My best friend’s mama is an incredibly crafty person. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s created such beautiful things and she’s only gotten better and more detailed with time.

When I first became a teacher, she made me a customized teacher handbag with ALL THE POCKETS, which I *still* use to this day. When we moved out to the east coast, she made me a warm, fuzzy blanket that is still sitting on our couch for those extra cold nights. Before Ishaan was born, she made him beautiful blankets and burp cloths that have lasted longer than the ones we bought online.

All this to say, every time she gifts me something, my first instinct is to tell her, “THIS IS AMAZING. YOU SHOULD SELL THIS STUFF. PEOPLE WOULD BUY THIS STUFF.”

To which she always responds, “If I did that, I wouldn’t love doing it anymore. I just want to keep this a hobby so I continue to love it.”
For a while I didn’t understand it. Probably because I didn’t have hobbies of my own. Or not any that would make me any money, haha. But now her response resonates deeply.

When we first moved out to Tennessee, I was lucky enough to find a job. Still, I had a LOT of down time and my infrequent blogging became daily blogging. I had themes (“Things I’m Loving” Thursday and “Confessions of a Bloggerholic” on Wednesday and “Scenes from my Weekend” on Mondays). I LOVED IT SO MUCH.

Writing became my therapy. The whole process of getting a cup of coffee, sitting down at my computer, and writing and writing and writing. Sometimes people would comment on a post and it would make me so excited that there was a receiving end to my words. That I wasn’t just documenting my day-to-day life but that there were people who chose to come to my website to SEE what was going on in my day-to-day life.

Over time, a few people had suggested that I monetize my blog. Turn it into a side hustle. They said that I had a bit of a following and if I’m going to write as often as I do, I might as well make some money out of it.

Well, with a husband in medical school and me making a teacher’s salary (and in a small town in Tennessee at that, so literally pennies), I jumped at the idea. A side hustle sounded perfect.

I signed up for a course. Paid money to get some fun, eye-catching logos and widgets for my blog. I spent hours and hours and hours on the dashboard of WordPress trying to understand how to navigate the whole thing. I even purchased an SEO software that would help me optimize my key words in my posts so that they would pop up on the first or second page of Google should anyone Google those specific words.

The people leading the course told me to let go of those day-to-day posts and hone in on something specific. They told me to focus on education and leave the rest behind.

I began to write posts about how to support students in the classroom. I included affiliate links in these posts. Links to things that teachers could purchase that would be helpful for them and would also land me a couple of bucks each time an item was purchased.

What’s crazy is that as a teacher myself, I, personally, would never buy the stuff I promoted online. I would find workarounds to spending this kind of money. I wasn’t being genuine. If I were being genuine, I would say, “Hey teacher! Don’t buy this shit online. You can recycle XYZ and make THIS. DO THAT! SAVE YOUR MONEY. YOU HAVE NONE!”

After a couple months of this, I felt like I lost myself. I was spending SO MUCH TIME on learning how to optimize my keywords to show up in search engines. SO MUCH TIME resizing photos and making them fit. SO MUCH TIME doing everything else BUT writing. Which is what I enjoyed the most.

So, yeah. Now when Mama Albert tells me she wants to keep her hobby a hobby and not try to profit off of it, I GET IT. I took my sacred, therapeutic time and turned it into a stressful, high pressure situation. And it didn’t have to be like that.

Luckily, I let that shit go. It wasn’t sustainable to teach while doing this little side hustle. I chose the teaching. Because I cared about that more. And the side hustle dissolved and I returned to writing. Simply writing. And I’m so much happier for it.

If you’ve been following Eat Teach Blog for a while, thank you for being here. And for putting up with the weird changes this site has gone through.

But I’m grateful to be back to the mundane day-to-day stuff because that’s what I love sharing the most most most.

(If you don’t already, you can follow me over on Facebook or Instagram where I share a bit more frequently than I do over here.)