I’m sure I’m not alone when I say it feels like this year has flown. And honestly, I don’t even know where October went. It feels like just yesterday I was all excited to be starting my first Blogtober challenge, and now it’s already November!
Looking back on the challenge, I do feel like I overestimated myself a little.
Normally, it really bugs me when I promise something, even to myself, and then can’t meet with whatever expectations I’ve set for myself. As it should, really.
So ordinarily, it would have bothered me that I didn’t actually manage to post every day. And I’d be lying if I said there weren’t days when I felt a twinge of guilt for realizing that I hadn’t posted and didn’t have either the energy or the time to make it happen.
Although I didn’t technically meet the goals of Blogtober as a concept, though, I met all of my goals for participating in it, and that’s the part that really matters to me.
And overall, I loved the challenge.
It reminded me how much I love writing for the sake of it. It’s easy to forget how much you love something when you have to do it every day, day in and day out, and when it becomes a matter of filling a gap set by a pre-made headline designed for SEO.
It’s an entirely different matter when you’re sitting yourself down at the kitchen island in the middle of a paint-splattered disaster, taking a few minutes for yourself. And I think this challenge, which pushed me to rethink of writing as my break from the mundane, reminded me of that.
It taught me that it’s okay to write when the urge strikes, not just when it fits a schedule. I usually push myself to follow a strict schedule with my blog, and at work, my writing is always done on someone else’s timeline. A lot of the time, that causes procrastination simply because there’s a deadline, followed by a big stressful rush when things get down to the wire.
I feel like the challenge has shown me it’s okay to be more flexible with myself, and that’s given me the ability to trust my creative mind to know when it wants to write.
It showed me that I like writing about different things, and it’s perfectly okay to do so. Normally, I put a lot of pressure on myself to do mostly gaming content, but if you look back at my Blogtober, almost all of it was more lifestyle.
It’s almost like the challenge helped me give myself permission to branch out and just have fun with what I’m writing, which makes me so happy since I’m starting the journeys of building our new spaces (gaming and otherwise) and planning our wedding.
And all in all, I can’t wait to try again next year—and hopefully I can beat my high score for posts, too!
One thought on “Blogtober 2020: Looking back on my experience”
Blogging has changed so much over the years — when I first started my very first WordPress blog I had no photos for the first few years, no one really did. It was just words. But these days I feel like posts have to have a purpose which ok, that’s fine but also I miss the days when you were able to just word vomit with no photos.
I’ve decided (today actually) that I’m going to bring back word vomit posts and if they get no views, totally fine. This is for me and for my days when I feel like I just seriously need to brain dump some stuff!