30-day blog challenge: complete!

At the beginning of June, I accepted the challenge to blog consecutively for 30 days. Today I cross the finish line.

Here’s a rundown of all that I covered in the course of the month.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: sitting down to write an original piece of content every single day never got easy, but the daily practice undoubtedly improved my writing. I look back at early posts and can’t find the edit button fast enough seeing run-on sentences or thoughts that never quite came together. But the beauty is that going back and finding yesterday’s errors shows I’ve grown to know better today.

Day-by-day, writing opened a window into my mind.

With 30 days complete, it’s fascinating to see the evolution of what I wrote in just a month. This collection of topics is a depiction of the diverse places my mind traveled in a few short weeks. From music to dogs to diners to Roe v Wade and back to music, I can see my mind dancing between subjects, picking them up like objects, and inspecting them from all angles.

Some days that window into my mind slid open with ease and ideas came flowing in like a breeze. And some days, that window was painted shut and I had to take a screw driver to it cutting away at the resistance just to nail down a topic, and then fight each paragraph as it refused to come forth.

In the diligence this challenge required, I was reminded of Steven Pressfield’s words in The War of Art:

“How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.”

I didn’t obsess over quality or length in these 30 blogs. I just wrote, gave it a look over, and clicked publish.

It was liberating to push the burdensome coat of exceptionalism off my shoulders for 30 days and let ideas have room to breathe before I squashed them with editing mode.

30 days of blogging taught me that only by doing do you improve. It’s not about doing the best—it’s about showing up every day.