Why my travel blog was a successful “failure”, and entering a new chapter of writing

Hello, world! It’s me, Alissa. How sweet and nostalgic it feels to be blogging again, after so much time.

To start with a quick introduction, my name is Alissa Murray, and welcome to my website. I envision this space as a place to store thoughts, projects, and other ideas on the topics nearest and dearest to my heart, namely: sustainability, everything and anything related to culture (travel, languages, and beyond), and more broadly the experience of being human. I am a 30-something professional working across the fields of sustainability and sustainable/international development. In my free time I can typically be found sweaty and smiley on the dance floor, walking up a mountain somewhere, or if I’m lucky, traveling. In general, I find little more satisfying than connecting and conversing with others, hearing people’s stories, and learning how people interact with the world in different contexts. I strongly value compassion as a vehicle for building a more sustainable world.

Although that’s me in a nutshell, I invite you to explore my bio or projects for more information about my work. For now, though, I would like to talk about what brought me here in the first place. If you’re reading this right now, you may know me personally. You may also know me from In Locamotion, the travel blog that I maintained for about four years. A lot of important aspects of my life would not have panned out the way they did, were it not for In Locamotion. So, regardless of how you arrived, welcome. Let’s talk about my best “failure” yet, my dear travel blog.

In Locamotion: a blog born through crisis and nourished with love

If you have ever been in your twenties, you may recall how it feels to be lost and not know how to find your way through many critical aspects of the human experience: work, love, and life generally. This was certainly my experience in my early twenties: young and ambitious, but struggling through jobs that weren’t right for me, wondering if this was “it”, if dissatisfaction was what adulthood had in store for me.

At the time, while I was contemplating giving up working in environmental science and planning a typical millennial experience of quitting my job to go travel the world, I decided, on a whim, to start blogging. Why not? I planned, purchased, and built my website, delighting in the technicality and creativity involved in starting with nothing and ending with a creation, a website. The site established, I started writing again after a long absence. Although all of the content related to travel, it proved an opportunity for me to center my values and try, in a very small way, to use my platform to make the world a better place. In Locamotion developed as a travel blog focused on the intersection of travel with sustainability and social justice. And over the next four years, I wrote.

Being a travel blog, I wrote about travel, sure – there are a few articles there about things to do, or places to see. But what I truly loved writing were the vulnerable, honest, and difficult essays and stories. I wrote essays analyzing different things that I saw or experienced in travel from a social justice perspective, trying to educate readers on important topics such as feminism, gender, race, and more, and how these relate to travel. I began picking apart different aspects of the travel industry, because the more time I spent “working” within the industry the stronger my opinions became about it. But my favorite posts were my travel narratives, in which I tried to take the reader traveling with me, detailing moments in time and attempting to capture the richness of the sights, sounds, conversations, and experiences that I lived while traveling.

In Locamotion was an important creative outlet for me for many years. It also opened up my world in new and unexpected ways. Perhaps most surprising was how it impacted my professional development. Although a personal project, it showed my commitment to working on issues like sustainability and social justice; this not only helped guide my subsequent career choices, but I believe my blog was an also important factor in helping me get my first job in sustainability, kickstarting my career. My blog brought me to travel conferences, connecting me with my now dear friend and colleague Vincie Ho, with whom I’ve since collaborated to develop educational content on sustainable travel for the RISE Travel Institute. It even fundamentally impacted me socially, introducing me to strangers across the world, one of whom has become one of my best friends today.

For four years, I blogged with my whole heart and soul. My blog was infinitely personal to me – my baby, my pride. The funny thing about pride, though, is that it’s a deadly sin for a reason. While I always loved and valued the platform as a whole, over the years I grew frustrated with certain aspects of maintaining In Locamotion. I would become upset after spending a tremendous amount of time and energy writing pieces that, at the end of the day, very few people actually read. I especially disliked the “backend” work of blogging – the constant need to be on social media, promoting the brand, building an audience – all of which was even more time-consuming than actually writing content. Fundamentally, though, I realized that after four years my website just hadn’t seen the growth that I wanted for it. This, to me, was a problem.

