2018-05-06

Five Hundred: Part 3

On this day, 365 days ago, I was struggling with intense writers block. I was left unable to write for over half a year, with all my concentration given over the stress of moving country. After a few weeks of settling in and suffering without internet, I decided to do something outlandish. I decided to go from writing 0 words a day, to writing at least 500 a day for the next year. I'll be dotting this blog post with some exerpts from my first journal entry.

Hello, my old friend. How have you been?

It's been months since we last talked. I said I needed a break, but now I'm not quite sure what I needed. Could I have powered through? Could I just have kept going despite the increasing stress?

I don't think I could. I think I did make the right choice.

Regardless of my intents, it doesn't change the fact that I'm still going to have to readjust to this whole thing... My typing has gotten considerably worse, and I need to actively practice again. There's no real reason I can't any more, I don't even need an internet connection for it.

There’s something beautiful about being able to read your thoughts from exactly a year before. I’m someone who’s always struggled with memory issues, and the fact that the last year of my life is set in stone provides me with a kind of grounding that I’ve never felt before. I’ve always been lost, confused, aimlessly drifting through time with little thought to where I’ve been or where I’m going, but now I have a foundation to build off of. Prior to this day one year ago, my life seems hazy, ambiguous, and floating in a sea of unknowability. Sure, there’s a handful of events I can anchor myself with, but they’re few and far between.

It’s like I’ve gotten tired of following the brambled path through the woods, from nowhere to nowhere, and started paving myself a road. The future will always be a mystery, but now I know exactly where I’ve come from.

Am I waxing a little too poetic? Probably, but this is pretty emotional for me. The me from a year ago never would’ve thought I could’ve achieved something like this. It’s a big thing for me.

I’m not sure what to write for the rest of this, to be honest. It’s a problem I have pretty much every day, because sometimes it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough material to write 500 words from. The thing is, I’m usually wrong. Over the past year I’ve gone through many different phases when writing my journal entries, always trying to find ways to use up the rest of the page when there’s nothing to say. I sometimes wrote random prose, or kept a checklist of things I wanted to do, or just filled it with inane rambling about things I vaguely cared about. After enough time, with enough experience, I realised that there’s always something worth talking about. It can be hard to find at the time, when I’m tired and just want to go to sleep, so I usually keep a tiny list of notes about my day, but there’s always something I can talk about.

In short, keeping a journal has taught me how to discover the nuances of my own life, and see things that I've never seen before.

I'm happy. I have goals, and I know I can accomplish them with time. My life has been in an endless state of flux for the past 6 months, and now that I'm finally able to settle down, I think I have a shot at doing what I love.

It is a Sunday. It is the 7th of May, 2017. This is what I am now marking as Day 1. In 365 days, I will have 365 days done, or at least something close.

Hello, future me. <3

My first plan for what to write as the final part in this trilogy of blog posts was some kind of faux-clickbait article being all like “How Keeping A Journal Can Change Your Life”, but that just felt like I was trivialising things. I think that if anyone spent just a few minutes thinking about keeping a journal, the benefits would be obvious. I honestly believe that everyone on earth can better themselves by keeping some kind of journal.

Here’s to the last 182,697 words I’ve written, and the next 182,500 to come.