Three hours in the morning is not enough time to do all the things I want to do before my workday begins. For the past 29 days, I’ve published a post on my blog every day; today will be the 30th. It’s satisfying to publish here, it makes me feel like I’ve done something.
The problem is that if I blog, I don’t journal. Three hours before work seems like a lot of time, but once I’ve fed the cats, done a short bodyweight workout, meditated, emptied the dishwasher, watered Christmas trees, made coffee, eaten breakfast, and cleaned my breakfast dishes, I’ve got about 30 minutes before it’s light enough to go for a run and get me home in time to shower and start work by 8. I can easily journal and take care of a few bibs and bobs for myself in that 30 minutes. Or I can blog. I can’t do both.
These past 30 days, I’ve opted to blog. I’m starting to miss my private journaling though. I pulled out one of my fountain pens yesterday to write a check, and I couldn’t get it flowing; the nib was clotted with dry ink. I pulled out a second, and a third. All had the same problem. This makes me sad.
I either need to restructure my days to fit in both blogging and journaling, or I have to pick between the two. I haven’t decided yet which direction to go.
I’ve blogged seven days in a row. Yesterday, I had already run out of things to say. To keep going, I pulled a prompt from a reflection deck of cards, wrote for ten minutes, and published.
Today, I was tempted to just not post. But I know what happens when I don’t post: one day turns into two, then several, and next thing I know, I haven’t written in weeks because nothing seems worthwhile to write about, and even though I want to blog, the inertia of not-blogging is hard to overcome, and then it becomes a whole thing: do I blog? What will I say?
I figured today I’ll push through and post anyway, just to keep my momentum. I’ve got the energy and drive to publish, if not a topic. I’ll just put my keys on the keyboard and let them go.
This morning as I unloaded the dishwasher, I listened to the How to build a happy life podcast’s season finale, where they talk with someone from one of the world’s longest running study on happiness, with data going back to 1938. The study has followed people through all stages of life. The researchers have found patterns of what shows up for the happiest people. They’ve asked people at the end of life about their greatest regrets. I had to stop every couple of minutes to take notes, and the five main notes I took were these:
Take care of your body like you’re gonna need it til you’re 100 (1st of 2 shared traits of happiest people).
The happiest — and healthiest — people are the ones with lots of social connections, of all types, including intimate partners, friends, and work and casual relationships (2nd of 2 shared traits of happiest people).
Maturity is marked by not pushing love away, whether through negligence or actively rejecting it. Love is most important thing, at all stages of life. Cultivate it, welcome it.
As you age: stay engaged with the world. Garden, find community. Stay physically, intellectually, and socially active.
Quote from Joseph Campbell: “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on somebody else’s path.” Meaning, you’re likely following “shoulds” and others’ expectations, not your own. It’s okay and even good for the path ahead of you to be unclear.
I feel like there are topics here to explore more fully in future blog posts if I keep pushing through. If you’re also struggling to blog and these spark anything for you, I’d love to read what you have to say about them.
A fellow blogger, bone&silver, wondered the other day if quick, visual media like Instagram and TikTok have stolen us from WordPress and word-based-blogging. I’ve thought about her post almost every day since I read it two weeks ago. I was struck particularly by her observation not that we are all scrolling and consuming these quick reels these days — I think we can all agree we do that — but that bloggers aren’t blogging as much. I hadn’t quite put that together until she stated it so plainly.
At least three-quarters of my favourite bloggers have either stopped altogether and disappeared, or else just post once a month or so.
– bone&silver
I, too, had stopped blogging. Her post motivated me to start again. Like many bloggers, I’m on again off again with publishing. I’ll go on a several-day streak, and then I’ll dry up and stop, sometimes for weeks or months. Or I’ll publish sporadically when the mood strikes. The mood has struck since reading her post, and I’m leaning into it while it lasts.
I’m not on Facebook or TikTok, but I do scroll Instagram. What I get from it is fleeting. I see a cat or sheep video that makes me giggle, or a photo of a friend that makes me happy to see their face again, and get a snapshot of where they are in their life. And those things are good! But I don’t get a lot of insight into thoughts or feelings, and most of what I consume doesn’t stick with me or make me think. Words take more time, but I like their depth and meaning.
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.
I generated a lot of negative self-talk about my writing in 2021. I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to. I don’t know what to write about. I write about the same things over and over again. I write too much about myself. I’m boring. I don’t write anything useful/interesting/thought-provoking/beautiful.
And so on.
In 2021, I also listened to a lot of podcasts about happiness. Because, see first paragraph. I was on the rowing machine at the aquatic center in December when a particular episode on how to squash negative self-talk made me stop rowing to pause the podcast and take notes. The advice I noted was this:
Monitor negative self-talk
Dispute
Affirm
I felt bad again last week about my writing rut. Yesterday, when I wrote my Reading in 2021 post, I thought about my writing in 2021. I remembered the advice from the podcast, and I wondered: what did I actually write in 2021 compared to the stories I tell myself about my writing? Can I dispute my negative self-talk with evidence? And if so, what’s a more positive story I can tell myself?
The first story I tell myself: I didn’t write much
One of the stories I tell myself is that, aside from my journals, I didn’t write much last year. I don’t blog like I did in my early blogging years, before I was, you know, employed full time.
Gathering evidence on “did I write much?” is pretty easy. The first step is to remember that I also write at work. I can grab annual stats* on word counts and posts published for my blog, we have similar stats at work (because I work for the company that makes WordPress.com), and I can calculate how much I wrote by hand during the year based on the number of pages I filled and how many words I average per page. Here’s what I found:
Personal
Professional
Handwritten pages filled 590
Handwritten pages filled 150
Handwritten words 265,000
Handwritten words 54,000
Blog posts 84
Blog posts 647
Published words 34,000
Published words 258,000
Total words written 299,000
Total words written 312,000
Words I wrote in 2021
The evidence shows that it is true I didn’t publish much on my personal blog compared to how much I journaled, but I still published 84 posts, which averages to about 7 per month. That’s not bad considering I work full time, I suppose. The word count of my blog posts is equivalent to the length of a novella.