Why In Locamotion “failed”: from persistence to hiatus to archive

As I was approaching my four-year blogiversary, in the fall of 2019, I had a moment of reckoning with In Locamotion. I took a step back and asked myself, “Okay, if I want people to read this content that I’m working so hard to create, what do I actually need to do?”

For those who don’t blog, it may surprise you to know that blogging is actually much like a business. Successful blogs are “customer”-oriented. They start by asking, “what does my reader need?” And then content is created that is tailored to meet that need.

The “customer” of a travel blog is a traveler, who is looking for help traveling. I realized that (ironically, for someone with a travel blog) my interest was not in helping others travel. In fact, the more time I spent in the travel industry, the more this idea started to feel antithetical to my values. What I really cared about, I realized, was telling stories. I liked using travel as a medium to think about being human, and how it relates to things like love, loneliness, connection-building, and cultural exchange. The last blog post I wrote on In Locamotion was a delight to write, in which I mused about the experiencing of looking at a volcano in Antigua, Guatemala for the first time in a few years, and what that experience taught me about maturity and personal growth. I still think it’s a beautiful concept. But that post will never have strong SEO (Search Engine Optimization, for the non-bloggers in the room) and will never rank in Google. Someone curious might read it, but most likely, a visitor to my site looking for information about Antigua, Guatemala wants information about things to do, or places to stay. Not reflective essays about volcanos and growth.

I was not writing for the consumer; I was writing for me. I tried to twist the content I was truly interested in writing to fit under the travel umbrella, but a lot of my writing just wasn’t travel blog content. I knew that if I wanted it to be read, I would have to change my approach. But I stubbornly did not want to change In Locamotion, because a change of this magnitude would alter it fundamentally, including altering the underlying values that drive the site. That didn’t feel like the right option, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I decided to take a break. I planned to take the rest of the year off, and regroup in 2020. But in January of 2020 I still needed more time, and then March of 2020 rolled around and we all know what happened then. It seemed like fate that the project was meant to conclude. So I let it conclude, without fear or regret, and decided to leave In Locamotion online so those who did find it could still read it, and hopefully benefit from the content. For me, it was a weight off my chest; clearly, it was the right time to say goodbye.

Then to now: on accepting “giving up”, and new beginnings as a writer

Since concluding In Locamotion, I have not looked back. But at times it felt hard to justify the decision to others, strangely. I think culturally, especially here in the United States, there can be a lot of stigma around giving up on a project, especially a passion project that was so important to me for so long. We have an ingrained mentality of infinite persistence until we realize our hard-earned gains; in this view, In Locamotion could have been successful, as long as I tried hard enough.

But concluding In Locamotion was an act of love. It was an acceptance of the fact that what I had tried was not working, and without fundamental change, would continue to produce the same results. It was also an acknowledgement that success can be measured in many different ways, and sometimes to be successful we have to let go of what no longer serves us. Furthermore, although I didn’t know it at the time, concluding In Locamotion was a means of opening myself up to whatever would come next, creating space where there was none for the next important thing in my life.

It took more than two years, but now I am here. Not quite a blog, definitely not a brand. Not focused on travel, not limited by narrow categories. In Locamotion taught me the value, both personally and professionally, of having a space to write about the things that I care about the most, and I plan to do that here. If my readers are 3 friends, my mother, and my grandmother, then so be it (thanks to you all for being here!). And if you don’t belong to any of those groups and you happened to stumble across this page and read down to this paragraph, then I want to thank you, wholeheartedly, for being here too.

And a final thank you to In Locamotion, without which I would not be here today. It helped shape who I am, how I have developed, and how I express myself. I will forever be grateful for its impact on my life; it is, without a doubt, my most successful failure to date.