Brain exercise

I can’t believe it’s 13 December already. In thirteen days Christmas will be over. In less than three weeks 2010 will be gone.

That’s kind of insane, am I right?

What’s even crazier? I’m 18 days away from my goal of blogging every day for a year. That’s 347 blog posts so far. I don’t think I’ve stuck with anything this long. At least not every single day.

I’m the type of person who gets really excited about something and invests in it 1000% and then burn out and abandon it after awhile. I’m a hot or cold kind of person. I do nothing halfway. If I’m in I’m in. If I’m not I couldn’t be less interested. It can be a good quality.

It can also be a real pain.

When I started blogging last year on 1 January I don’t think I expected to last a year. I knew it was going to be one of my goals but I had six years. Or five I guess since I had to actually blog for a whole year before I could say I completed the goal. I tend to put things off until the last minute and I didn’t have any reason to think this goal would be any exception.

Somehow I made it a whole month of blogging daily, almost without meaning to. I even blogged from Cancun which is kind of a big deal because it wasn’t easy to find internet access.

Looking back I realized part of what helped was giving up my perfectionist tendencies and allowing myself to post about “nothing”. I used to only post big important things. Each post had to be perfect. This past year I let that go a little.

I try to make my posts as interesting as possible. Let’s face it though, interesting things don’t happen every single day of the year. Sometimes days are just dull. Or sometimes you have a million things on your mind but because you’re not anonymous you can’t write about those things honestly. Or at all.

Those days are my brain exercise.

Forcing a post out on those days can be as easy as 100 crunches. Maybe for someone who is super awesome that’s not a big deal but for me and my flabby abs it can be real work.

It’s such a satisfying feeling when I’ve completed another post though. Especially if I felt like I had nothing at all to say and somehow managed to end up with a pretty fantastic post. Or at least fantastic in my opinion. I’m kind of biased.

Some of my best, most honest posts have come from sitting down and just letting my fingers move across the keyboard. Letting my brain and heart spill onto the page can be uncomfortable. Being open and honest doesn’t come easy for me anymore. Letting the world into my soul is hard.

But when I make magic on these pages it’s worth it.

When someone responds that they know exactly what I mean because they’ve been there too it’s worth it.

Every day is a post that gets me closer to my goal and that makes me feel amazing.

The fact that I actually can set a goal and stick to it? Worth it.

Today was another brain exercise. I don’t have any writing prompts to set me up. No memes to play along with. No big events are going on in my life. I don’t have a silly video or picture to share.

It’s just another writing exercise for my brain. I’ve come way too far to give up now.

I have a feeling the next two and a half weeks are going to be tricky.

Holidays make for easy blog content. But minds that are full of work and feelings far too personal to share with the world do not.

I know I’ll continue blogging after my year of every day posts is complete. I doubt I’ll continue to post every single day though. It would be nice to have a break every once in awhile. I do want to set some sort of goal that pushes me.

Because these brain exercises are tough but they sure are rewarding.