Looking back at a month of writing consistently

I was really nervous when I hit publish on Jan. 1 on a post in which I vowed I'd write every day this year.I'm so bad at following through on personal projects, even ones I felt strongly about. It's as if I'm rebelling against myself.So I thought that, on the occasion of actually completing an entire month of writing every day, that I'd reflect back on it and talk about what I liked and what I didn't.

The Good

It felt good to write every day. I was doing something for myself, not for anyone else. In fact, I wrote another blog post for a friend during this time and momentarily thought about having that as my writing of the day. But that's not the point - that's not what this is about. So I got on the computer and wrote something else that day.I'm getting back in the rhythm of writing. Like anything else, if you're not writing regularly, you can get rusty. I'm not gonna say I got better at writing just in 31 days - not at all. But I got better at sitting down to write, at the bare minimum.I stretched my creative muscles. I couldn't think about something interesting to write about every single day. Some days I struggled mightily. But knowing I had that empty screen to look at soon made me think harder. Did I always hit? No. But I always wrote.My best posts, I believe, were very diverse. I wrote about answering phones in my first job, the music that has had an impact on my life, writing what I think I should write, and about accepting criticism. I say this from a purely technical standpoint: I thought those posts told stories and flowed well.

The Bad

There were days I really did not want to write. I couldn't think of anything. Just nothing. I'd sit, staring at the blinking cursor on the computer screen, cursing myself for having gotten me into this in the first place.Having to write every day meant that no matter what else I had going on that day, I had to write. One day was chock-filled with meetings and the time I thought I'd have to finish the post I'd started earlier in the day left me with no wifi and the inability to get it done. So when I got home about 10 p.m., the first thing I did after looking in on my boys was sit down in front of my laptop, finish writing, and hit publish.It did feel good, though, to hit publish on that post, gotta say.There were days I really didn't want to hit publish, because I thought the post was sub-par. I did, anyway, because I knew at the start that I'd have some posts that weren't so great. This was a case where the process and the follow-through was more important than the individual results.So, here we are. On the precipice of another month in which I will write every day.Each day, I say, "I have to write today." At the end of each week, I say, "I wrote every day this week." Now, at the end of a month, I can say, "I wrote every day this month."I think I'm gonna do it, y'all.Photo by Brooke Larke via Unsplash.