Full disclosure, it is not Friday the 5th when I'm writing this. I'm writing it at twenty to two in the morning because one of the dogs is stressed from the fireworks and it's taking a lot to try and get him to go to bed and get some sleep. I used to love fireworks, but as I have said countless times, I don't love the impact they have on my animals.
Anyway, onto what I was actually going to be writing about. It turns out I might actually be full of shit. Why am I full of shit? Well, because I said I'm not really a resolution person and I said I wasn't going to try and do any of these things of do X every day of January, but instead, I'm doing something... worse? Better? I guess that depends on your perspective. I'm going to be trying to write every day. I'm part of a writing website called 4 The Words, I've written about it a lot before and it's something that I get very passionate and overexcited about and have zero awareness of when other people's eyes glaze over about it (thank you ADHD) and I have a streak which has been live for a consecutive one thousand, four hundred and sixty days, which is four whole years. Technically, I joined at the end of November 2019, but I didn't keep my streak fully after the end of NaNoWriMo, so my consistent one has been since 7th January 2020, but it's calculated by number of days not calendar years. It was a very different time.
One thing about streaks is that if you log in on the day, you can 'fix' a streak even if you don't write, because at least you thought about writing, and there is the facility to 'book time off' with planning ahead of you can 'buy back' days onto your streak, but only for a very limited period. There's a theory that I thought was called nudge theory, but I believe that's actually something different, which states that doing something small towards your goal each day is the best way to achieve it, so actually even logging onto the website and clicking a button to say I can't write today, whether it's because I'm busy or I'm ill or because I just feel like an empty vessel, it's okay. To some degree, the system allows me to take that further, but something I'm aiming to do this year is to actually log in every day and write the small amount of words (four hundred and forty four) that I need per day to pass par for the site. By the way, I'm spelling the numbers out for two reasons. Yes, long hand the words are worth more than a number written as 444, but also because I have realised recently that even though I'm good at maths I do struggle reading numbers sometimes, mainly between 3s and 8s, but the words generally behave a bit better for me.
There are going to be days where that is not physically possible, so I'm planning to email myself my words on those days so I can make sure I am writing every day, even if it's only a small amount, and even if it's only essentially me dictating my own internal monologue to myself. I don't want to lose my love of writing again because I'm trying to force myself into it, but I cannot lose this part of myself because I categorically do not know who I am without it, and part of the reason I felt as bad as I did during November was because it felt as though this part of my personality was crumbling, based on the complete and total misconception that my identity as a writer started with NaNoWriMo and couldn't function outside of it.
Today I, well, my avatar of a slightly different name (character restrictions on usernames so it's CharlieWrite, having been charlwrite for a number of years due to even tighter character restrictions) will get a set of gold wings as soon as I hit my four hundred and forty four words, and you better believe I will be putting them on that tiny, dweeby looking facsimile of me, because I am proud of the achievement. Even if it means I was full of shit when I said no resolutions, and no joining in on do something every day things, this is something I really want to do, and I sat with it for a while to see that it was that, rather than something like parkrun that I carried on with because I wanted to want to do it, which is not the same. And if it does make me full of shit, well, a lot of people are so I guess I can make my peace with that. Hopefully in four years time I will be sat here ready to get my 8 year wings that are the coolest pair (in my less than humble opinion) and this year will be one which I look back on as a time of peace and focus, though I realise that might be asking a lot of a brain that like shiny new things and behaves erratically. We'll just have to see.
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