Can I write a blog post today? I’ve managed just one so far in the week and a half since my holiday. Getting out of the habit of blogging is the main issue I think. It’s not particularly anything else, just that I feel like I don’t know what to say and so I just give up on the idea. I’m not sure why having the habit of writing something every day makes it easier. I’m sure it shouldn’t have any effect on whether or not I have anything to say. I know I’ve written many blog posts where I’ve started off saying, I’m not sure if I have anything to say today and then gone on to write something anyway. I think it’s more a lack of confidence. When you haven’t written a post for a while I think you start to expect more of yourself. It becomes very easy to just give up and delete what you’ve written because you don’t think it’s good enough.
I think the same is true of everything really. When I have a really consistent running practice, it’s not like I always feel like running, or that every run is amazing or anything like that. It’s simply that I want to get another run done and keep the consistency going, and I also have more confidence that even if it won’t necessarily be easy it will at least be possible and I suppose also I get more and more convinced that running is a good idea and makes me feel good. When you haven’t been running for a while or you’ve been missing quite a few days, there’s always that doubt over whether running today is a good thing or not.
I definitely agree with the idea that it’s far easier to do something every day than just occasionally. Even doing something four days a week introduces enough uncertainty to make it harder to get it done. With my strength training, I do that four times a week, because I don’t think it would be a good idea to do more than that, but that means it’s just a little bit harder to remember to do it. I usually do it Monday to Thursday, which is a bit unbalanced, but weekends are much harder because I run early and am then out of the house for a lot of the day, whereas weekdays, because I work from home, I generally have more time. I do Monday to Thursday because then I have a little bit of leeway in case something goes wrong, so this week for example I was just really tired on Monday, because I ran (which I normally don’t do) and did my leg rehab exercises. Afterwards I felt wiped out and didn’t manage to fit a back workout in. So that’s ok. I did it yesterday and will do my shoulder workout tomorrow. I almost always do my leg workouts (I do two per week normally) on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because usually I go to a running club session on those evenings and so it makes sense to fit the leg workouts in in the morning. I found that doing leg workouts either the day before or after a tough run was HARDER than doing them the same day, as I often have sore legs the day after tough runs and LEG workouts.
So it turns out I did manage to find something to waffle on about after all. So I’ll probably try to get my blogging habit back to most weekdays. As mentioned, my weekends tend to be busier than my weekdays so it’s generally much easier to fit a blog post into the weekdays, and it’s easier to make it into a habit I do every day.
This is where the self-doubt thing kicks in though. I’ve written stuff most days this week and then deleted it after deciding it wasn’t really suitable or good enough to be posted on the blog. I think what happens when I get into the habit of posting regularly is I don’t really question it. It feels good to post something, regardless of how I feel about its quality or value, and so I continue to post as often as I can, and I do think that by practising regularly like that, the quality does hopefully start to go up, although that’s debatable and also something I’m not really interested in assessing.
It sounds like a silly thing to say about a blog, which is public, although I am not actively promoting it at all at the moment, but I write first and foremost for myself. I write as a practice, not to be perfect, not to gain approval, not to get somewhere specific but just to do what I can from where I am with what I have. I take the same attitude with running but somehow it’s easier with that. Of course I run for myself, who else would I be running for? It’s obvious that no one else is going to get any value out of my running, what a strange concept, although people can be inspired by each other, and definitely I am often inspired by what my fellow average runners are doing and have been told by other people that I’ve inspired them which is incredibly nice to be told. But with writing, for some reason it feels like we’re supposed to be thinking about the reader all the time and actively trying to achieve something when we write. I just think it’s interesting how differently we see certain activities.
That said, I would definitely love to be a paid writer and if I wasn’t interested in communicating to anyone else through my writing then I could simply write for myself and never post anything online, so…it’s a conundrum. But not really, because I think the only way to get anywhere is to keep showing up and doing what you can, doing your best, not judging yourself and just do it all again tomorrow and see what happens.
So with that said, I’m off to publish this post, no judgement, and tomorrow I’ll show up and try to do it all over again.