Why a daily blog?

The first thought I had about writing today was that this daily blog is a bad idea. In the last few weeks, even though I wrote daily, I have been feeling stuck and I knew something needed to change. This is the perfect breeding ground for reactionary goals. The problem with reactionary goals is that they are founded on a base of insecurity. It's so easy to tell yourself "If only I did X, I would be happy", and to set way too ambitious goals that fall apart as soon as you start working on them. More often than not, these goals aren't something you really want to work on, but an instinctual response to your insecurity. So when these goals fall apart they make your insecurity even worse. The feeling I woke up to, was that my daily blog was just another reactionary goal.

The weekend before the last one I was in a bad state of mind. This was partly caused by an unhealthy dose of self-sabotage (drinking too much wine doesn't exactly improve your sleep), a general sense of exhaustion, and the mentioned feeling of being stuck. I realised I had reached a new low point while listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. In this episode, the interviewee told about her experience as a leukaemia patient. I didn't know that this topic would come up, but my first thought when it was mentioned was "I wish I had leukaemia as well. A near-death experience surely would shake me up." As soon as I had this thought, I stopped myself. Because obviously, I don't want to have leukaemia. Nobody wants that, really. It was a sign for me that there was something wrong, something I didn't address. The next day, I started to write a memoir to drill down into what it was exactly that I didn't address. This is a perfect example of a reactionary goal. Because after a few days, my mood improved and I didn't have any desire to continue working on it. Still, this weekend left me with a question yet to be answered: How can I bring my writing to the next level?

The answer to this question is a writing system. I'm prone to overthink anything, if I give myself an opportunity to do so. The best way around that is to have a predefined process. So that instead of following your intentions that can be mislead easily by your emotions, you can implement a process you can follow no matter how you feel. While I was thinking about a writing system, I had the idea of writing a daily blog again. Usually, when I had this idea, I dismissed it. The main reason for this was that I felt like a daily blog would help me with completing the larger writing projects I wanted to work on. But when I looked at it this time, I realised that I didn't have any large writing projects I was working on. To make it worse, with the time it took me to write a single post, my blog discouraged me to work on something bigger. The problem I had was that I spent too much time in the fields of diminishing returns. When something you try doesn't work, why not just try the opposite? What I need to learn was to finish things, and to let go of the outcome. And I don't know if there is a better way to do this than to finish one post each day.