Feb. 8, 2025
Writing a blog post every day is not essential. It’s not part of some new year’s resolution, despite the fact that the start of this unbroken streak of posts was January 1st. If anything my new year’s resolution has been to try and step gently away from my perfection. And the adoption of that resolution began in the middle of 2024 rather than new year’s day.
Around September time, I realised and began to recognise myself as I read many descriptions of crippling perfectionism, especially in how it relates to depression. Depression is a weird experience that is simultaneously subjective but also measurable in many ways. It became clearer and clearer to me that perfectionism was a significant component to my problems, in both work and the rest of life (i.e. the part that is most important). And so I began to try and undo a lifetime of thinking in a particular way, mostly guided by a set of rules that I now write down in all my notebooks. Those rules are for me, so I won’t share them here, at least not today. But they are eminently findable on the internet and recognisable variations of common themes in self-help literature. I still need to work out which of them are genuine rules and which are merely guidelines.
At the moment, daily blogging is just a process whereby I try and get something reasonable into the text box by the arbitrary deadline of midnight. A large part of that process has been creating the tools that make it easier for me to get started on posts. Another significant chunk of the work has been to scale back my ambition for what a post might be. And to think about what I might need to do in the days leading up to a bigger post in order to get it written while maintaining a daily post.
So the compact I currently have with myself is get something done. No zero days. And then aim for each day to get a bit better than the previous one, where appropriate. I’m lucky that I allow myself to blog on a lot of different topics and have a lot of interests, so I can veer around a bit. The quality might be a bit up and down day to day, but that’s fine. Where there are flaws, there are opportunities to do it better next time. In some ways today’s post is a direct response to yesterday’s: that one said “gee quality drops off a bit when I write every day” and this one says “quality every day is an aim that will be achieved if I write every day, not when I write every day”.
And that’s it for now. See you tomorrow.