Writing has been an integral part of my life since my teenage years. My undergraduate years were the best because I developed and explored by love of writing with immense support of my friends. I was blogging, writing poetry and ultimately ended up authoring five novels that my friend community took well.
When I write, I feel connected to my inner self.
When I write, I am getting my thoughts out of my head.
When I write, I can make actionable goals of my dreams and aspirations by putting them on paper — even if it is virtual paper.
When I write, I help myself deal with situations better and sometimes to read what I wrote in a different tone, helps me get a new perspective on things.
Stephe mentioned in her recent post on building the habit of writing that being consistent and attaching it to something we are already doing is very important. Looking back at the years when I was not writing as much, I realize now that I did not have a reason to write. To rephrase that, I had random thoughts that I wanted to let go but they all talked about different things and putting them in one book did not make sense. There are some times in life when we are scattered into so many directions that it is hard to keep up and organize.
Bullet journaling has helped me focus again. It has brought back the joy of writing, by hand and on the computer. By writing everyday — something as simple as a sentence on who/what I am grateful for today to a lengthy paragraph on what happened today that changed, developed or challenged my personal and professional values — brings me closer to who I am, what I think about and who I want to be.
Since January is right around the corner, the Christmas trees are up and the snow is falling, it is the time of the year again when I look with renewed enthusiasm at my goals for next year, things I accomplished this year and habits I want to keep.
For the month of December, I am doing a couple of things that are writing related.
1. The Boho Berry Challenge: Boho Berry is a great website for bullet journalists. Kara has monthly challenges and every month has a theme, each day of the month has a purpose. It is not required to journal. Everyone participating in the challenge approaches in the way they are comfortable. I plan to write a short paragraph about each of her daily prompts. You can check out the prompts here.
2. December Journal Prompts — I have never had time before to do journal prompts but this time I am going to try. I found numerous prompts for the month of December on Pinterest and could not decide which ones to do. So, I collected the ones I liked, wrote them on individual little sheets of paper and put them in a jar. This is my jar of incomplete sentences and unanswered questions. There are more than 31 and it will be random which ones I end up doing on which day. My hope is that this will compliment by daily gratitude and professional/personal development log of thoughts by making me think about trivial things, the small things and happenings in life that give us joy.
3. Design Your Destiny — Kim from Sublime Reflection has a wonderful 5 week course about setting goals for next year. Every week, starting this week, she sends out a workbook of 14–16 pages to reflect on the year that was, what we want to do next year, how to plan it and so on. I am looking forward to planning out my year ahead.
4. Your Best Year 2018, the life edition — This is a more thorough workbook by Lisa Jacobs and it has steps around setting goals, doing quarterly reviews of the goals and revisiting them.
No. 3 and 4 are going to be very important in terms of my preservice teacher journey because while I am in-training, I need to make connections, learn more about my career, do courses that will help me help my students learn better.
You might be thinking that it is going to be a lot of writing. I think so too. But I am excited and can’t wait to get started. Well, school and exams take priority of course but the day has a lot of time. 🙂
My final advise for someone who might just be starting to write or overwhelmed about it:
We connect with our inner selves in different ways. Some people draw, some people write, others paint. Some do Yoga. What brings you solace is individual to you.
I love writing and appreciate its presence in my life. I am glad that I got an education that has honed my skill to think and construct thoughts and bring them into existence. Developing a habit of writing is hard. Sometimes we don’t know what to write about, sometimes there is too much to write about. Don’t worry though.
Write something if that is what you want to do. Don’t judge your work. Just let your thoughts flow. It has really helped me focus, avoid procrastination and come up with more details than I had expected.
Bullet journaling has definitely played a role in this and I will talk about that in detail in a different post. Coming soon!
PS: If you were wondering, the jar is my mind.
Also published on Medium.
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