Writing

Back to the start…

(Nearly) 365 days later…

Fast forward a few months...

These are just a few title ideas for this blog post that I had before I settled on one. At what point do you pick up a blog that you haven’t posted on for nearly a year? The last post was when I had just started #hollyruns3652k16 and I’m now only 33 days away from completing it.

I didn’t really plan on blogging about my challenge and I didn’t really have any goals with the blog as a whole as such, but I didn’t plan on it being this long before I posted again.

This year I’ve started reading a lot more than I had done previously. I have always loved to read but as I’m sure anyone with a full time job and other responsibilities can relate, its one of those things that tends to fall by the way side of this thing called life. I’ve been doing my best to make sure I make time for this though. Some months have been harder than others to make sure that I’m making time to pick up a book but I have knocked through some of my reading list.

As I have been reading, my thoughts have also turned to writing. Until right now when I am writing this post, these have just been thoughts. As a child and teenager I always used to write. My friend and I used to write a magazine when we were young and had plenty of time to play and create, then when I got older this turned to writing a journal and eventually an online diary. I’m actually trying to regain access to my online diary from all those years a go, I’m not holding out much hope as we’re talking 10-12 years since I last logged in but I’ve contacted the administrator as it would be great to read it again.

Very boldly for my 16 year old self, I shared my online diary with my friends and a number of them read it and followed suit by starting their own. On the one hand its seems strange that as a 16 year old I was happy to share some of my innermost thoughts and what was going on with my life with my friends and strangers, something I don’t always feel comfortable doing now so publically as a 30 year old. But the internet and social media (which wasn’t even a thing then) has changed so much that it seems quite a scary and alien concept to share the sort of information that I used to.

I never fell out of love with writing but my feelings for it definitely changed. I did a degree in English and was very much made to feel like I needed to write in a certain way, and of course about certain things to meet the criteria of my course. I guess it just became a bit of a chore and once my degree came to an end and I didn’t need to write anymore, I just stopped. It wasn’t intentional but it happened. For me, university wasn’t the most positive experience of my life and I got used to hiding how I felt about a lot of things. I’d stopped sharing in real life so I stopped sharing online, I also didn’t want to acknowledge that a lot of the time I wasn’t having as much fun as everyone else or feeling about university experiences how everyone else felt and wanted me to feel. I felt that ‘if I didn’t write it down, it wasn’t true’ so my online diary stopped when I was about 20.

I regret that I stopped using the written word to document my life but I compensated with photographs, another medium I want to include more in my life next year.  

Whilst I don’t think I would share to the level that I used to before, I would like to start writing again and its definitely on my list of goals for 2017. I’m not entirely sure what it will look like at the moment, but I read a lot of blogs and I have some ideas about what I want to mine to look like. Last night I read some of my past blog posts and I enjoyed it, so if I enjoyed it I can only hope that maybe others will to (though its not my main reason for writing a blog).

I’ve written this post over the last 20 minutes and the words have flowed easily. I have felt how I want to feel when I write so I’m hoping that this is a positive start. Fingers crossed for 2017.

Holly

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