Just discovered your site today - and find I'm in a similar boat - aiming for 365 days, and learning as I go. I am not a writer, but I enjoy writing... that I share is important.

Good luck - I'm subscribing!

Thanks Matt and welcome aboard.

A great post from @colinwalker explaining his learnings from his Write365 challenge. It reminded me of one of my posts expressing a sentiment similar to one of his lessons — here’s my response.

I have always believed that anyone can write. Life throws at us many opportunities to express ourselves in words — something short or long, in public or in private. It is incumbent on us to grab the chance. Colin Walker had expressed a similar sentiment while summarising his lessons from his Write365 challenge.

What does matter is that we communicate, that we share, that we express ourselves so that others can understand. What does matter is that we don’t isolate ourselves behind a wall of silence. Writing is a starting point, a first step on a much longer path. We should all write.

I completely agree with Colin, each one of us should write. This also reminds me of a post I had written arguing everyone can write — all it takes is a will and belief in oneself. Following is an excerpt from that post. One way to think of writing is to jot down abundance of words, leading towards a story or an account. Another way is to simply think of it as expressing oneself. Every person often comes across such occasions to put his thought, his ideas, his expressions in words. Occasions are aplenty. Event in his own life. Event in the lives of acquaintances, friends or near & dear ones. Or just a public event. One of my friends had a similar occasion, one close to his heart. It was anniversary of his engagement with his fiancé, theirs 1st. He took all the pains to decide on the gift, the place to buy it from, flowers to go with it and the time to be delivered at. And then he did what I see people doing most often. He went to google and typed “1st anniversary wishes/messages”. I wondered why did he not just scribble what he felt? It’s saddening to see people resist the efforts to pen the words they think of. They go after what others have written, beautifully never-the-less, but at the cost of it being not real, fake. They underestimate the power of conveying one’s own feelings in whichever way possible. The words, their structure won’t matter much then. And that is one way one can start writing. Don’t miss a chance to write to your loved ones, breed a will to do so. Wish them, appreciate them, console them. Keep it simple, write the words you feel. Take effort to make it personal, involving. And finally, have belief in yourself.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. -Sylvia Plath

So next time you get an occasion to wish someone, don’t doubt yourself. Start writing. Express.

Lessons Lessons learnt from a year of writing - use this post as a basis. (The lessons have grown!) Unfinished business with the #write365 project. Always wanted to re-purpose the posts in some fashion, build on them. Was meant to be just focused on the one year but that cannot really be taken in isolation. The year is a metaphor, or a representation of life as a whole. continued lessons as I read and write and discover dealing with mental health issues and how that intersects with the writing

A journey of self discovery (or, perhaps, realisation) and admitting to my mental health issues.

It becomes so much more than about writing.

The lessons: we become our own inspiration being creative opens the flood gates, we give ourselves ideas by getting in the right mindset we allow ourselves to be open to ideas, we get the mental wheels turning Review - "I subconsciously adhere to a certain style and this style influences subsequent thoughts: a feedback loop" Philip José Farmer - "Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got." Jack London - "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." The social paradox - "The more we create the more creative we grow to be." & "Creation becomes habitual and we find ourselves overwhelmed with thoughts and concepts" balance & burn out the irony of self-applied pressure when trying to escape perfectionism writing every day is not so much an issue, so what if it's rubbish, but knowing you'll be hitting publish adds another layer Being ill - "frustration at inability to conjure more than meandering stream of words" but THAT was always the intent, not to be perfect "We must acknowledge and accept that not every moment will be life changing, not every idea will be ground breaking" writing is like any other habit it can be hard to get going, rewarding while we are doing it, but easy to fall off the wagon Back on the horse - "it's a lot easier to fall out of a habit than to form one." Perhaps not doing something becomes just as much as of a habit as doing it. Perhaps, once the habit is broken it becomes harder to reestablish it due to an underlying sense of failure. big ideas are simply made up of lots of little ideas the project was a big idea, there's no way I could do it all in one go but just by turning up each day with a little idea it was completed I keep telling myself I'm a little ideas person but the project shows that I am capable of bigger things - I just have to believe writing changes people good and bad the writer and the reader related to writing finds the truth we should all write I believe that everyone should write/type/narrate if they are able getting your thoughts down lets you see things for what they really are rather than getting stuck in your own head everything is derivative there is no such thing as truly original thought wait for perfect rather than demean ourselves with something derivative March to your own beat - {{https://rebeccatoh.co/beat/}} "The more we read, the easier it is for us to write or think things we think are original but that are actually derived from other people’s heads.

