I’m surrounded by my favorite things right now: one of my 3 cats (the outside cat) sitting on my lap, on the porch while sipping a cup of tea on this beautiful day that will soon transition to night time. I wasn’t planning on writing, but it’s the setup for a wonderful writing experience. I get caught up in the desire and it consumes me. That’s how my writing process has been lately: I’m inspired by an experience, thought, or one of my many photos that I take, and then I stop what I’m doing at the moment to write. 

When I initially started my blog, I thought about maintaining a writing schedule to include publishing a post once or twice a week. For the most part, that was manageable when I was working, but I have way more time on my hands this month as I recover from 2 breast cancer-related surgeries. 

It’s been about 5 months since I started this blog, and so far, it’s one of the best things I’ve done. The desire really came to me about 2 years ago, but June 2016 is when I decided to take the leap. And it’s a good thing that I did too because I realized that the time would never be right. With my first leap, the grammar wasn’t perfect, but I published it anyway. In fact, this is the strategy I use with all of my posts. I publish whether or not all the grammar is perfect because I can edit it later. I don’t want perfectionism to prevent me from achieving my goals. Again, these are my steps towards recovering from perfectionism and you get to witness this.

I was one of those teenagers that kept a journal growing up starting at age 12 years or so. I’ve used spiral notebooks and eventually graduated to actual journals as I got older. As my handwriting has become more illegible, I’ve kept electronic journals as well and have gone back and forth between my laptop and smart phone. At work, writing is an essential component of my job and I often organize my projects with some aspects of journaling. At home, I organize my household with different lists whether electronic or paper. Writing is definitely something I’ve practiced for a long time so it comes to me naturally. I like being able to process my thoughts in this way, which is why I had to add writing in the form of a blog as part of my self care routine. 

I’ve learned so much about myself as I’ve reread my journals. I’ve noticed trends in my attitude, mood, and spiritual, mental and emotional states. I admit that it can be depressing reading them sometimes depending on the time period. I’ve used my journals to help me grow by assessing my progress, making changes, planning new moves, etc. However, I haven’t always reread my journal entries for those purposes. Usually, the process of writing is enough to center and ground me. 

I’m so used to my journaling voice that it was an easy transition to my blog.  Fortunately, I have a plethora of material that comes to my head, so I don’t usually have difficulty coming up with topics. I may have to spend some thought on tying the topics to my blog’s very specific subject matter: self-care.  I did notice that I struggled when I learned of my most recent life changing, health challenge, so there was a period where I literally did not want to write. Now that I’ve gotten over that hurdle, I realize that I have even more material. I keep a tab of topics I might want to blog about in my phone and I add to them as I get more ideas. 

Writing has essentially helped me manage my life. I’ve learned so much about myself and others and I’m using my blog to help others by sharing my “light lessons” and epiphanies. I want you to be inspired, to know that you’re not alone, and to believe that you can handle anything that life throws at you. It’s for these reasons that I’m using my writing powers for good. Writing is my super power!