Blogging about blogging

Two good friends of mine blogged about blogging this week, and they inspired me to get off my butt and publish again. They made me miss my blog. This space has been my companion for ten years; I published my first post in June of 2012.

I haven’t always written on a regular cadence. In 2013 I published 159 posts; in 2019 only 38. At the beginning of the year, or a month, or a particularly motivated period, I’ll tell myself, “I’m going to blog every day!” or “I’m going to publish three times a week” or whatever my goal du jour is.

I rarely meet those goals. Or I meet them and then am like, thank God that’s done, and then I abandon my blog because it had become a chore and I need a break.

It’s funny, I consider myself to be a routine-oriented person. I rely on routine to give structure to my days. When I look at my actual behavior, though, it seems I’m constantly changing things. If someone were to ask about my daily routine, I’d tell them I write in the morning. But these past few weeks, I’ve hardly written at all; I’ve used mornings to work out (because I didn’t get an A on my health assessment), edit photos (because I’ve suddenly gotten super into photography again), and meditate (because I need to chill). So though I think of mornings as my writing time, really, mornings are just my me time.

My pre-chill self might have worried about this, that I’m not writing enough, that I’m not writing like I “should” be. But when I observe reality, what has ultimately happened over the years is that I write when I want to write; I blog when I feel a wild hair to blog. I don’t need to trade in my pens because my camera suddenly has my attention; I’ll always come back to words.