I haven’t blogged for a few days, failing (you might say) in my attempt to blog every day. I set the challenge, and I fell short, and thus I failed.

Or…

Maybe I can never fail. Maybe the old cliche is right, and the only way to fail is to give up. Missing a few days blogging last week is nothing compared to giving up right now. And I don’t want to give up. I want to keep blogging. I want to try and post something every day.

I know I’ll fall short at some point. But that’s not the point of all this. The real point is to keep going.

I’ve been here before with my writing. I’ve gone through stretches where my fears and my perfectionism made it hard for me to write ten words, let alone a thousand. I went through periods where I could only write when I had the “perfect time” to write (what a joke I was playing on myself then), and I went through periods where I thought the reason I couldn’t write was because my life had conspired against me to rob me of my inspiration or my time or my energy (this was also a joke, but not one I played on myself… it turns out the joke came from others, from gurus with “advice,” which was that in order to write, one had to write a certain amount of words each day, and every day, and if one didn’t meet these quotas, one wasn’t a “real” writer… boy, did that put too much pressure on what was supposed to be something fun!).

But each time, whether I did it to myself or believed what others said was true, I never gave up. Not completely. I still kept writing, even after long stretches of not-writing. It would have been a lot easier to stop writing, when I felt so much like a failure, only it wouldn’t have been easier. Not really. Because, for whatever crazy reason, I really, really, really need to write. I need to put my thoughts and ideas and stories into written words, and if I don’t do that, I get cranky. I get all bent and sharp-edged. If I go too long without writing, I get angry. Out of sorts. I never realized that my compulsion to write was tangled up in my emotions and sense of self, until I started noticing how I felt on days when I wrote and how I felt on days when I didn’t. Kinda like the difference between days when you exercise and eat well versus the days when you don’t.

It’s the same with blogging (which, obviously, is a kind of writing). If I don’t write down my ideas and work through my thoughts as I write, I feel off. I feel strange. Not myself. All bottled up, and at the same time kind of fuzzy, like my very self is going out of focus on an old TV set.

So, I can’t give it up. Even if the internet melted down tomorrow (which… maybe not a bad thing…?), I would still write down my thoughts and put them out there for others to see. I might make more zines, I guess. (Which, come to think of it, is probably something I should do anyway.)

But regardless of the delivery system, I would still want to write stuff and show it to people. Not because I think what I have to say is so great or important, but simply because I feel good when I write, and I feel good trying to connect with other people through my writing. Why do any of us make stuff and share it with others? Because it’s fun and makes us feel good.

Missing a few days in my “daily blogging” challenge doesn’t change anything. I haven’t failed. I’m still “blogging every day” because I’m here right now, typing these words and posting them, and I’ll keep “blogging every day” no matter how many future days I miss. Failure only happens if I give up. And I’m not going to.