Why I failed at my previous blogging attempts
This is not my first foray into the web log wilds. I have a long history of intermittent blogging, dating back from Blogger and BlogSpot. More recently, I’ve been on WordPress.
Restarting my blog is an exciting and joyous prospect. It makes me wonder why I ever stopped in the first place. To succeed at this daily blogging challenge, it might pay to look at some reasons why I stopped.
Emotional pain
One of the attractions to writing is that it creates a feedback loop. The last time I blogged, it help surface niggles I needed to deal with in my personal life. Although this was a rich seam worth mining, I wasn’t ready to share this publicly at the time, so I took a break to deal with it.
Blogging gave me the courage to confront my pain and the clarity to understand it, even as I was speaking of other subjects. This might be because writing asks of us to be honest and authentic.
Thankfully, that painful period has passed. I am hoping to make my writing more consistent, so that painful periods don’t mean that I have to stop completely.
Burn out
I put too much pressure on myself and I flamed out. I was writing long form essays that required a lot of research, which was exhausting on top of a demanding day job. I had an arbitrary rule to produce a thousand very deep and meaningful words every week, which is a recipe for failure, if you don’t have the time.
This time, there are no rules. My word count can be any length I want it to be, and I can post anything I find interesting. My primary focus is on commitment to daily practice.
This is why I’ve framed this exercise as an experiment. An experiment’s goal is exploratory. You do it to learn something. I want to discover things about myself. What holds my attention? What do I think about? It would defeat the purpose to put strictures on such a voyage, therefore I’m keeping an open mind about whatever experiences result from the activity.
Overwork
Another barrier to writing frequently is fatigue from the day job. I give too much to my work so that there’s nothing left for much else. This is definitely not a healthy way to live and I am very keen to make a positive change.
Exhaustion means that I don’t have the spare capacity for reflection. This makes me cantankerous and narrows my outlook to a pin point. It’s etiolating. As A L Kennedy points out:
“Toxic work doesn’t just blight our business hours - it wearies our affection, steals our time for each other. We rely on free moments and free energy to invent, to recharge, to create. An exhausted, stressed population is docile, but doesn’t solve problems well.”
I’ve struggled with overwork all my working life, and I’m hoping to create enough space here, to want to show up frequently and stop over-working at the day job. The impediment is that I enjoy my work immensely and I overindulge. But I really want to change, so that I’m still doing exemplary work, without killing myself or sacrificing my writing in the process.
Thinking is hard
I don’t always want to do the hard work of thinking. Regardless, there’s no way out of thinking for oneself, it’s an imperative. There are no easy answers to many of our human challenges. But this is no reason to give up. In fact, we need all hands on deck, each doing their small part. Grapple we must! This way, we’re in with a chance of working things out. If we can’t, in speaking about them and sharing our experiences, we can feel less alone and recognize that our problems though not solved, are manageable.
Conclusion
These are some of the pitfalls that left unexamined could trip me up again. Becoming aware of them could help me come up with sensible strategies to address them should they strike again.