5 Years Later.

Long time no talk guys! I can't believe I'm seriously doing my first post of 2022 on my original lifestyle blog in February (a whole month later)! I have a lot to update y'all on & I want to do it on a platform where it all began for me in my blogging/serious content creating career. In April will be my 5-year blog anniversary & 5 years since I launched this blog with the intentions of it being strictly about fashion, beauty, & music.

At the time I launched this blog, I was going through one of the most growing periods of my life. I had gone through my first real heartbreak, lost the Twitter account that was a HUGE part of my identity in middle school/high school, & overall was a confused & lost 19-year-old with 0 idea on what I wanted to do with my life.

When I first started this blog, I would post I kid you not 5 times a day (a lot of my older posts were deleted as part of a rebranding process) because I was so excited that I had a brand-new platform to talk about things that I wanted to talk about with no character limit & at the time whenever I was figuring out a whole new Twitter account to rebrand myself with, everything in my social media life was getting rebranded & transitioned from a teenager who fangirled about celebrities to who I wanted to become as a young adult.

As time went on, I decided I loved the lifestyle blog aspect of blogging & starting that summer in 2017, I documented my day-to-day summer life & what I was up to on a daily basis. This became such a documentation of my young adult life that when big changes & new opportunities come into my life, I make sure to document it now on this blog & someday (even today looking back on my older posts), I'll look back on those steppingstones that made me the person I am today.

Over the past 5 years, my content has evolved & changed & if you did regularly read this blog, you can see how different even every month I posted was. I began to find new interests & ideas that personally worked for me. I never really cared about views & still don't to this day & that's the true beauty of this blog. It's a carefree space for me.

Something I discovered over the years & an evolving idea that I LOVED posting about were the Grammys. In 2017-2019, I did my annual nomination thoughts & even some of those years I did personal recaps or performer thoughts, but it wasn't really till 2020, where I really took those posts to the next level. I had a Grammys content week all 2020 to hype myself up for that current year's awards & during quarantine, I dove into predictions & found a newfound passion into award show predicting & why certain songs or albums get nominated.

Yes, doing fashion posts were fun & a boutique I use to work at from 2017-2019 definitely encouraged those fashion posts but then I learned & I have opened up about this in the past that it DRAINED my bank account & I found myself stressing so bad to come up with the latest & trendiest idea that I lost every authentic side of why I started this blog in the first place. 

The true beauty of the award show posts that I figured out in 2020 was that it costs $0 to create the most authentic & personally my best content. In late 2020 in the full speed of my award show content gaining more views & attractions to this blog, I knew I had to take the content I was doing to the next level. 

Fashion & lifestyle blogs are still trending & even evolving but written music blogs were REALLY hard to come by. As I did some research, I found out that podcasting was the right avenue to go down to showcase these ideas in its best quality & that's when my podcast, "It's A BOP! with Jess" was born.

Since my podcast's launch in late 2020, I have had a BLAST recording episodes & having an even newer platform to talk about music, social media trends, & more & after every episode I record, I smile because I find so much joy & happiness in what I do. Blogging brought me that same joy 4/5 years ago for the era in my life I was in, but this was a different feeling & right for the current era in my life.

Last June, I announced that I was launching a whole new blog (jessicanicoledeleon.wordpress.com) to promote episodes & do the same award show content I was doing before but on its own platform. What I learned from doing my podcast is that the authenticity of how I blogged my award show content needed to not only be showcased in a written form but combining that written form with talking about it in an episode. 

I am super blessed for my podcast platform & for those who have never listened to an episode, click here to check out my podcast!

Now let's talk about the real reason I got back on this blog to do a post. Over the past 5 years like I said before, when a big change or new era happens in my still young adult life, I document it on here to look back on one day. I have been given the AMAZING opportunity to take on an internship that touches in several career avenues I've prayed & dreamed of doing since I was 18 years old with an AMAZING company!

I have been with my current job for over 2 years & even though I have loved where I've worked at & been blessed with some of the most important people in my life because of that job, I was ready for a new challenge in my life. I'm pretty sure I've opened up about it on here, but my dream career is to pursue digital marketing. I've been taking online courses catering to that career path for the past couple of years & along the way, I found out other avenues that excite me & I definitely wanted to know more about.

It's been a process in the making for sure & I'm not going to lie there's been times where I've been so impatient for this next era in my life that I have questioned if this was the right career path to go down. This internship touches on local businesses, local event/convention planning, marketing, outreach, & even a little bit of digital media. 

This is a moment I have dreamed about for YEARS & it's finally here! All of my hard work, hours of online courses, & years of praying for this opportunity have finally all paid off! It's a temporary internship & I just know it's going to be the best & most growing era of my life & an AMAZING way to start off 2022!

I just wanted to document how proud I am of myself & my latest accomplishment! This is also a reminder that no matter how crazy & insane your dream sounds, PURSUE THOSE DREAMS!

I'll see you in my next podcast episode or even on this blog! In the meantime, stay blessed & I pray your dreams become a reality!