Giving Up, Giving In, Moving Forward

What happened to the 30 day Writing for Healing poetry writing challenge? It got sidelined by my personal healing journey.

A few weeks ago, I launched a 30 day Writing for Healing Poetry Writing challenge. For 8 days straight, I was consistent with uploading poetry writing prompts to this blog and my social media outlets. Then I fell off.

Why?

The simple answer is I got overwhelmed.

The detailed answer is this: I was overwhelmed with a myriad of things, including the work of creating daily blog posts, the graphic and document designs related to those posts, the correlating videos I was sharing on social media, the inefficiency of my work-life balance as a writing professor, and the weight of my personal well-being.

That last part - emotional and mental healing - is what took the heaviest toll for me. Trying to heal while trying to support other people's healing - the way I attempted to do with this challenge - became really hard to balance. I'm passionate about helping others in a variety of ways: as a teacher, a peer, a writer, a friend, and a family member. But I forgot to consider the need to focus on myself and not feel guilty about doing so.

I've been spending the past few weeks dealing with the things I need to heal from and this type of work continues, as it always will, for all of us. Mental health is a daily process, a lifetime responsibility. The same way we must manage our physical health -- every day of our lives -- we have to do the same for our mental health.

After I bounced back enough to feel more functional than I felt a few weeks ago, I decided to encourage myself by taking all of the prompts I would have published on this blog and turning them into a manual. Reading over this manual has been a source of personal encouragement and I will challenge myself to use it for my personal well-being. In the meantime, I'll keep "in touch" at a later date, once I get back into publishing blog posts.

Sincerely,

Alison