It’s probably telling what I do on the days when I can’t think of anything else to write.
Yes, I have days like that, especially since this blog is daily, and real life for me at the moment is very uneventful. I had been kind of a homebody before the pandemic hit, having just relocated cross-country for work reasons and only just started to get out and meet new friends in the area.
When the pandemic came, well… it was almost like going into involuntary stasis.
Not the most ideal conditions under which to write daily non-fiction posts. My daily life is okay. I’m grateful that things are stable. But it isn’t exactly exciting. Things aren’t changing very much. (Fiction, however, is easy to write under these conditions — since my brain gets bored by all the sameness and starts imagining things to entertain itself.)
There have been a lot of days when writing this blog was hard. But I have something that’s worked really well.
When I’m super-blocked and need to write an article, my easiest no-fail strategy is to write a love poem about my partner, disguised as a blog post.
This is because I find it easier to write loving things about them than writing literally anything else.
Easier than a social media status. Easier than a grocery list.
Because the loving feelings are always there, crowding out practically everything else in my life, everything else in my brain. And it’s easy just to pull out a little of that loving mental and emotional background and turn it into words.
Yes, easier than writing a grocery list.
Thankfully, you readers seem to love those articles. They always do really well.
Anyway, the fact that this works is very telling. It makes me feel like the poster child for Words of Affirmation.