525, 600 minutes and 100, 527 words equals our first year together, friends!

Friends who I’ve known for a while have been a party to my reflection projects preceding Christmas and Easter for a while. Easter longer than Christmas, but both for a few years. After they are done for the year, a few of my friends have mentioned that they really liked the process, and that I should consider doing a longer term thing – even if it’s not every day like the reflection projects are. I squirmed around it. I sit at a computer all day at $Dayjob, I write there. I don’t want to sit at a computer all night, too, right?

But…maybe there was a longer endgame there somewhere. Not in an everyday post, but in a collection of the thinky-thoughts. A raison d’etre to mull things over and work on climbing out of the dark place in which I sometimes found myself. But if I did that, I didn’t want it to be a battle plan for How To Kick Anxiety To The Curb. More like… How I’ve daisy-chained some bright moments to remind myself what the light looks like. Some days that feels ambitious. Some days, it’s about finding the riverbed and knowing that something is just under the surface if I just dig for it. Some days, it’s like trying to not get pitched out of the boat for the torrent of thoughts.

But I get ahead of myself.

A few years ago, at a team-building event, we played Two Truths and a Lie. I don’t remember the truths that I put forward, but my lie was that “I have done Open Mike night at a comedy club”. NO ONE thought that was my lie. NOT ONE PERSON. Another time, we did a team-building thing where one of my teammates said that something great that I brought to the team was my ability to tell a story. Even my teammates were encouraging me to be a storyteller – or, in the very least, to do something beyond Technical Writing (which, don’t get me wrong, I still like as a career).

Then, the universe kicked it into high gear.

A year and a bit ago, the Director of Learning and Development at $Dayjob set a goal for herself. She was going to do a weekly “Microlearning Monday” segment. One of those segments was about writing a blog. Just write what you know. People will show up to read it. A little over a year ago, I watched that segment, and Child watched it over my shoulder.

“You should do that, mom.

“Hm. Maybe”.

Just a few months later – a year ago this week – Child became my superfly IT monkey and posted my first blog entry on Sweary Parent Chronicles for me. I aimed for posts on Tuesdays and Fridays, and then tossed in Throwback Thursday for good measure. Sometimes the weeks were successful, sometimes notsomuch. Sometimes there was a Foodie Friday. Sometimes there was Saturday-very-late. Or Wednesday Wayback. Sometimes it was superwordy, sometimes it was succinct. But there have been posts. Mostly Regular.

I did 3 reflection projects – Advent, Remembrance, and Lent. I thought about a waterfall project (fail!) and a beach project (semi-success!)I had great feedback from people I know, and my posts reached people that I don’t know. That’s good progress.

So thanks, friends, for shoving me onto this path. I’m excited to see where we find ourselves next year.