Our company’s CEO has shared that WordPress exists because of the power of one: one comment on one blog post led to the creation of the software that powers more than 42% of the internet. The creation of that open-source software led to the creation of the company I now work for, which employs nearly 2000 people around the world, all working from home or coworking spaces of their choosing — we have no headquarters or central offices. And this company, and my job with it, has changed my life in deep and personal and beautiful ways. All from one comment on one blog post.
Though my experiences are smaller than that — I haven’t created anything world-changing — I do continuously marvel at the impact a small interaction or a single piece of writing can have. In September, I had been in a major rut with my journaling (and blogging). Every time I picked up a pen, I felt blah about what to write about. I was tired of writing about me, and I felt bad about myself for not being able to come up with anything more creative to explore.
Then on September 18, I received the Day One (journaling app) newsletter in my email and saw these words: 20 Nature Journaling Ideas to Connect with the Natural World. It lit me up immediately. Yes! I want to connect with the natural world! Yes! I absolutely want to sit outside and describe the colors in the sky, and the sound of the wind, and the smell of pine straw warming in the sun! This blog post inspired and invigorated me. It was exactly what I needed to get me out of my writing funk.
Even better, the blog post got me outside and paying attention, day and night. I’m constantly aware of the moon now: I usually know where it will be in the sky and what phase it will be in. I watch it nearly every night and day; it was waxing gibbous a couple of days ago, and will be full tonight. When I get up and go to the pool in the morning, I soak in the starlight as I walk to my car or drive with the top down. Sometimes I draw little pictures in my journal. Sometimes I hang out in nature and forget the journaling part altogether. In either case, Kristen Webb Wright’s blog post changed me and showed me a new path for journaling, and for that I’m immensely grateful. I have it bookmarked in my browser so I can revisit it whenever I feel stuck in my writing.
If you’re a blogger, keep at it. Write that blog post you’re thinking about writing. You never know when you’ll write something that might change someone.
It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon and I’m sitting outside under the dogwood tree. It’s been weeks since I’ve pulled out my cushion and sat in the Adirondack lounger my husband made me last year. The sky is blue. Wind rustles the dry Karl Foerster grass next to me, the lemon balm, the dogwood leaves. A grasshopper just leapt out of the columbine and landed on the foot of my chair. It’s walking towards me. It’s buggy eyes are trained on mine. I hope it doesn’t jump.
I can’t concentrate for fear it will leap at my face. Writing on my lap is a challenge now because I had to stop using my left hand to keep my journal in place — I have to use it now to hold my book up as a shield. My journal slides around as my right hand tries to scribble in it. I peek over my book and the grasshopper is still staring straight at me, like it will leap any second, and even though I know it might jump, I know I will still squeal and drop my pen and bat at my face if it does. Ooh! It’s turning. Slowly. Away. And now it has sprung into the Karl Foerster grass.
The breeze feels good on the hairs behind my ears. And on my toes. I hear frogs and crickets and the soft shushing of leaves. My mums and asters look lovely in their bronzy deep red and bright October purple. End of summer bumble bees and honey bees buzz around and land on them. My husband and daughter just called out from the driveway that they’re going to get Boba and wonder if I want any. I do. They will bring it back; I don’t have to get up.
Sunlight slants through the dogwood leaves and into my right eye. The leaves aren’t as full as they were midsummer. They’ve shrunk a little and are coppery red with green spines. Sunshine glints off the rim of the glazed bird bath. The wind has died here, but I hear it ripple through the tall trees across the street, and now it has arrived. I feel a breeze on my shoulder. Little skippers dart among the flowers. The air is filled with crickets chirping. A suet cake dangles from a dogwood limb, under the canopy of autumn red and green leaves. The tree has made bright red ovoid berries. The sun is still in my eye, but it’s not too bad, it’s October.
Daily writing prompt
What details of your life could you pay more attention to?
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 leave Thursday morning for my annual Girls’ Weekend. Last week, I ended my workweek with a pile of stuff I wanted to get to but ran out of time for. Now I’ve got a three-day workweek with that pile of leftovers from last week, plus all the work of a new week, and there’s just not enough time.
I worked on Saturday to get some catchup done and to plan out my three days. As I looked at all I need to do, I made the choice to cut out exercise this week. It felt more stressful to try to tetris it in than to just skip it. But already, after two days of not running or swimming, and looking toward the rest of the week when I also won’t have time even for a walk, I feel the loss. It’s harder to focus on the positive, I feel stressed, even good stuff only gives me a momentary blip of “Oh, that’s nice” and then I’m back to “Gotta get this done.”
In addition to not exercising, I’ve also found myself not keeping up with my wellness journal these past few days. The end of the day comes, and I haven’t written down anything that made me happy during the day. Too busy. Must get through my list.
After building a habit over the past 18 months to journal things I’m grateful for or that delight me, the days feel gray and bland and all exactly the same when I don’t shine a light on the color.
It’s interesting to me to see this stark difference between what I feel like when I take care of myself and what I feel like when I don’t. In that sense, I appreciate this week of deliberate denial. I can clearly see the positive impact that physical activity and gratitude have on my sense of well-being, and the stress I feel when they’re not part of my routine.
I’ve got two more days of intense work. Then I’m off to spend four whole days marinating in good feelings. An extended weekend with my life-long girlfriends is totally worth the stress of cramming five days of work into three. Maybe we’ll even drag ourselves off the couch for a walk on the beach after our noon breakfast and before our afternoon cocktails begin. And then next week, I’ll add exercise and journaling back to my daily routine, and all will be well again.
