To make myself feel better about myself, I’m going to say this was inevitable. That anybody on a journey towards taking better care of oneself (one’s self? BAH! autocorrect in your heads, mofos) will experience these strange uncalled for pauses in routine that feel daunting.

See, my last update was Day 28. That was ONE WEEK AGO. I did not realize until today what happened and why I let it. I could swear it was just a two-day slip-up. Anyway, here we are.

WHAT DO I DO?

First I’m going to celebrate the obvious. Twenty-seven days! For thirty-plus years I have not managed to write for even three days straight! Whaaaat! What happened? Well, Clarion happened, but also this. Now I have a first dirty draft of a short story for the year, and I can now devote all my energy to revising it and then forcing people to beta read it, then quite possibly submitting it to places and start a new one. I still haven’t done the writing in a rigorous enough manner that I’d have simultaneous projects in the works; maybe that’s something I can consider doing next.

Okay, now for the bad stuff. My writing habit slid back when I stopped running. I got my pre-period blues, then my actual period, throwing things off track, then I got another bout of stomach distress. All excuses. I also stopped meditating. Stopped waking up early. Stopped going to sleep early. The first time it happened after the good runs coincided with some new work stuff I had to deal with. Thanks to journalling, which is the one routine thing that has not stopped, I have facts now, that I can work with. Before this close monitoring of my days I would attribute backsliding to mood swings and leave it at that. As a result I’ve often thought of myself as a flake, irrational, and hopeless. NO MORE.

Now for re-commitments. LOL. That’s a work term that basically means oops we fucked up, here’s a new deadline. For administrative shit, do I restart at Day 1 or continue counting from Day 28 as if the one blank week didn’t happen? Since I’m making my own rules around here, and my objective is to form a habit so I don’t have to keep counting the days anymore, I’m going to restart at 1. It’s not impossible, and the fact that I’ve been able to keep it up for close to a month (tatlong araw na lang hindi ko pa natapos!) actually tells me that it’s fairly feasible as long as I don’t forget.

Again, I do not recommend you do this. Writing a thousand words for 100 days straight is in no way a guarantee that you will achieve your dreams, in no way is it a requirement, in no way is it the only way things are done. But it is one way. And I’M doing it because I got demons, and this is my way of tangibly defeating these demons. Your mileage may vary.

More importantly, though, it’s super fun. Writing is my version of method acting, my version of understanding, analyzing and putting emotions under a microscope. I still think it’s magical and powerful and I’m way past doubting whether this is worth the pain. Also, I’ve always been fascinated by the rigor of doing something every single day, I have this latent soldier mentality (I did try to get into the army, a story for another time) that is hungry for structure and discipline and being used for the greater good.

Changes this time: 

I’m going to put markers in my habit tracker (currently it looks like this, just a bunch of red circles so I can’t see how far I’ve gone in my 100 Day Challenge).

(Bonus relevant pajamas.)

I’m not going to let anything distract me from doing it first thing in the morning because that’s also my way of telling myself that this is important to me. And while I know it is, my brain still thinks every word I write is precious and final so I keep putting it off to later in the day.

I’m going to cancel Netflix again. LOL.

Forthcoming challenges:

I’m going to be running at the NatGeo thing on April 22. My first 10k! Will I die? I don’t know. Who knows!

I’m going to Taiwan for ten days towards the end of April. Let’s see how I navigate around that! Or how it’s going to help, maybe? I don’t know. Who knows!

See you on the other side!