I don’t want to ever be a person who teaches shit I don’t do myself. I guess that’s why I’m here. Because I spend every day building websites for people (which, by the way, I hella enjoy) and teaching people about blogging and stuff and I don’t want to be a person who talks but doesn’t do. That’s why I’m here, sort of. At first glance, anyhow.

More, I’m here because I want to be the kind of person who writes.

Ok, but not like that. Not like hipster-in-a-park-with-a-typewriter or millennial-in-a-coffee-shop-with-a-moleskine person who writes. I want to stay in the habit of putting words to all the static and colors inside of me.

A person (famous? I don’t know) once said that nobody likes writing, but people like having written. That’s pretty much the realest shit. It’s honestly how I feel about most good things: yoga, exercise, eating healthy food, cleaning my house. If you’re like “Hey do you want to do yoga and clean your house?” I’m like “Nope. I wanna watch Netflix and not wear clothes.” But then after I’ve done that good and healthy shit I think “Yep. That was a good life choice.”

That’s how I feel about writing too.

I was talking to my therapist yesterday about how sometimes my inner landscape feels like a desert, or a big grey thing. Like there’s not a lot of texture and shapes and I’m afraid of living a life that’s not meaningful, one day blending into the next until I’m old and then dead and don’t even know what the fuck I did with my one wild and precious life or whatever. (Mary Oliver reference. I’m very sophisticated.)

When I write, it helps shape the big grey thing into something that feels more like a well-lived life. It forces me to pause and reflect on what I’m actually feeling inside.

(Maybe writing is like mindfulness meditation for verbal processors. Where we sit and observe our inner thoughts, except for that we have to say them outloud or write them down to know what they are. Whoa.)

So there’s this #Write31Days shit, and last year I wrote about Becoming Human, which, spoiler alert, I am a Human so I guess that was successful.

This year I’m going to do simply this: write.

I’m going to set a timer for ten minutes and force myself to write whatever comes out. No editing, so agenda, just words.

Right now I have 25 seconds left.

I hope that it makes sense. Maybe. Sometimes.

I’m glad you’re here.

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This blog post is part of #write31days. This year I’m skipping out on a theme and going with ten minutes of unedited free-writing every day (unless I don’t feel like it, let’s be honest). You can read more posts from my #write31days by clicking here.