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.
It used to be that I was able to put aside self-consciousness about publishing on my blog. I published unpolished random writing exercises, outtakes of nothings on my mind, vignettes of a woman sweeping her walk at the beach.
Sometime in the recent past, maybe in the last year or so, that has changed. I have theories. One is that I feel repetitive. Another is that I got self-conscious about other people reading what I wrote. A third is that I questioned my motives — why do I need these words to be public instead of private? A final one, and probably the biggest one of 2020 — since the pandemic began, and since I began waking up to the misogyny, white supremacy, and racism that are still very much alive in the US, and since my mind is almost exclusively occupied by work and the disgraceful and horrifying state of our country and leadership — is that everything else feels insignificant in comparison.
Because of this recent self-consciousness, I haven’t been blogging much. What I’ve discovered from this is that when I don’t blog, I feel like my psychic arteries are clogged. There’s something about getting words out — not just out of my body but out into the world — that unblocks me. I guess this is what is meant by self-expression, though I don’t really know what I’m expressing when I blog. I don’t have a big message to share with the world (a fifth reason for my self-consciousness). This isn’t art, I’m not inspiring big thoughts, there’s no layered meaning to my posts, I’m not changing anyone’s life. Blogging just somehow serves as a release, like opening the windows when you’ve been shut up inside for too long.
I want my windows open. I have been shut up inside for too long.
To unclog my psychic arteries and open the windows for my pacing soul, I want to blog more, and I want to blog comfortably again, in my own skin, despite self-consciousness. To help get me out of my rut, I looked into fresh options to inspire me. I found the Brainsparker app. I used a couple of the free prompts with success, and I wanted more. They have a variety of “card packs”, including a blogger’s pack, and I was curious — what kinds of creative prompts would a blogger’s pack include? They already have a journaling pack and a writer’s pack. I wondered how Brainsparker creators perceive blogging and what kinds of prompts they thought fitting for bloggers.
When I found samples of cards from the blogger’s pack, I understood. The prompts are titles like “The best 10 ways to improve XYZ” or “The single best way to get good at XYZ.” These make me think of Buzzfeed headlines or blog posts written by companies who use blogging as part of their content strategy. I forgot that blogs can be monetized, and these are the types of titles that drive traffic, and that this is what many people think about when they think about blogging.
Needless to say, that’s not the type of blogging I do, and I suspect many of you reading also see blogging as something bigger than clickbaity headlines: blogging is writing, journaling, thinking, philosophizing, opining, sharing, teaching, expressing. The existence of this blogger’s pack and the type of prompts it provides got me to thinking about blogging in general, and what it means, and what people do it for, and what I do it for.
And here we are at a blog post wherein I realize I blog to express and release and breathe fresh air and unclog my psychic arteries. So I guess Brainsparker worked :). I definitely don’t need that blogger’s pack of prompts, but they have other packs to spark creativity that I am curious about, including colors, quotes, and a what if? pack that looks fun. There’s also a pack for photographers, and the prompts look like they might be good for writers, too.
I want to preserve this space for hope and beauty, and this post is my first step in unblocking myself to do that. For now I’ll continue to seek external inspiration and prompts until stuff starts flowing on its own. I cracked open own my prompt box again. I haven’t published anything I’ve written from the prompts, but maybe I should start, just to get me over the hump of, It’s okay to not write about the big stuff; it’s okay to write about the mundane, and maybe even beauty in the mundane, to for the very purpose of bringing a little light despite the big stuff.
The self-doubt is creeping in. I’ve published 12 blog posts in a row, all written on the fly with minimal editing, and with rare exception, minimal planning. I get up, I write, I publish.
I needed to break out of a rut. I was writing privately, a lot of nothing, and frankly, I was trying too hard. I was putting pressure on myself to write a cerain way, to write a certain type, to write meaningfully, to write big ideas, to provoke thought, to write something different, to go beyond myself. I felt like I was pressing against an elastic wall, and private writing wasn’t helping me break through.
Then I said the hell with it. This isn’t working for me. I’ve got to get out of my notebooks. I’ll just write. I’ll write on my blog, and maybe sometimes something good will come out.
And for the first few days that was good. And I was good. I started getting streak notices: You’re on a 3-day streak on Butterfly Mind! Then 6-day, 10-day, 12-day. Today will be 13.
Then I made the mistake of reading my posts and I’m like, who cares? Why would I publish this instead of just hiding it safely in my journal?
I mean, I know why I did it. I know why I do it even though it’s lot safer inside my elastic-walled bubble. I am more disciplined, and I examine my work more closely when what I write might actually be read. Sometimes I even choose better words for the published post than the ones I used in the first draft. Sometimes I like what I wrote enough to give it that much care. When I publish, I’m working on the craft of writing in a way I don’t when I just dump my brain in a journal.
Still, I second guess. I see all the flaws, the mediocrity, the lack of action, or tension, or point. I try to remember that perfection is not the goal, but improvement is. If I keep writing, sometimes something special will happen.
Sometime last year I decided I wanted to separate my interests onto different blogs: one for sailing, one for gardening, one for favorite words, one for my career, and one for my reading project. I’m not sure why I did this. I think I wanted to be able to give them all different looks. I really loved the theme I chose for my sailing blog, for example. I think I also wanted to give followers a chance to follow a specific topic rather than my whole mess of flitting posts.
What ended up happening, though, was that I stopped writing. I felt segmented. I spread my (sparse) posts widely but rarely went deep. Each time I wrote something, I wondered which blog to put it on. When I switched jobs I had to remember all the places to update my bio. I had all these custom domains and subdomains to maintain and renew.
Having multiple blogs is overly complicated in an area of my life that I want to be complication-free. Blogging is my hobby, for pete’s sake. WordPress allows me to categorize for when I want to look at a stream of garden or sailing posts. There is no need for me to manage six different blogs.
So, as with many areas of my life, like switching to a tiny purse, I’m paring down. Decluttering. From now on, other than my Andrea Reads America project writeups, I’m moving all my writing back to Butterfly Mind.
I feel lighter having made this choice. It means I have a lot fewer decisions I have to make each time I sit down to write. Plus it gives me a winter project.
This January when I’m craving green leaves and bright flowers, I can turn my attention to cultivating my blog: to transplanting content, pruning categories, and maybe even changing the look of my site. Oh, and writing. I’m excited about my blog again for the first time in a quite a while.
Butterfly Mind 