Write for 21 days…

Writing.

I have a love-hate relationship with it.

When I do it, I feel good. If it’s personal writing,I feel happy, understood and free to be me. If it’s professional writing, I feel accomplished, like I’m being of service and like I”m paying it forward. If someone reads something I wrote and it helps them in some small way, that’s so cool!

When I don’t write (on a consistent basis, that is), I’m thinking “I should be writing.”

But I’m not a big fan of “shoulds”. In fact, I hate the word. The only “shoulds” in my life are feeding and caring for the baby and our pets. Everything else is optional. I mean everything (showering, flossing, cleaning house, you name it!)

Yesterday, I was journaling (for the first time in weeks) and the message that came through to me was “Write for 21 days and see how it changes your life.”

I think the last time I wrote for 21 days straight was in 2002 when I worked through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way and she suggests morning pages. I hate morning pages! All I want to do in the morning is grab a shower and some breakfast and maybe do some yoga stretches to wake up. But write first thing? No way.

But I wrote morning pages. Just never in the a.m. I always wrote in the afternoon or evening. I felt defiant but that way it was less of a “should” for me and was more on my terms.

In the past 11 years of being a business owner, I’ve written a lot. Four websites, a few dozen articles, a few hundred blog posts, a few thousand Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, speeches, e-mails, marketing campaigns, ad copy and I’ve also filled up a few personal journals.

But I still haven’t claimed “being a writer.”

I even attended Jennifer Louden’s Writer’s Retreat (highly recommended, by the way!) in Taos, NM in 2005 and wrote the outline to my adoption reunion book (it will get written before I die!) but I still have a hard time saying I’m a writer.

So what is a writer? One could argue it’s one who writes. And I certainly do plenty of that.

But I think my gremlin associates being a writer with being an “author” of a published book. And I haven’t done that. Yet.

But I know that’s stinkin’ thinkin’ ! I don’t think any less of my friends who are runners because they’ve never completed a marathon.

So I’m claiming it here. I’m a writer!

At least for the next 21 days…

(I’ll let you know how it goes! And if you want to join me and commit to writing for the next 21 days, send me a note and we’ll check in every few days and see how it’s going!)

P.S. Oh yeah! the inspiration for this article came from Dawn Goldberg’s great free e-book Writing From Your Soul. I encourage you to check it out.