This is my start line for a different sort of challenge.
It’s one that I’ve been pondering for some time now, but it took a few days by myself in Barcelona to really allow myself enough space to consider that there’s actually nothing stopping me from just doing the thing.
The truth is, sharing your innermost thoughts publicly is terrifying.
Writing out my journey of mental ill health into short and digestible Instagram-captions over the last decade has supported me to build some tolerance to vulnerability. But long-form writing is a new level of ickiness that really exposes you to a different type of critique.
I say long-form, but truly, I’m quite open to wherever this might take me. The last thing I would want this to become is some contrived, heavily performative series of writing that actually isn’t Jess Robson at all, you know?
My voice is my voice, as chatty and unprofessional and unacademic as it might sound, it’s mine. I’d be foolish to try and emulate anything else to be honest. And I love writing so - why ruin that?
I promise this preamble is actually leading somewhere.
I’m going to start a writing challenge. This challenge will be a daily A-Z of one-word prompts. At first I thought I would start with categories like an A-Z of people I’ve met, or places that mean something to me, but to begin with, I think I might just make it an utterly random set of words.
Application. Broth. Cows. Doc Martens. Eggs.
Ok, so definitely not those words above. But something like that.
I’ve just had the most ridiculous idea of outsourcing the suggestion of the next-day word on my socials… I could be opening a can of worms with that. But it keeps things fun, and, well, a challenge.
Some rules around the challenge:
I will use ZERO AI-support in the creation of my journal/blog posts. Not to generate ideas, not to write, and not to run a post-edit either. These pieces will be riddled with mistakes, and I will keep them so.
I will write in a chronological A-Z order. No skipping from B on a Tuesday to P on a Wednesday.
I must write about the day’s prompt, no matter what the day brings. If I only manage one sentence about the prompt, that’s ok.
So, why this, and why now?
The point of all this, in a nutshell, is to let myself be seen. Properly seen… messy seen, “deep” seen, memories seen, all of it. Seen in all the stuff that is a bit too complicated to squeeze into a caption.
I imagine a lot of these pieces will end up a bit memoir-ish (but then, isn’t that the whole point of a journal?).
And who cares? Maybe nobody, and that’s ok, because this is for me first. But maybe you’ll find a bit of yourself in here too. We kick off tomorrow with A, and this is where you come in. Drop a comment with what you think the A word should be. Acting? Adventure? Alarms? Apples? Surprise me (just maybe be kind, yeah?).
