This Social Anxiety blog will be 6 years old soon.

Back when I started my blog, I had no idea what I was doing in terms of getting my posts in front of an audience or how to properly write a blog post and get it ranked on search engines. I was just writing how I felt and hoping someone would read it someday.

The reason I started my Social Anxiety blog was to raise awareness about social anxiety disorders, as well as other elements of mental health and to be a resource that people could actually relate to.

Anytime I searched for anything regarding social anxiety, all that would come up would be medical pages and studies but that just made me feel like a statistic or a “patient”. It didn’t make me feel like a person who was understood.

What I REALLY wanted, was to read an article or a post by someone like me, someone who had been through it.

I wanted to know that there were other people out there who had hid under their windowsill to hide from the postman or pretended to be sick so they wouldn’t have to leave the house.

I wanted to know that there had been other people who had let their hair become matted and impossible to brush because their mental illness exhausted them SO much that they had no energy to look after themselves.

I wanted to know that there were people like me, who had been broken and had their lives stolen from them because of social anxiety but had come out of the other side and learnt to manage it. I wanted to be inspired, to have hope for my own journey.

Yet, I couldn’t find anything like that and I didn’t want to read articles from professionals who hadn’t experienced it because I was already in therapy. I already knew all the jargon and the psychology side of it.

So I decided to start my own social anxiety blog in hope that I could show people what it was like to live with this disorder.

The beginning of my social anxiety blog

Like I said, I really didn’t know what I was doing at all. I’d started websites before because I’d been running my photography business for a while but blogging was a whole other ball game.

Every post I wrote was just what I was thinking at the time, no real thought put into the content, no titles that made any sense and certainly no formatting of the post to make it readable.

People still came and read my blog (I’m not sure how they found me back then) and after reading the comments and emails I received I quickly realised how important it was to keep talking about this subject and to talk about it candidly.

The journey of my anxiety blog

Since starting this anxiety blog, I’ve learnt so much about myself, about all of you guys and about the blogging world in general.

The most amazing part of having an anxiety blog is the community that has been created because of it. Especially with my Facebook group, I’m so privileged to have that safe space where myself and others can talk about our anxiety and I’m so proud anytime someone shares there achievements.

My own social anxiety has improved since starting Anxious Lass. I think mostly down to the fact that I’m always challenging myself so that I have something new to write about and so that I can share different perspectives. Anytime I go through something that affects my anxiety or my depression, I have this blog to write on for comfort and that in itself is also very therapeutic.

Not only has it given me a place to talk and to meet other likeminded people but it’s given me opportunities to raise awareness that I never would have had before.

I’ve been on the radio, been on TV and got the chance to talk about social anxiety on other big platforms all because of my blog.

Want to start your own blog?

If you’d like to raise awareness or have your own blog for whatever reasons, check out these resources I’ve written on how I set up my blog, got the traffic that allowed my blog to be seen and what being a mental health blogger is actually like:

• How To Start A Mental Health Blog
• How To Start A Blog And Make Money Online
• How To Write A Blog Post That Gets Thousands Of Shares
• How Writing A Mental Health Blog Improved My Anxiety
• Why Being A Mental Health Blogger Isn’t Always Great
• 40+ Blogging Terms You Should Know
• 7 Blogging Mistakes To Avoid When You Start A Blog
• How To Double Your Blog Traffic In One Month

Do you have a social anxiety or mental health blog? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to read them!

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