"New"vember Resolutions

Today marks a new day, a new week, and a new month. It is also the day I have arbitrarily assigned to myself as a new year of sorts--a time to make a more concentrated effort to take on new habits to improve my life and ditch habits that are not serving me well. 

Interestingly, it's also the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which is something I have considered participating in many times throughout the years but have never actually done for one reason or another. It is especially top of mind this year because my 8th grader's English class has been assigned the student version of it as class project and will write 25,000 words of a novel by the end of the month. I genuinely wanted to participate alongside my son as a show of solidarity, and I truly thought I would do that. But, as I started to mentally prepare myself, I realized that the honest truth is I just don't seem to have a story in me right now. My mind feels very loud, and I can't hear characters and stories speaking to me at the moment. I believe they will one day because, when I was a child, writing stories was what I did for fun. It was effortless, and the stories almost wrote themselves. I believe that our child selves--in a time before things had to be done for money or approval but were only done for the sheer pleasure of doing them--are often our truest selves, so I think that story writer spirit still lives in me but has become lost in the noise of adulthood.

The world is so very loud with many voices speaking at once, and sometimes that cacophony leaves little room for true creativity. That's why one of the habits I want to cultivate in myself in this "new year" is the ability to find the silent places and sit in them so I can better hear and know the voice within me. Somehow, the noise of the physical and virtual worlds have become a comfort and an excuse, and sitting in silence now feels hard. 

If you know me in real life, you know sitting is not something I do well (though I have definitely gotten better at it in the last few years as I have become more intentional in my thoughts and actions and more focused on yoga and meditation.) I like to be busy, to be moving, to fill up all the down time with activities or chores or music or really anything as long I don't have to be still in body or mind. When I do sit, I tend to fill up what could be quiet spaces with the loudness of social media, sometimes scrolling for an hour or more, not even engaging in the content but just letting that "noise" wash over me. It's no wonder the voice of creativity can't be heard clearly, and it's not terribly surprising that the storytelling that came so easily in bored, quiet, technology-free moments during childhood is difficult to channel. The need to sit in the silence, in the alone, in the boredom, is very real and is why I am trying, in my spirit of resolution, to take a step back from social media and other similar distractions this month. I don't plan to quit my online "social" life entirely, but I want to stop using it as a crutch, as a time filler, as a means of validation, as a noise to drown out my uncomfortable thoughts. 

Even though I don't feel as if I have a novel in me right now, I do feel the tug to write and to find MY voice in the din. To that end, I am challenging myself to write a blog post a day for the whole month of November. I'm not aiming for 25,000 words (or the loftier 50,000 ascribed to adult participants in NaNoWriMo). I'm just trying to push myself a little and allow myself the space to be still and find my voice and to practice the act of writing so I'll be ready in case the chatter of characters and stories finds its way to the surface of my mind.

I only ever write for myself, and I'm not looking for external approval or validation in this blog space. But if you want to follow along and help keep me accountable to the goals I've set for myself, or if you think there might be a chance my words may strike a cord with you that challenges you or encourages you, I would love to have you join me on this journey.