Why Write for 30 Days: Making the case for NaBloPoMo

Writing for 30 days through National Blog Posting Month forces me to accept that what you don't use, you lose.

I haven't written here for awhile, my energy sapped, going the way of too much anxiety and stomach dropping concern, for the state of our country.

I'm hoping to start breathing again come November 8 but I know that I've got to make steps to return to what I love. I can't let uncertainty and fear keep me frozen out of everything else.

NaBloPoMo has come in my emergency. I'm using these 30 days of blog posting to warm up the engines and learn how to get behind the wheel of my life again.

Why post here for 30 days? Why say yes to National Blog Posting Month when all I've been able to do is what is only required for daily living: work, slight house upkeep, a shower every few days, a walk and talking with the people I live with.

I've got to tell you, something has hurt me over this election. Pain that is physically close to home. I'm hearing words from people I know and I'm seeing people I thought I knew, act in ways that wound. There are signs on their lawns, houses away from mine, showing the man who is their choice for our President. It's left me speechless. Wordless. Blogless. A gut punch will take your breath away like that.

But after not posting for a month, I believed that NaBloPoMo would blow its warm wind back into my life, letting me shed the frozen fear from these intense last weeks. Two days into November, and I'm right. I've put two posts up, one for each day of November thus far. I am accountable to this space. I have committed to 30 days of writing through NaBloPoMo and just as in the past, NaBloPoMo was flint striking together again. Only this year, it seems much more.

And that's why I'm back, that's my case for returning again to National Blog Posting Month. I've got people's blogs to visit, those who are committing to write daily for the next 30 days, knowing the good that always magically appears after four weeks of writing. We are creating community by this act.

I'm not worrying that I may not have something to write tomorrow, or the 28 days after that. Because National Blog Posting Month will get me through November, through the writing of others and through the writing that I'm going to do here. I already feel the spark of ideas of what could be.

NaBloPoMo says we are here, and that we believe that reaching the end of 30 days of writing will help us find our way back home: back to the reason we first posted on our blogs. Because we came looking, and what we found then, we can find again.

No matter how lost this world might make us feel right now.


Here's to National Blog Posting Month. Thank you for being here, and for lighting the way with the lantern of your words.

Need a little help to get your writing going? Click here for BlogHer and their list of November 2016 NaBloPoMo Writing Prompts

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