For those that know me, it's been a busy month...if you don't know me well (yet!), then here's a quick look at what I've been up to this month. November means NaNo to me: National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50k words during the month of November. I knew that I wanted to do it again this year, on top of all the other stuff I was doing. So still planned on writing a blog post every Wednesday. And this year I've been doing moon phase posts, so every 3-5 days I have been posting about the current phase of the moon over at Wyld Garden. Then, I'm still working on getting my Patreon going, and making sure I do all the things there for Patrons. Right now that means a short story every month, containing magic and seasonal influences. I also post a vote there for next month's blog topics, and a piece from something else that I have written previously but never released. And, because my Witchy Children (the seasonal short story I write for Patreon) story from October featured chants, I recorded them and posted all of them on Patreon this month: eight chants I wrote and then talked about! And still working on Wyld, the eZine I am helping produce with some friends. Although we are currently between major issues, we have been releasing smaller articles, so I had an article to write for that too.
And that's just the writing! I had family commitments, which meant I was away from home for a good chunk of five days this month. And on a personal level, I enjoy playing an MMO, and right now the group I play with has been working pretty hard on getting ready for the next big raid (a boss fight that requires ten players to group up together), so we were trying to put in extra hours getting geared up for that.
I knew it was going to be a lot. I've only been doing the Patreon stuff for three months now, so I am still sorting out the best way to plan all of that out. Mainly it is the short story that I need to make sure I am keeping up with, not only getting the ideas to write about, but also scheduling it in so I'm not trying to write it all in the last week. I really want those stories to be well thought out, so I not only want to have them written, but I try to read over them several times before I release them and make any changes I feel necessary.
I've done NaNo for ten years now, and completed it every year...which is a pretty big accomplishment for me. I always set my daily goal high. I aim for 2k words a day, which is about 400 words higher than the average needed to finish. But I also know that things come up, that some days I just can't get into the writing, and so it gives me five days of doing nothing. I also know from experience that on a good day I can write the 2k in about an hour...and on a slow day it could take me several hours.
This year I had a particularly slow start. I had way more prep done on my story this year, which I think made me a little overconfident. I also know that I write best in the morning, but ended up doing some game stuff on several mornings in the first couple of weeks, and then dithering away the rest of my day. Which wouldn't have been so bad, except that I didn't work extra on the other days to catch up.
Around the middle of the month, I felt way behind. I was about 5k words behind schedule, hadn't really done much on my short story, though I had finished my Wyld article. The worst part though was it just felt like there was so much waiting to be done. I was starting to drag my feet and not want to write at all.
I know this feeling. I fight this feeling all the time! Typically I use music to bust me out of it. I'll find some kind of music that gets me in the mood to move, and I'll dance for a bit. Really anything that is upbeat and pumped up! It changes my energy, and gets me motivated.
When I was down to just one week left, I still had 15k words to write, half my short story...and Thanksgiving! I rarely write on Thanksgiving, we are always doing family stuff. I knew I really had to dig my heals in and focus.
Stubbornness sometimes saves me. And an intense desire not to fail, even if I'm the only one who would know. NaNo is a perfect example of this. Sure, I shared my progress online, and my friends and family know I'm doing it. But I'm the only one who knows if I'm actually doing it! I could easily have added all these other words I wrote this month into my count (and I did consider this at one point....when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed). I could have used a previous year's work to cross the finish line. Or I could have easily just stopped talking about it and given up.
But what I love about NaNo is it pushes me. It makes me strive for things that seem too much, that are more than I've done before, or that challenge me in different ways. Every year that I've done it, I've learned new things about my writing. This year was my hardest year in terms of volume. With all the other things I worked on this year, I wrote more in the month than any other year ever. Not counting this blog post, I wrote 26k words for things that weren't NaNo...that's almost as if I did an extra half a NaNo!
Doing things like NaNo helps push my boundaries...it shows me just how much I can do when I put my mind to it. I wouldn't want to write like this all year round. I really have to structure my life a lot more to get things done. I didn't do some things that I would have liked to do (leisure things), and I definitely wrote a lot of days that I didn't feel like writing.
But the feeling I get when I submit those last words, the final blog post of the month, and check all the tasks off in my calendar, that makes it all worth it. Looking forward, I have a lot more confidence about being able to manage everything I want to do. And, after such an intense period of time, a normal workload feels easy!
I think this is true of any area of your life where you push yourself hard. Athletes do this when training, they push hard and do more in training than they need to do in a competition. Their body becomes used to the training, so when they compete, they can push themselves hard and it may still feel easier than if they only trained doing exactly what they needed to do. Students do the same thing studying for tests in school. When they are applying the knowledge later, in a job or just in life, they don't need to do that intense focus on the information. They may brush up on it as needed, but that's it.
I think this same thing often applies spiritually. When we are learning a new discipline, we often immerse ourselves into it. This is sort of what I'm doing with my moon work this year. At the end of last year, I did a pretty deep study of the moon phases in general. I had worked with them before, and had studied them before too, but not at this level of depth. For a whole cycle, I read and journaled about the current phase, reading multiple articles and sources and then writing my own reflection. And then, for the whole year, I've been taking that general moon phase knowledge and applying it to the particular full moon energy, which has been incredible...and a lot of work! But I know that I am absorbing so much, and will be able to turn to this year, my journal and the things I have learned in the future..without needing to do all the work over!
If we don't challenge ourselves to push our boundaries, we never expand, we never grow. Boundaries are there for a reason, and they definitely serve to protect us. We want to stretch them, but not break them. When we break our boundaries, then we open ourselves up to harm. This means different things in different areas of your life. Breaking a physical boundary could mean pushing yourself too hard physically and often leads to an injury. Breaking an emotional boundary may happen when you ignore your emotional warning signs and invest yourself with things that aren't healthy for you. Breaking a spiritual boundary could be working with things that aren't right for you (especially if you feel pressured into it by other people) or it could mean burning yourself out by doing too much too soon. Much like physical muscles, our spiritual muscles need to be stretched so they don't get damaged.
Finding that edge where you are pushing your boundaries hard but not breaking them involves paying serious attention to your mental, physical and emotional health. Stopping or backing off when you feel like you are ready to break is NOT a sign of weakness. Knowing where your hard limits are is what lets you push your boundaries...because you know just how far you can stretch them and when to let the pressure off.
It can sometimes be frustrating because we often don't see the results while we are neck deep in whatever we are working on. Many times, we have to get to the end to see how far we have come. The true scope of our progress doesn't hit us until we are finished. But we also sometimes need that rest time at the end to really let things sink in.
Another thing that is important is to not be afraid to try something just because you are afraid to fail. If you only do things that you know you can do, you aren't pushing yourself. New things are uncomfortable because we are quite literally outside our comfort zone. Think about it like a balloon. If you are sitting inside the balloon, this is the place where you are at right now. It is your comfort zone, the things in life you feel safe doing. But if you see something interesting just outside your balloon, you can move towards it. The balloon will stretch and you can move into a space that you haven't been before. The balloon is still around you, but it's a bit thinner where you are at because it's growing to accommodate your movement. If you move too far, it will pop and you won't have the protection of the balloon anymore. But if you stand in this new space fore a while, it's like adding a bit more air, and your balloon finds a new balance. Now, the space that was outside your balloon is inside of it and your boundaries have changed.
We naturally are drawn to things that challenge us. We hear about something new and we may want to try it. And we also instinctively know when we need to rest. We just need to tune into those feelings, listen to ourselves when we are feeling tired or like we need a bit of a mental break. And then, when we are refreshed, we can turn our attention to the next new thing!
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