Fair warning: you may or may not find anything useful on this post. This is a ‘mostly for me’ post, trying to get over the longest writers’ block I have ever experienced in my 2-month life as a blogger.

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So I began thinking about why I just can’t write anything of substance lately. Initially, I  thought it was because I’m not doing anything worth writing about. Every time my daughter asks why I haven written anything for a while, my husband would say: “Pat, blogging is an art! Your mom will write something when the inspiration hits her. ” (Aww, he really loves me ❤) I have also been very tired lately. The last couple of weeks have been filled with work, work and more work. Therefore, I’ve come to the conclusion that work not just makes you too tired to blog but also kills all the inspiration 🙂

But seriously, I have to stop making excuses. I was so focused on trying to come up with a blog-worthy post that I forgot why I started blogging in the first place — to keep calm and de-stress, to unclog my brain and reset it back to a fresh start. I remember reading somewhere that the average person receives data equivalent to 174 newspapers on a daily basis! That’s a lot of information for the brain to process, and with the amount of workload I have right now, I feel like my brain is on the verge of crashing, constantly struggling to remember things and deadlines and what have you’s. And that right there my friends, should have been all the more reason to blog frequently!

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Now that I’ve established my big why for blogging, let’s focus on the what. What do I blog about? I am in awe of bloggers who can whip up a post day after day and still have more coming.  I mean, how do they do it, right? I’m pretty sure they also have lives and families and work that keep them busy, and yet, they never stop blogging. Take Roda of Growing Self for instance, who comes up with a daily post and some of the most amazing pictures I’ve seen. And how about Laura of Messy Mapmaker? I was looking at her archives, and her earliest post shows a time stamp of September 5, 2017, but my, how her blog has grown. Both these ladies’ blogs are rich with content and creativity and I want them to know that they have been a source of inspiration. Now if I can just will my hands to start typing away, then we’d all be done here 🙂

So here’s 3 things that I resolved to do to get over this slump:

  1. I’ll set aside a time at the end of the day to do nothing but blog. Most of the time, I plan to blog but don’t put it in my schedule, like most of the important things I do. So it remains as such, only a plan. But if blogging is for my sanity, my happiness and my well-being, then it deserves a spot on my calendar.

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2. I will constantly challenge myself. What exercise does to the body is what writing does to the mind. As we grow older, we try to come up with excuses to be less active and stop exercising. But age should never be a deterrent, not for exercising the body and definitely not the mind. The more you stretch it and the more you engage it, the stronger it becomes. The mind has no limits. I will look at books, magazines and images as rich sources of blog topics. I will browse other blogs and read their content. I’ll use tools such as Daily Prompts , Listly, and GoogleTrends for inspiration. I will train my mind to say “There is nothing that I can’t write about.”

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3. I will live in the present and practice mindfulness everyday. It was a couple of years ago when I first started hearing about mindfulness and resilience, and now it’s the buzz word in healthcare and self improvement.Backed by research, mindfulness offers multiple benefits such as increased concentration, a boost to your immune system, and stress reduction, among others. It ties in very well with my blogging purpose, and I think richer experiences as a result of being mindful can only help me become a better writer.

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I know it’s not yet the new year, when resolutions are often made. But I think there is no time better than now to do something about this. I refuse to accept that my brain is fried and my well of inspiration is stone-dry.  No, not this blogger. And if there is some last minute advice I would like to give my blogging self, it would be to stop trying so hard and loosen up. Have fun and just blog away. ♥

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