Hello.
I've received a few messages over the months about where I am, and how I'm doing, and why I don't blog anymore. I really appreciate those messages (but will refrain from listing names to protect their privacy) and I feel like I owe everyone who might stumble upon this an explanation.
I stopped blogging last year for a multitude of reasons. First, and most basic, was that I was too busy with work and other hobbies to continue writing regularly enough. I had cut back how much makeup I was buying. Since then, my makeup artist business has flourished and grown, and I was putting more focus into that and what to buy for my kit versus buying personal items for review.
Second, the blogging network, or community, is not the same as it once was. I saw the changes happening years ago and now the community has morphed into a system of whoever has the most money and the most sponsorship gets the gold. I was never interested in monetizing or getting free products, and I watched my readership and comments go steadily downward over the last few months that I blogged. It's disheartening when you put so much work into something and it feels like no one is listening. I've talked to other friends that blog, and they said they noticed a steep decline as well, so it wasn't just me. The big bloggers and Youtubers who have the sponsorship get the majority of the attention, even if a smaller blogger has more knowledge and better reviews, for example.
To piggy back off of that, and the truthful and final reason for my departure -- I got into a very scary situation with a group of really hateful people that made me have to turn everything off and go dark for a while. To make a long, personal story short, I "pissed off" a company owner who was well known in the community, who also happened to have quite a posse of women behind her at the time. I didn't do anything wrong (I've come to terms with that), but whatever I did, she latched onto me and wouldn't let go. She found out, through someone on my Facebook that was feeding her information, where I worked, where I lived, who my husband was and what other sites I had in my free time. She began stalking me. I was receiving hang up phone calls at work, sometimes with female laughter on the other end. I have screencaps of her threatening to call my boss to tell him that I was doing something online that could have made me lose my job (I can't say the details because I no longer state what I do or who I work for.) She spread lies and rumors about me within the community. I was getting threatening emails and horrible personal messages on Facebook. She even found an OLD Photobucket account of photos of me and my now ex-boyfriend and plastered them on the internet.
The final straw was when I received a screencap showing my husband's job position, full name, and where he worked including their address. Unfortunately he was searchable on Google once she had his name, because of his position within the company he worked for (he was public on many of their networking pages, such as LinkedIn.) I turned off my Facebook for a few weeks and "went dark", so to speak. I had a few close friends that were monitoring the situation and I had also told my husband to be aware at work. She eventually moved on to bothering someone else, but that still didn't change how I felt... how absolutely betrayed and scared the situation had left me. You can only protect yourself on the internet so much, but the lengths that this woman went to were terrifying.
So, here we are. I won't shut down the blog because it's here as a body of my work and I do still get a lot of hits on my lipstick and palette swatches. You just won't see any new content from me.
Thank you all for the support you've given me over the years, and your concern at my disappearance. I really do appreciate it. If you would like to follow my makeup artist work, please send me an email at turtle beauty at yahoo dot com, and I will give you information on how you can do that. I don't feel comfortable posting it publicly here, unfortunately.
- Wendy
