every day for a month, the conclusion.

One of my goals for the year was to post every day for a month. I'm not sure why I originally chose this as a goal - maybe because a friend told me I should post more often (thanks for the encouragement, Melissa!), and maybe I was just curious to see what I could find to write about for a month.

Here are some of the things that I've learned:

• I heard someone once say that if you want to be a writer, you need to do it every day. It doesn't even need to be very good, but you need to develop the discipline to write even when you don't feel like it. I don't have any aspirations to be a writer, but I do think that's a healthy guideline for any skill or habit you want to develop.
• Writing can be very therapeutic. It sometimes takes me a long time to process something, to work it out in my head. Some things, especially problem-solving kind of things, need to kind of marinate for a while, but there's also a lot to be said for processing out loud. Writing kind of works the same way.
• On the other hand, its very difficult to write about something when you're in the middle of processing it. I think there's value in getting not-yet-fully-developed thoughts down on paper (so to speak), but its still very difficult to explain something that I haven't quite figured out in my head.
• Forcing myself to write out what I'm thinking teaches me things, about me. And I think it will be interesting to look back in a month, or a year, and see what new things I'm learning. And what old lessons I need to learn again.

I don't really write this blog for anyone but myself. I write it because I have something I want to say, or something I want to share, or because I just like the process of journaling in this way. Yet I still hope that this blog represents who I am, the things that I care about and spend time on and the things that matter to me. In forcing myself to write every day, I think I've come closer to achieving that. In the last month, I've written about my faith, about CASA (twice), about children's ministry, about Africa and processing that, about family, about home and craft projects, about songs that I liked and songs that were incredibly powerful for me, and more.

Now that I'm at the end of the month, where posting every day is no longer a (self-imposed) requirement, I'll slow down, but I am hoping to write more frequently than I was before.