Resetting for the new year.

When I rebooted my website into this blog in August, all I knew was I wanted to allow myself to truly write freely, for the first time in a long time.

To not write as a coach, a business, an authority, but just as me: Silver. The person.

Prior to this, I had not been able to write consistently for over a decade. Writing used to be painful, agonisingly so, psychologically and physiologically. Thus, consistency was impossible.

I set myself the hypothesis in August: If I were to remove all expectations for what I've been conditioned to believe "writing should be", would I be able to write painlessly and consistently?

And I think I've proven that to myself now.

• I crossed the 50 post mark at the end of last month; I think this is my personal best, frankly.
• I have written consistently for four months; another personal best.
• I have been publishing three posts—one long-form and two short-form—a week (bar my monthly week off), which, considering it used to be a miracle for me to even get one out a month, is unbelievable!

In this experiment, I deliberately aimed for consistency over quality (though I'm not saying that everything I wrote was shit) because I wanted to get the practice in.

I wanted to build a muscle of simply writing, simply getting my thoughts out into word-form, and publishing them authentically. Nothing else mattered. And the commitment to the discipline really helped.

This week's long-form post was difficult to write for so many reasons:

• I was fighting off yet another viral infection (I'm better now),
• We were also doing a massive clean for our rental inspection, and
• It is a messy topic on which I'm still working out my own thoughts and feelings.

Yet I still managed to get it out. Once upon a time, this would have been impossible. Practice pays off.

Now that I have my white belt, I feel ready to move onto the next belt. I want to start practicing other skills and aspects of writing other than just production. Namely, learning and working on what makes better communication.

So what I'm tentatively aiming for in 2025 is:

• Keeping the consistency of one long-form a week, and
• Dropping the consistency on the short-forms.

In other news, I'm in the middle of a big website migration.

Having written consistently for these past few months, I find that I've outgrown the linear format of a blog and am wanting to, finally, explore growing my own digital garden.

I first stumbled across the idea of a digital garden at the start of this year through Alexis Watson's post On Digital Gardening, and through their post, discovered Maggie Appleton's essay A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, which is a must-read for anyone planning on building their own digital garden!

What I love about the practice of digital gardening is that it allows a person to build a digital presence that:

• Is an authentic, curated reflection of their diverse selves, that
• Can also be built in such a way that people unfamiliar with the concept don't have to feel lost upon entering it.

It's like architecture, in a lot of ways. Building for accessibility.

Sounds great, but golly it's been challenging!

• There has been a lot of healing involved: The simple act of giving myself permission to be my complex self online was phew!
• It's completely different from my zettelkasten. My ZK needs to make sense only to me; I want my digital garden to be accessible and navigable to most people.
• I'm learning a completely new platform from scratch with no coding experience and no budget for assistance.

I would like to have my new website ready by January 2025: Ya know, the sexy new year launch harharhar. 😜 I would really, really like to... sooo... I'm going to take the rest of December kinda off from writing to focus on this.

I mean, I may still write if something itches me so bad it's gotta come out, but I don't multitask well. I'm a hyperfocus kinda person. 🔬

So, hopefully see you in January with a spankin' new web site! 🤞🏼 And if not, see you then anyway! 😝

And if you have been following me these past few months, thank you for sticking with me! I truly, deeply, madly appreciate your support. ❤️🙏🏼