A friend shared a TEDx talk at work the other day about success and happiness. The talk, The happy secret to better work by Shawn Achor, flipped the idea that you’ll find happiness when you find success at work. The more likely scenario is that you’ll find success at work when you find happiness.
One of my pandemic pastimes has been to learn more about the science of happiness. I’m a sucker for psychology and cognitive science, and I love that there are people who study what makes us happy. Not what we think will make us happy, but what actually does make us happy.
What Achor talks about in his talk is something that comes up again and again in the podcasts I listen to and the science of well-being course I took. Our brains trick us into thinking we’ll be happy once we have this or that external thing or circumstance in our lives. What really happens is that we might get a temporary boost in happiness from that thing, but then we get used to the success, the relationship, the shiny thing, and we go back to whatever our baseline of happiness was before.
The more realistic path to lasting happiness is to incorporate behaviors in your daily life that are known to have a lasting impact on your sense of well-being. The course I took highlights seven well-being practices, but seven is a lot to remember, and they backfire because I feel bad about myself if I don’t do all seven every day. Achor focused on five, which is an easier number of things to hold in my mind and build daily habits around:
Consider 3 things your grateful for
Journal one good thing that happened
Exercise
Meditate
Perform random acts of kindness
I like this list because it’s achievable. The item that jumped out at me, though, was the one about journaling. I journal regularly, but I was getting pretty bored with my brain dumps that often didn’t even touch on the events of the day. Journaling about good things that happen each day gives me focus when I sit down with my pen and paper, encourages me to be attentive to things that bring me joy or pleasure or contentment in my daily life — writing about them requires me to remember and pay attention to them — and helps me appreciate what I already have. Appreciation and gratitude are two of my favorite feelings, and this journaling practice helps me spend more time feeling them.
I opened my notebook to find a sticky note to myself: “Free write about the benefits of journaling.” I left it the other day when I read a chapter in the Little, Brown Handbook about journaling and felt a thrum of excitement about what I learned there. Until I read this chapter, I’d felt like journaling is the easy way out for me for writing. It’s comfortable and private and I don’t have to worry about how I write or whether the structure makes sense or if there are too many words. So journaling almost feels like cheating.
And then Little, Brown gave me this:
Indeed, journal keepers often become dependent on the process for the writing practice it gives them, the concentrated thought it encourages, and the connection it fosters between personal, private experience and public information and events.
– H. Ramsey Fowler and Jane E. Aaron, The Little, Brown Handbook
I’ve been transcribing my journals from 20 years ago to digitize them. Random entries here and there describe how I’d get mired in my thoughts and feel overwhelmed by them if I didn’t write. I developed a habit of pouring my thoughts onto paper so they wouldn’t confuse me and wrap in on themselves and make a tangled knot in my brain. I developed a habit I’ve become dependent on.
I became dependent on journaling as a way to sift through my thoughts, to express my feelings, to examine my troubles. Journaling has built a way for me to process the world via the written word. I remember when my brain scared me because it was such a mess in there. It made me feel panicky, and I wish I could go back and give 25 year-old me a hug. I rarely feel those snarls in my brain anymore, and I credit my journal for that. It’s almost like a part of my hygiene routine: I brush my teeth, wash and comb my hair, and journal.
If unsnarling the thoughts in my head was where the benefits of journaling ended, it would be enough. I’m that grateful to it. But it goes deeper than that. Writing doesn’t just untangle the thoughts in my brain to keep things a little smoother in there. Processing my thoughts through a pen helps me connect ideas, dissect thoughts, examine the world and myself. I learn through journaling. I learn about myself and what I think. I grow as a result.
Recently I realized I’ve been telling myself a story that I think may not be true. The story I’ve been telling myself for years is that I don’t have ideas, and specifically that I don’t have ideas to write about. As I read Little, Brown‘s tips for generating writing topics, I realized I have a lot more ideas than I give myself credit for. I need to change the story I tell myself. I do have ideas and thoughts and feelings to write about. I do it every day if I’m not worried about what someone else would think.
Journal writing frees me to just write. Whatever and however I want. It’s liberating because nobody is going to read it. It frees me from the analysis if “Is this clear? How do I say this with fewer words? Am I getting my intention across?”
Instead of stopping to rethink, edit, revise, and interrupt my thoughts like happens when writing for readers, with a journal I can write whatever comes. I can brain dump or heart dump or soul dump, and I can write a thought five different ways if I struggle to articulate it to my satisfaction. It can all go onto the page, I don’t have to stop anything to check and recheck, I can just pour it out in words. After years of journaling I like to spice things up by experimenting with sentences, verbs, exercises, or tips I get from writing books, but even that is just play.
And that leads to the final, unintended benefit of journaling for me. Journaling has built a way for me to process the world via the written word. And what this does is give me practice. I do like to communicate via writing. I do want to actually publish on my blog and write meaningful and useful stuff at work. I’ve been beating myself up that I write secreted away in ink on paper, in my own bubble. That for journaling I don’t need ideas, I can just write. I’ve been telling myself that journaling is the easy way out because I don’t have to think about all the stuff that needs to happen when you’re using words to actually communicate with others.
That’s another story I can now change. Journaling is not a cheat; its ease does not diminish its value. Journaling keeps the machinery oiled. It maintains my writing engine, and that makes it easier to transition to writing for my blog and writing for work. And I love that. So very much.
Butterfly Mind 