I'm Kalina, and this is my blog.

There will always be people ready to tell you how to do things like - ahem - blog. And there will always be you, who can tell them to shove their well-intended advice and go on doing your own lovely thing.

I once had a blog, and the blog had a lot of rules. Because that's the way things work, I guess. If you want to start a blog, you Google "starting a blog" and there are all kinds of people ready to boss you into exactly how to do it. They have pretty PDFs full of journal questions: who is your target audience? What's your visual theme? What's your primary purpose?

And me, being a person who likes rules and likes doing things right, as I imagine lots of people do, I gave my answers to the questions. And I tried to make my blog the things I said it was going to be, only it didn't work. It didn't work because I hated it. And so I stopped blogging.

“And I tried to make my blog the things I said it was going to be, only it didn't work. It didn't work because I hated it. And so I stopped blogging.”

When I think of creativity and output, Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my favorite examples. Of course she's wildly popular, but it's not that. It's because she was a western men's magazine writer when she decided to write the memoir of her world travels, which just happened to turn out to become one of the most trendy women's books about finding oneself.

It's not like she set out to write a trendy women's book - she was a men's magazine writer, for Pete's sake. But then, after Eat Pray Love? Anyone would have been paralyzed by the success of what she'd just accomplished. She was a women's writer now. A women's memoir writer. And at first, she wrote a sequel.

But then she wrote another fiction novel, this time about a main character obsessed with moss. Was it because Gilbert's agent told her that women were wild about moss these days that she dove into investigating the plant world for her next book? Doubtful. It's because she followed what the hell she wanted to do instead of going with all the outside advice I'm sure was constantly buzzing around her head.

She won big, but still managed to do what she wanted. (Then in 2015, she wrote a book on creativity called Big Magic where she reflected on all this and I totally recommend you check it out, along with her boss Ted Talk.)

So one day recently, I noticed that all the blogs I was following were very unlike the blog I said I would create, the prison of a blog I hated. And I thought "Hmm. Perhaps other people would like something different from my stunted blog of many rules which I don't post on anyway."

And I hope you do, but one way or the other, I know I'm hella ready for something different. ;-) Welcome.