Daily writing practice
This TED series on How to be a Better Human looks good but there is a lot of information in there. I came across it when a friend posted 7 Types of Rest that Every Person Needs which is a good read.
It’s been a helluva week. Like most people I’ve spent a lot of time glued to the news and to my social media timelines wondering what the hell is going to happen. But the days of eyestrain, neck pain, and headaches finally came to a head today and I decided to step back from the rage machine and tackle my Goodreads goal (150 books!) instead. I’ve read 4 books so far.
Today I finished On Writing by Stephen King, which is why you see these words today. Mr. Tucker is also reading it and so our conversations naturally gravitate to interesting parts of the book, or information we find relevant to our own lives. Last night I turned to him and lamented that I used to write every day back when livejournal was huge and since I joined facebook in 2007 I don’t write with any length anymore.
To be fair, I gave birth to the Bean in early 2008 and writing was not as a high priority. Facebook had also started to take off and it had a more open and succinct style of communication that fit into my knew lifestyle as a stay-at-home-mom of a newborn. Of course, the snappy style of facebook led to its widespread adoption pretty quickly. I also became so adept at it that I made a career out of it – a successful one, in fact. So while it’s easy to blame social media for my lack of writing the reality is that it is a culmination of factors: mom of two kids, working (in communications a lot of the time. Nothing kills your own writing like writing all day on someone else’s agenda), and the ease in which social made keeping in touch with multiple people much easier.
I’ve also always kept a journal. For the majority of my job contracts through 2012-2015 I woke up early to be at work early so I could be home to take the kids to the park by 4pm. So 6am saw me belting out a couple of pages of notes on my life. I didn’t journal from 2016-2018 during my series of operations and the tests that led to my final diagnosis but at the time I was barely living at all. My diagnosis forced me to pick up the pen again to try and make sense of everything that had happened.
I did manage to keep a blog for awhile that I had started when I had gone back to work after being home with the kids for four years. I wrote during my lunch hours and on the weekends, mostly. At that point my goal was debt repayment and early retirement. So I wrote about the things that I found interesting from that perspective. The universe is a cosmic joker though, and when I found myself in January 2018 with a PLS diagnosis & my neurologist recommending I go off work, I found it deeply ironic. All those years spent worrying about early retirement goals only to get streamrolled by forced retirement. Like a petulant child I screamed in my head, “WHAT? BUT MAYBE I DON’T WANT TO BE RETIRED?!” I had been given what I had wanted but not in the way that I wanted it.
So I started this blog…and did nothing with it. I think I have been reluctant to write here because it feels like I should have a theme and stick to it. Put this blog into a little box labeled DISABILITY BLOG and only discuss topics relating to my disability. But when it comes down to it I just want to write about my life and how I am living it. Yes, Post Morbus means after diagnosis and this is my life after diagnosis but my diagnosis isn’t my life. Sure, it has an effect of every facet of my life but it’s larger than that.
So instead of getting caught up in the minutiae where I feel like I need to write some well-researched, perfectly written tome of helpful information I am just going to write. I am going to write something every day (or almost, everyone has bad days) and get back into the habit. Maybe it will just be a recipe. Maybe it will be about some silly thing I saw online. I can’t say. But the goal is to write something every day & to just get back into the habit of writing.
So here goes it: January 10, 2021 is day 1. Let’s see if I can do a year?