Confessions: Writing Every Day Doesn't Feel Transformative Yet

I have now been in NaNoWriMo for 12 days, though I started posting more often before the month started to get used to it. I don't know exactly what I expected. I guess I thought I'd have good ideas every day, and the energy to treat them with the compassion and logic I usually aim for. I didn't think, when I decided to do this, that this roof leak and mold thing would happen or become such a big thing or that I'd be moving in the middle of a month when my wife is working 80 hours a week.

I didn't think that all I'd want to write about is how mad I am at the leasing company, and how overwhelmed I am with the number of things I have to do, and how I'm frustrated with work. It is a lot. And I get to be frustrated. And some of it is also my SAD kicking in, especially since I've been missing vitamin D doses, and so I'm doing the stuff that always happens this time of year: crying a lot (sometimes over very small things), splitting (everything is either good or bad), catastrophizing (everything is going as wrong as possible), and perseverating (getting stuck on things, in my case, usually things I've done wrong or perceived faults). And I'm trying to tell myself that it's okay to feel that this is a lot and that these other things will simmer down when we're moved and closed on the house and I get my vitamin D levels back up.

And so writing every day hasn't been the magical experience that I hoped for. At least not yet. I've had a few posts that got a fair number of hits, but none that knocked it out of the park the way some past ones have. I haven't been offered a speaking gig or a book deal or any pay for my writing. That's not really how this works.

That said, I've learned that I do have time to write every day if I make it a priority. I've started thinking about which room, in the house we're buying, will be for writing and what I would need in there to get a lot of writing done. Maybe a little part of me is starting to think of myself as a writer - not just a blogger, not a dabbler. And we'll see, at the end of the month, what happens, but I think I'm learning that writing isn't always as much having epiphanies as it is about sitting down to write when you just. don't. feel. like. it.

And hey - that was worth learning.