" - reading is an occupational hazard. We are told to read to become better writers but how much of what we consume ends up influencing us, even if unintentionally? The fires of imagination We absorb so much information from different sources, much of it subliminally. We subconsciously process this and extrapolate on it to form ideas and opinions. Much of what we absorb lies dormant, unbeknownst even to us, waiting - waiting for the right time to show itself. Perhaps we need the input of others, their contributions, to reawaken what sleeps inside, to reignite the fires of imagination that smoulder within. We need to reminded of everything we once learnt but didn't realise, everything we need to complete our train of thought. identity is fluid/transient a common theme across a number of posts, the notion of change - always in the "now" that we are a fixed version of us is an unachievable ideal, we change, we grow, our opinions morph over time based on life experiences it would be nice to think that we can provide a definitive "us" but that cannot happen "Just as we evolve so concepts, meanings and understandings evolve with us. We attribute new properties to even basic entities as we realise that they are part of a far wider interplay than we at first imagined." "What we are never changes. Who we are never stops changing." Branding - "We mould ourselves to situation, circumstance and environment, only revealing a part of ourselves, albeit always a different part and of a different size, even to those closest to us." novels or short stories: We tend to think of ourselves as one identity, a consistent projection or manifestation of who we are whilst simultaneously growing and evolving as experiences contribute to that projection. We see our lives as one story arc: birth > life > death. We see our stories as one giant novel comprised of different chapters, each event following on from the last in perfect sequence: action > reaction > conclusion. We string together these events as though they have temporal significance, as though their placement in our story affects everything that follows and, of course, the eventual outcome. As much as we attempt to fashion our narrative we have no one true story, an autobiographical truth that serves us completely from beginning to end. Redirection - Susan Sontag: "I write to define myself - an act of self creation - part of the process of becoming" Interestingly, Sontag is also quoted as saying: "I've never fancied the ideology of writing as therapy or self-expression. " - an intriguing contradiction Existence - By changing our context are we truly still us? What is authenticity? Who are we, really? What is authentic or true when we project different façades of ourselves to different people or groups? Allow yourself to be you - "the identity paradox" The imposition of self - is being eccentric (different, at odds with normal) actually being authentic because we are not forcing ourselves to conform is eccentricity merely the abandonment of pretence? "The imposition of authenticity is the imposition of the self." Authenticity - "We are constantly trying to work out in our own minds who we are. Taking this into consideration perhaps authenticity is transient based on our own self image. We act in accordance with our nature but if that nature changes so do our words, actions, beliefs. This may be seen as inauthentic from the outside but is it? Not if we are being true to ourselves." writing has a way of getting to the truth with or without your abettance Stephen King - "Fiction is the truth inside the lie." Opportunity - "By writing you can find that you are consistently at odds with ... yourself" Artificial - "They may not make riveting reading or be particularly thought provoking but they are the most revealing, the most transparent and provide the best insight into the mind of the individual." leads in to... writing is both a trigger and therapy the project became a public therapy session in places but what came out also triggered mental health issues at the time and later sharing introverted musings can be difficult as we are having to effectively translate our own chaotic thoughts into something more conducive to public consumption - exposing our thoughts and processes to an audience initiates an observer effect Lloyd Alexander: "Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it." That is exactly how I felt about the Write365 project. The only problem was that understanding it was a double-edged sword. the difficulty of "living what we write" - especially when mental health issues intervene (see below) everything has become defined by the project, it is the one success I have achieved and I compare everything else to it "Above all, write for the love of it." - Steve Kunzer

Words, everything comes back to words.

morning pages & daily gratitude logs Brande v Cameron: {{https://colinwalker.blog/25-02-2020-1938/}} {{https://colinwalker.blog/18-04-2020-1037/}}

My thoughts in "Stupid" about clearing mental detritus - same sentiments as with morning pages but years before I knew what morning pages were.

what does blogging provide or allow you to do that other forms of communication don't? "be the version of us we are rarely fortunate enough to be"

what is the attraction of exposing your soul, your hopes and fears to complete strangers on the internet? validation?

"writing is like any other habit" but even once you have established that habit it is still hard to string words together into a meaningful cohesion. The old adage "turn up even when you don't feel like it" has never been so true as for writing. You have to throw words down even if they are garbage. Like writing the morning pages, sometimes, getting the rubbish out of the way will reveal some good stuff underneath, you just have to scrape away the crud to see it.

Thoughts from Pocket Psychology - "We have to be storytellers but also an audience. We have to be authoritative but admit when we know nothing. We have to be outgoing but stay restrained. We must be leaders but know when to follow." That's what writing gives us.

"3. Writing and not living what you write is a serious form of hypocrisy. Embody your words / beliefs / philosophy." - {{https://rebeccatoh.co/ten-recent-thoughts-4/}} I have been living that hypocrisy: writing one thing but acting another We can't live by what ifs. (what if) "You try, you fail, you try, you fail, but the only real failure is when you stop trying." (Haunted Mansion) Self censorship - We are our own worst critics; we tell others to say whatever is on their minds and in their hearts but are ashamedly reserved ourselves.