posts. It's still coming up with links to the old URL even though all my posts have been imported here. I'm working on it, so bear with, and I'll try and get it sorted asap.

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