100 Days, With Words

I don’t really remember when I started writing. When it became something that I liked to do. Maybe it was sometime between reading this Berenstain Bear book and that Babysitters Club Super Special.

But I can distinctly remember one snow day, sometime in the winter of 4^th grade, when I forced myself to sit down and write. I don’t remember what I wrote about or if I actually even wrote anything. But I remember that feeling; that push and pull. I remember knowing that this was something I needed to set time aside for. Something that I needed to make time for and spend time doing.

Fast-forward 20-something years and a decade-long career in writing, editing and the like and that push and pull is still there. But along with it are the 8,000 other things: the dishes and the dinners, the toddler baths and the early morning workouts, the days spent in front of a computer and the nights falling asleep to an old episode of Party of Five. 

And before you know it, those everyday tasks become both the things that keep you from writing and the things that you actually want to write about.

The idea of doing something for 100 days had been floating around in my head for a while—namely in that 100 Happy Days challenge that was happening a few years ago. I couldn’t ever totally get on board with that, but when I saw a blogger that I follow on Instagram, Elise, had started doing something similar, I fell down the rabbit hole of where The 100 Day Project started—which is all here, and also on Elle Luna's Instagram—and well, I figured this was as good a time as any to start something myself.

And for me, it always comes back to writing. To making the time for it and to getting in the practice. So I’m committing, for the next 100 days, to writing something every day. I don’t care what it is or what it’s about. I don’t need it to be a certain length or a certain level of sophistication. It can be 8 paragraphs or 5 sentences.

Sometimes I imagine what I write will look like a typical blog post and other times it won’t—I’m doing it here because I know I need to actually hit publish to hold myself accountable. But I also know that, in the past, the more I write, the more creative and inspired I feel. That alone makes it a win-win, really.

So! Let’s try this and see what happens.

photo via unsplash