The evidence also shows that I write a lot for work. Objectively, I would say that 258,000 words qualifies as writing much. For a sense of scale, that’s more words than Moby Dick (206,052) or Crime and Punishment (211,591), though of course, not as much as Lonesome Dove (365,712) or Anna Karenina (349,736) (reference). Sure, some of those work-related posts and words are meeting notes or notices of when I’ll be out of the office, but it’d be too much effort to remove those, and they are relevant for work: they are written communication, which is essential in a distributed workplace.
In total, I wrote approximately 611,000 words in 2021, which is more than the entire Lord of the Rings series (576,459), including The Hobbit.
Affirmation: I write a lot. Even if it’s not high literature or published work, writing is like breathing: I do it without realizing it.
The second story I tell myself: what I write isn’t great
I realize I am comparing the word counts of my personal journals, hobby blog posts, and work-related memos to great works of literature. This is not lost on me. It feeds into the second story I tell myself about my writing, which is that I don’t write the kind of stuff I like to read. What that really means is that is that I’m not an amazing epic writer. I am not a story-teller, I don’t have the imagination to craft narrative arcs, create characters, go deep with ideas and produce great works of art.
I don’t have evidence to dispute this. I especially don’t have evidence to dispute this if I’m comparing what I write to the novels and short stories that awe me. I really have to deal with this one, though, because otherwise I’ll never be happy with what I write.
If I go deeper, and identify what moves me in the art I admire, I think it comes down to three main things: connection (I can relate to what the artist presents and so feel connected to them or to humanity or to something bigger than all of us), awe (that such beauty and creativity exist in the world), and change (the work makes me see or think or act differently after experiencing it).
At a much smaller scale than the great artists I admire, I can look to some of my blog posts or ideas that I’m really proud of and see hints of those three elements in some of them: readers and colleagues will comment or message me that they can relate to what I wrote (thank you, it means so much when this happens ♥️) or that something I wrote was beautiful (I feel like I’ve done something good when this happens ♥️), and at work especially, I’ve written things that did effect change, like suggesting a writing coach program that has since been implemented.
Affirmation:My writing doesn’t have to be great. Sometimes what I write brings goodness to people, and that’s what I really want.
The third story I tell myself: I don’t have ideas
The final story I tell myself is that I don’t have ideas. I don’t know what to write about. I recognized myself in a book I read recently, Miss Iceland. The main character is a “real” writer, who churns out stories and poetry and novels because she is compelled to write: she is so full of ideas, she can’t not write, and everyone wants to publish what she writes.
She is not the character I identified with. Instead, the character I identified with is her poet boyfriend who spends all his time sitting around talking about writing with other would-be writers. When he realizes his girlfriend is a real writer, and comparatively he just wants to be a writer, he says to her:
The truth is I can’t think of anything to write about. I have no ideas. Nothing that’s close to my heart. Do you know what it means to be ordinary?
Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir, Miss Iceland
Ouch. I’ve written variations of those first two sentences dozens of times on my blog or in my journals. I am a cliche.
I know that a lot of what I write is just blathering about nothing, but in the 600,000 words I wrote last year, there are surely ideas, even if accidental. If I look through blog posts, I see some idea-based ones, like the benefits of journaling or how an empty morning feels full.
I think what’s really going on is that I have ideas, but it takes effort to develop those ideas. That I write at all shows I have plenty to write about. Time and mental energy are finite resources, though. If I’m worried about having publishable ideas, I need to remember my professional writing. That’s where the majority of my writing energy goes right now. My writing life at work is rich and satisfying: I outline, I sketch, I develop ideas, I think about structure and audience and outcomes, I draft, I refine, I proofread, I publish.
When I get down about not having ideas, it’s usually related to my personal writing. I need to affirm that I do have ideas, and remind myself that it takes effort to develop ideas. Having ideas and developing ideas is an important distinction. The distinctions puts me in control of how I want to use the time I carve out for my personal writing: I can continue to use all my writing time to free-write and just get stuff out, or I can allocate some of my time to developing ideas.
Affirmation:The fact that I write is evidence that I have ideas. Developing ideas requires effort that I can choose to dedicate if I’d like to. I dedicate considerable energy for publishable work to my professional writing. Also, Miss Iceland is a fictitious character.
What’s next
These issues are not new: I’ve written about them before. I have to remember these affirmations. Also, nothing will change if I don’t change something. I started a list of writing assignments for myself rather than using random prompts that don’t inspire me. I’ll change up my practice and see what happens.
*If you have a blog on WordPress.com and want to check your annual stats on how much you wrote, log into your account and go to wordpress.com/stats/day/annualstats/[yoursiteaddress]. For example, when I’m logged into my account, I can see my stats at wordpress.com/stats/day/annualstats/andreabadgley.blog.
I seem to be having personal problems with calendars and scheduling this week. So much for my 1-day buffer for lining up and editing blog posts. I accidentally published two posts yesterday right on top of each other. One of those – the one about me misreading my calendar — was intended for today, but consistent with the content of the post, I calendared wrong.
I was glad to have an extra day to keep working on that post because I wasn’t sure I was happy with it, then I got a notification that it had published, so so much for that. Good thing I don’t care about whether something is in good shape for publishing.
I guess this is one of those reminders from the universe to not get too comfortable with the control I think I have.
Butterfly Mind 