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September 22nd marked nine months since I have been writing an essay every day.
It started with a self-challenge to write 100 essays in 100 days.
Writing was not new to me. At that point, I had been journaling daily for almost five years.
However, journaling is very different from writing when you know someone will read it. In fact, I wrote an entire essay about just that thing.
Journaling no longer felt like enough. I felt like I had things to say. After so much personal development and career growth in the previous five years, I wanted a chance to start sharing my ideas and perspectives with others. I wanted to start naming and claiming the things I was seeing in my work as a therapist and in my life as an autistic individual.
I thought writing would help me to pour out everything in my mind. Clear out the particles of sand. Dust out all the corners. Concretize some of the amorphous thoughts in my mind.
It did just that. I enjoyed my daily writing so much that I decided to keep writing daily after I hit 100 days.
I no longer count my essays by days.
I’ve found there are occasional days where I don’t write, and then days where I write 2-3 essays.
So now I keep track of my total essays (I’m at 375+).
While writing feels significantly easier now, I still have to maintain a schedule. My mind is most alive in the morning, and if I miss that window, I usually don’t end up writing an essay that day.
The more I write, the more I want to write. I thought I had this avalanche of things that just needed to come out and then it would be over. I either haven’t reached the end of an avalanche, or I’ve awoken a dragon that has been unleashed.
My list of essay ideas pages long.
So where do I go from here?
I’ll keep writing for as long as it feels good. Maybe I’ll reach the end of the avalanche, and maybe in six months I’ll be telling you about my year+ of writing.
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