the love/hate relationship with writing challenges

On the first day of July, I decided to take part of the #30daywriterchallenge without actually thinking what would it do to my blog. 

First of all, I met some like-minded people through this, which was one of the reasons I even started sharing my writing and photos. So that's a plus. But there's a big minus on this too.

The good thing about joining any challenge, group, community or a hashtag, is that you most likely will find others who share the same ideas and opinions, who are ready to discuss and share. They keep you motivated and personally, seeing the pageviews and increasing comments motivate the hell out of me! It feels as finally someone else besides my boyfriend is reading all of this. And it feels extremely good, so thank you for reading the words I'm typing down. It does mean a lot. 

But when you think about it ... You post an article every day for 30 days straight. It may boost your creativity, it may challenge you and make you want to both stop writing and never leave the keyboard at the same time. It's more than the usual Instagram challenge where you just post a photo with the right hashtag for 30 days. To get out a content for an article is much more challenging than what you could think. And I've taken some stops in the middle of this challenge. Why? Because since day 1 of publishing my blog I've said and I will stay true to this - I'm creating a valuable content. I don't want to spit out something just to put the check mark. It even feels a little like spamming. I'm no daily newspaper that has to be published every single day. I am afraid that my posts may lose value, credibilty and relevance if I keep on writing something just for the sake of writing. That was never my intention and I won't fall in that pit. 

I love that this challenge really made me research different types of blog post ideas, I found new blogs to read and overall it did kickstart my creative mind. But I just don't feel comfortable posting every single day just to fit in the thirty days. It may be helpful to get you started, to get you inspired from others. But if it doesn't fit, it doesn't and it shouldn't make you feel frustrated like it did when I realized I've missed a whole week on writing. I write when I feel like it. And it's such a personal thing, that no one should make you feel under pressure for it or make you write down some non sense. 

So, I will continue to contribute each post I do to the challenge, but not every day. I will try tho, but if I will feel that it's just not going to happen, then I won't. This all for the sake of my initial idea for this blog.

Thank you for reading!

Love,

Ieva