Writing 30 Articles in 30 Days

How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Failure and Love Deadlines   

At the beginning of the year, I wrote an article titled, You're in Your 30's and You Don't Know What to do with Your Life — What's Next? trying to mascarade my fears about turning 30 and not knowing what to do with my life. Little did I know, that as the year progressed the insecurities that plagued me would also infect many people around the world. This past year has been difficult for everyone (well, not for the billionaires that got $637 billion richer during the pandemic, but that's beside the point). Many words could be used to describe the theme of 2020, but I think a little four-letter word summarizes it best — loss. 

Whether it as been a loss of time, money, or perhaps even life, 2020 has certainly taken something away from most. By the middle of the year, the anxiety that my life was directionless had compounded as a feeling of dread related to what was going on around me grew. I was so scared of doing anything that I stopped doing everything. 

Ever since I was 13, when I started my first blog, I have been writing in one form or another, but for almost six months at the beginning of 2020, I lacked the motivation to publish anything. The problem wasn't that I didn't know what to write about instead I had lost the passion to finish any writing project. I knew I had to do something about this! 

Some people recommended that to get started writing again, I should take things slowly. "Write a new sentence every day, and then a new paragraph, and eventually you will rediscover what made you passionate about writing again" was great advice I received — and completely ignored it. Instead of undertaking micro writing projects, I choose to do the biggest writing project I have ever done — write 30 articles in 30 days. 

I knew the idea to write one article per day was crazy, in fact, I fully expected to fail. In my original article introducing the writing challenge I wrote, "For the entire month of June, I will be attempting to publish one article per day. Will I be successful? Probably not. But if by the 1st of July I have published at least half the number of articles I propose to write I will be (mostly) satisfied." To this day, I am still not sure why I started doing this project if I expected to fail? But I guess that is one of the lessons I've learned from this project, that it is better to aim to do something big and fail than to settle in mediocrity. 

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned during the 30 days in June when I wrote an article every day was to doubt myself less. Like many people, "imposter syndrome" is something that I often think about. I was born in Mexico and raised in the United States, ni de aquí ni de allá (neither from here nor there) as some Chicanos like to say. From growing up in a country whose current president and his supporters insult my people, attending an Ivy League university where it constantly felt like I was the dumbest person in the room, to living in countries all over the world where I will never be accepted as a local, feeling like I don't belong is an inescapable notion. That is also how I felt in my capacity as a writer. 

Even though I have been writing for over 17 years, before my 30-day writing challenge, I never felt as if I was truly a "writer." Sure, my works have been published across many platforms and mediums, I have edited hundreds of pages for other people, and I have made good money doing both of these things, but for me, that wasn't enough. "Writing is just something I do for fun" I often told people when the asked me if I was a writer. Now, after completing my writing challenge, I can finally say that I am a writer and I no longer doubt that I belong in this category of people. 

Writing 30 articles in 30 days was one of the most challenging things I have ever done in my life, but it was also one of the most enjoyable experiences. The process allowed me to learn about interesting subjects such as sustainable fashion, A.I. technology, and Juneteenth. I also got to meet cool people such as an awesome fortune teller, a phenomenal artist, and a group of single people in search of relationships, love, and sex. I don't know what future writing projects await me, but I do not know that this is only the beginning and that there is more to come!