We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kristen Rhoda. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kristen below.

Kristen , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

Absolutely. I can’t believe I let fear get the best of me.

Kristen , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

When I first started blogging, I was a junior in college, and I was terrified. There were so many what-if questions that were weighing me down, like “what if no one reads what I write? What if I never gain an audience? What if no one sponsors me? What if no one supports me or cares to share my writing?” I kept worrying about this all the time, and I felt hopeless at first. What I didn’t think about at the time is that if doing something truly makes you happy, it should be

I thought about all the advice I had been given throughout my life. As I write this story, I think about what my senior year choir teacher told me. “The only way to do it is to do it,” she told me. This advice helped me so much as I put myself out of my comfort zone to go after the things that made me happy. I always knew from childhood that I wanted to share my words and voice with everyone. I didn’t exactly know how I was going to do that back then and I was very afraid, but whether it would be through music, writing, or speaking, I knew I wanted to reach people and inspire them. This is what led me to start the first version of my blog on Weebly. After some discouragement, I took the site down, took a break, and relaunched it on WordPress. I enjoyed creating and expanding the site, and had many plans to make it into a huge, active website. Unfortunately, balancing between school and the blog took a toll on my mental health, and I decided that the best thing to do was to delete the site. I was very upset, and I felt like a failure for several months.

However, what I discovered later, when I finally became more ambitious about writing new projects and creating content, was that sometimes working towards your goals may lead you to do things you never would have imagined attempting. This is how I fell in love with podcasting. During my fourth year of college, I took a podcasting course. The first semester, I had a huge failure due to mental health issues. I did not record a single track. The second semester, I retook the course and was encouraged by my professors and classmates to forgive myself and try again. I teamed up with a classmate, who I’m so happy to be able to call a good friend, made four episodes of an unreleased podcast about the dangers of diet culture. For the final exam, we had to make our own solo podcasts. I was nervous about doing a podcast without my new friend, but during that time I had fallen back in love with reading and started blogging about books on Instagram. This led to the idea of doing podcast reviews of books. I only had to do one episode for the final, but falling in love with podcasting, something I was originally too shy to pursue, led me to making seven episodes of a podcast called “The K.A.R. Recap,” which is now on every platform and has been streamed in 16 states and 10 countries. I don’t have a huge number of downloads, but I’m so proud of these episodes, and I’m happy that I got out of my comfort zone and made this leap. Now, I’m planning to turn the podcast into a book club, and I’m so excited to continue this journey. I couldn’t be more grateful for every professor, classmate, friend, and family member that helped and encouraged me along the way.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

No matter how big or small of an audience we build, it’s about the fact that doing this makes us HAPPY. To this day, I’m still scared to promote myself, but I enjoy blogging and podcasting so much that it doesn’t really bother me anymore. It’s not even about followers or popularity to me anymore. That was all I wanted when I was younger, because I had few friends and felt mostly unloved and unsupported. Now that I’m an adult, I see that the beauty of creating is that we ALL make our communities beautiful no matter how many people see us.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

If you want support, support others. Sometimes it’s discouraging when people you know aren’t really supporting your work as much, but you can’t expect them to be intentional when you yourself aren’t being intentional.

Contact Info:

• Website: linktr.ee/kristenrhoda
• Instagram: @k.a.r.blog

Image Credits
Rosette Whitehurst-Cromartie