Mixed feelings
It’s interesting to observe my inner vacillation between “Yaaay it’s been 365 days of writing!” and “Oh it’s been a year. Nothing to see here. Keep calm and carry on.”
Because after one year, my relationship with writing feels like it had progressed into like one of those long-time married couples. No fiery, lustful romance. No hot dates and late night phone calls. No sweet-nothings and loud declarations. Just simple, quiet, loyal companionship that’s always present, always caring, always loving. Just a mature, deep partnership that withstood the test of time. Like well-aged wine. That’s why I don’t feel much—in heart—about writing to celebrate this milestone.
Yet the other side of me—the ego, intellect, conscience, whatever you call it— says I got to at least do something. Small wins matter too, on a long journey of effort. Milestones should be scribed down, pit stops taken. So I find myself here, doing my bit for my conscience, in case it matters later on.
How my daily writing had evolved over the year
1 year. 365 days. 403 posts. 800 pages. 200158 words.
I wouldn’t say that I wrote the equivalent of a few novels here, because that kind of effort requires a different skill, imagination and is a lot more focused and singular in purpose. My writings actually don’t matter that all that much, to be honest. The words recorded here are the by-products of a more primary purpose – meaning-finding and meaning-making. Ultimately, self-growth and self-actualization. Words as tools, and writing as process.
Initially, it used to matter that what I wrote were catered to an audience… the occupational hazards of being a human-centered designer, of wanting to be useful. It was a lot about having all these backlog of content and ideas and wanting to put them out into the world. The writing was mainly one direction - from my brain to keyboard. The intent was clear, and the writing straight-forward and factual. That’s my ‘loudpseaker’ phase.
Next came the #slump phase. This was right around 60-70 day streak. As the ideas whittled down, enthusiasm waned and life caught on, the difficulties got real. I started to write more ‘cheat’ posts to get by. It felt awful initially, but after a while, I fully embraced the slump and got experimental. Wrote all sorts of different genres, from cheap short stories, to sensorial, descriptive essays; from worldbuilding to meta-posts that breaks the 4th wall; from revisting old writings to even painting with words! The writing was all over the place, and I was just throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks with me. Everything I could get my hands on. It was chaotic but beneficial. I made me experiment and learn what I enjoyed and don’t. Then something changed - I went to Kyoto for a month. That was the clincher that finally broke the slump.
My ‘sensorial’ phase came next. Inspired by fresh, new experiences of being in a different country and city; learning new skills like kintsugi, eating different foods; having adventures everyday; and simply being jolted alive by all the new input gave me a new heartfelt sense of revival in my daily writing. This was when I learned that a consistent daily output requires consistent daily input as well. The better my media consumption, the better quality my thoughts and my writings. My difficulties during the slump phase was that there wasn’t good enough input coming through. And what better way to get new input than to travel?! I was hooked to writing about my travels for this period of time, revisiting all the previous places I went to—India, UK, France, Bhutan, Scandinavia—and retrospectively writing about my beautiful experiences there. Nothing quite fires up my inspiration like travel does. Through this I also discovered I enjoyed writing these sorts of sensorial, experiential descriptive essays. The writing was outside-in this time, reversing the direction compared to when I started. And so I found the antidote to the monotony and stagnation in my writing.
Eventually, even the writing topics for travel died down, but the enthusiasm kept me going. Riding on that high, I went into an ‘over-compensation’ phase where I had so much to write about, that I double-/triple-posted often. For a time, the low bar of 200 words felt like a ceiling. This was just before the 200th post or so. I had good media consumption that helped, but I also discovered a post-generating technique that worked for me—the Reply post. We had a lot of good writers on 200wad, and often a post would set me off on a train of thought, or made me learn something new. So I built on the great content of others. It was great fun bouncing off the ideas of others, adding my own interpretation, mixing it up and putting it all back out into the world again. The writing wasn’t experimental like in my slump phase, nor was it outside-in like my sensorial phase. It felt more like improv theatre—your fellow stage actor says something, and you respond on your feet, in the moment. It was fluid, yet more controlled. I often enjoyed the back and forth, the absorb-and-build-on manner we were going with. To date, I still use this often.
Last but certainly not least, I got to the ‘envisioning’ phase. I think the seeds of it was when I did some posts on where I would be in 5 years, and another about what I want to be at each age decade (40, 50, 60…). And it coincided with a new season of work where I wanted to dedicate to working fulltime as an indie maker. With the new season, lots of fresh input and learnings came in the forms of books, online courses, social media articles, and Twitter posts. I devoured everything about coding, nocode, money, habit formation, success, etc. This was also around the same time when a bunch of us here started doing monthly goal setting and wrap-ups (since August). It’s fascinating and uncanny how the universe conspires in your favour when you’re aligned and congruent between your callings and actions. This was a period that engaged my creative imagination, using writing as a meaning-making, reality-shaping tool. As a life-giving tool. It was also an invigorating phase of learning new skills, new knowledge, new life experiments. I got on keto, overcame old chronic conditions, and developed new habits. Writing certainly played a big part in helping me here. I’m still in this phase I believe, except that there’s more implementation and action these days compared to the early part where I was doing more visualizing and planning.
What next?
I don’t know. If my different phases are any indication, there’s no certain ‘next’. My writing evolves as I change, as my life seasons unfold. But tools change us too, it makes us hold it a certain way, use it in a certain way. In industrial design, this is called affordances. The one year had certainly showed me that writing is a versatile enough tool to catch up with the needs of my life’s seasons, but in itself, it also helped shape how I responded to my seasons.
Maybe there will come a time when even writing’s own versatility will fall short. There’s definitely a non-zero chance this will happen. Perhaps new tools will come along that will serve me better. Voice? Working with my hands? Dance? Haha who knows!
No matter what happens, if that day does come, you will know that I’ll still be keeping my streak, doing my daily dues, just in a different mode.