Our dining area with DIY African wax print wall art

Our dining area with DIY African wax print wall art

 

I’m alive.

Not writing on this blog for more than a month feels like forever in internet years.

I know you’ve been looking for me. To readers who care and emailed to ask if I stopped blogging: I’m still here. I did not leave.

This space will not disappear. It’s my baby. It’s my life. It’s my freedom. It’s another proof that dreams do happen.

I’m still here. I’m still traveling. But sometimes, I have to get away from it all to remember why I started doing this. And I remember: I don’t want to be tied to a desk and I want the freedom to only do things that make me happy.

Traveling. Reading books. Watching movies. Learning new skills/stuff. Improving my German. Throwing dinner parties. Spending time with people I love. Cooking delicious food. Obsessing over beautiful furniture and interior design. Dancing like I have all the time in the world.

And sometimes blogging ties me to a desk. Answering emails, fixing technical problems, a lot of admin stuff I hate to do etc. It’s funny because I probably spend 5% of my time blogging and 95% maintaining stuff behind the scenes. Okay, that’s not funny. And that’s not always fun.

This is why I needed to step away and reassess my life and how I spend my time. Because the past months I feel like I am prioritizing things that are generally useless and not bringing me anything good. I also think I spend too much time on social media. Don’t get me wrong, I love social media and interacting with you guys there but I think I spend too much time updating my Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and not so much updating this blog itself. Is that bad? Probably not. But I would actually prefer to update this blog more.

But then another thing hits me: writer’s block. I have all this stories in my head but when I sit down to write them, I couldn’t write a single word. I don’t know how to start. It’s midnight and I am furiously typing because I suddenly felt the impulse to just start writing. I have this weird fear that if I don’t write anything RIGHT NOW then the hours will roll into days, the days into weeks and the weeks into months.

It has happened already. Five weeks have passed since my last post here. That scares me. It could easily roll into two months anytime soon.

And so here I am trying to live out the confusions until they become clear.

Part of the confusion is the fact that I am a very well-rounded person who has many interests in life besides travel.

I am a bon vivant. A postmodern polymath. Call me pretentious for saying so I don’t care. I believe it anyway and that’s all that matters.

For instance, I am currently furnishing and decorating our first ever apartment that we have lived in for more than 6 months in the last 5 years. I have always been interested in interior design but I didn’t know I would be so obsessed with it until I had to actually furnish our entire apartment. These days I buy more vases than shoes. I spend too much time on Pinterest searching for DIY ideas.

I am also currently obsessed with food and cooking and throwing dinners/BBQs with friends. I just finished watching the latest season of Master Chef and I want to be a great cook like those home cooks in the show. My cooking style is ill-cook-whats-in-the-fridge which means I always come up with something new. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s meh like this avocado-lime cheesecake that crumbled because I didn’t put enough coconut oil.

I want to blog about these things because they excite me and they make me really happy.

I don’t always want to talk about travel. It sometimes makes me sick of it. When all you do is travel, write about travel and consume travel content like I do (or most travel bloggers do), I think you will get sick of it too. It’s a different thing though when you just start falling in love with travel. You want everything to be travel travel TRAVEL! I’ve been there myself. Most of you reading this don’t travel as much as I do so I hope you’re not sick of reading about my travels!

Anyway. I feel like I can’t talk about all these obsessions here because I have such a strong brand about European travel and doing so would drive readers away. I don’t know. Would that drive you away? What do you think about reading such content on this blog?

Sometimes I think I should just write about stuff I want to write about. This is my freaking blog anyway and I have all the editorial freedom to choose what I write about. And it’s my life. I want to talk about my life here. Every exciting and not so exciting bits of it. But the more new readers I get every month, the more pressure I feel about writing only stuff about European travel. Because isn’t that what most of you came here for? To get ideas about your dreams of traveling to Europe?

Oh the irony of having an audience of almost 40,000 a month and not writing about other things I would love to write about.

Besides travel, I am currently obsessed with interior design, food and cooking, language learning, style and learning new skills/stuff. But can I combine them all here? Or should I start another blog instead? Is that what they call a lifestyle blog? Or is it something like personal development blog? Does it matter?

These things simmer in my head. They paralyzed me.

And so the hours rolled into days, the days into weeks and the weeks into a month. I allowed it. I wanted to live a normal life without blogging.

I traveled to Kosice, Slovakia, a new city and a new country for me. I met my friends from all over Europe and had an Erasmus reunion in Warsaw. I traveled to Italy twice. I finished reading In One Person by John Irving, Could Atlas by David Mitchell and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I felt so inspired and happy to be reading books again.

I watched a lot of movies and finally finished watching the last season of Modern Family. I am currently watching the latest seasons of Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model. Guilty pleasures! I am still looking for other interior design shows besides HGTV’s Design Star. Do you know any?

I finished decorating my office/guest room. I have thrown BBQs on our balcony, a dozen dinner parties and hosted a number of friends visiting from the Philippines, Lebanon, Sweden, Belgium, Spain and Germany. They came to see me in this random German city I lived in. I love my friends.

Most importantly, I spent a lot of time with the man who allows me to do all these crazy things.

And in between juggling all my current obsessions and spending time with people I love, I realize what I needed to do and what I needed to focus on.

I need to keep doing things that make me happy.

You are supposed to do only what you want to do. The world is vast and full of possibilities. Follow your bliss.

I’m alive.

I’m happy. And I’m back!

DJ Yabis is the poster boy of Dream Euro Trip and a modern day renaissance man. Originally from the Philippines, he loves throwing dinner parties and stalking rock stars in music festivals. Subscribe or follow his adventures LIVE on Facebook or Instagram. Learn how to plan your own eurotrip.

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