Do you ever start questioning your life when you have something big coming up? Leading up to a surgery I foolishly scheduled the day before Thanksgiving, I kept asking myself, what if today was your last, would you have done everything you wanted to do in this lifetime? Did you express love? Did you show appreciation for your family and friends? While I’ve done a lot of things I wanted to do like travel, go to concerts or sporting events, I feel like I’ve been holding back in my daily life. Not fully expressing my feelings, showing appreciation or treating everyday as an adventure like before or not making time to pursue the some of my goals.

I’ve wanted to build my blog but have been inconsistent with writing because I was afraid to be judged for sharing where I fell short. Even though I would never know you were judging unless you wrote a comment. You see all these perfect people who manage to juggle everything with their families, write blog posts, take beautiful pictures, make homemade everything while exercising regularly, ugh…exhausted just thinking about it. Then as I was waiting to be admitted into the hospital, I saw this 31 day challenge to write 500 words a day. No editing, just writing and publishing to get into the habit with the hope that the daily habit will improve your writing skills in 31 days. It was the perfect challenge to push myself to write and publish regularly.

Cheryl Marquez – Learning how to code, lessons learned about blogging, marketing and live streaming

Bombchel – Recipes, fitness and yogi journal

Medium – Life without a car and Pokemon Go

One of my clients has done a great job of documenting her journey from learning to code, attending a dev bootcamp to getting a role as a junior developer on CodingOver40. While she struggles with letting go of her old identity and settles into being a developer, she has been an inspiration to women of all ages through her blog. You have to develop a thick skin when you write, live stream or share your journey with the world. When she got started, I suggested she write everyday and post a different theme for the month. One of my favorite themes was 30 days to a Dream Job. You can identify with the struggles of a job search, she let’s you in on what it’s like to have the added challenge of changing careers while you are working on your technical skills.

In hindsight, I should have done the writing challenge at the same time, so we could go through our journey’s in parallel. As I sit here, I am tempted to put together an editorial calendar but that’s not the goal for the next 31 days. The goal is to write 500 words a day to get into the writing habit and choosing which blogs to post the content I’ve written. Does this mean I’ll publish daily? Not sure, all I know is I’ll be writing 500 words a day. The content will be published on my blogs, including cooking tutorials on Facebook Live. I would love your feedback on what you would like to learn about and I would be happy to write about it. Let me know in the comments. I’m going to use any suggestions as writing prompts.