Today’s prompt: Writing with Style. What’s your writing style? Do words just flow from your mind to your fingertips? Do you like handwriting first? Do you plan your posts? Title first or last? Where do you write best?

In a perfect world, I truly love pen to paper. I am easily obsessed with stationary and pens and journals and all things paper. Put me in a stationary or nice card store and I’m in heaven. I would love to have hand written all my blogs and have them in a nice journal to reflect upon now and again. The reality is, I can no longer write without pain. Add to the pain that my writing looks horrible these days and it only leads to frustration and emotional pain for me. It ends up being just another reminder of what I’m facing on a daily basis.

Not to wallow in despair over this… I’m laughing to myself at that sentence I just wrote… “wallow in despair”? Seriously? I digress for a moment, but bear with me as I have been watching a lot of PBS Masterpiece Classics and Mysteries. I love Inspector Lewis, Downton Abbey, Sherlock Holmes… etc. I think I may have picked that up somewhere. That is definitely not something you’d just hear me say on a daily basis.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I am not sure what my writing style is. I try to stay positive, I’d love it if people smile or laugh when they read my blogs. I don’t beat myself up if I tend to have a down posting now and again as that’s what life is. Life is not always rosy, but my goal is always to end on a happier, positive vibe. I never want people to visit my blog and leave sadder or more depressed. There’s enough of that in real life, I believe most of us with these invisible diseases want hope, something to make us believe there are solutions out there. We want to know people are living successful, happy lives – or even “living” life at all. I mean getting through each day with some type of success to celebrate, small or large. It keeps us going.

When I am writing (or should I say typing?) My mind generally goes super fast and I have a difficult time typing as fast as the thoughts are coming. Many times I’ll be typing and half way through my mind will just go blank. Maybe it’s a signal to stop and review what I have typed so far, maybe it’s just my brain deciding it’s gone on overload and needs to reboot. Whichever it is, I either review and throw it away, re-focus what I have so far or keep on going after making a few edits here and there.

I don’t have planned days to blog. I am very inconsistent and go through phases where I don’t even look at my blog for months. When I am in a flare or particularly bad time of depression, I don’t really want to write. The words would only depress me and everyone else. I just don’t have the energy mentally to pull it together. This writing challenge has definitely been a true “challenge” for me. I am proud of myself for keeping up with the prompts and I have made it a goal to get through these thirty days. It’s been very pleasant and more relaxing and fun than I thought it would be. I find myself thinking about the prompts throughout the day.

On all of my postings, I will wake up thinking about something I want to write about or during the day I’ll mentally have a topic pop up in my head. I will think about it and mentally write something in my head and in the end if I am really feeling good about it I’ll jump on my laptop and start typing. There are a lot of days where I just think about a topic for hours and end up not writing anything – or I’ll start writing and decide I don’t really want to complete the post. I admire authors and writers tremendously for their ability to focus and get through writing a book or people who keep coming up with fresh ideas for their blogs. It’s not easy to hold people’s attention. Especially these days with anything and everything at your fingertips on the internet. When I hit the publish button on my postings, I always have a feeling of “did I just do the right thing?”, “will anyone read this?”, “did I say anything I shouldn’t have?”, “Am I the only one who feels this way?”. Receiving the positive feedback from people is always reassuring.

This blog, my diary of my journey with Fibromyalgia, Depression and ADD has helped me in so many ways. I hope, if you haven’t started a blog, this inspires you in some way to start one up. It’s not as much about readership as it is about self-realization through the writing process. It’s a great way to express yourself and help those around you… your family and close friends to understand what you are going through without having to articulate it verbally. I am not good at talking about what I experience and this is my way of communicating. I know my dad reads these postings aloud to my mother and it really makes me feel good to know I have my best supporters with me on this journey. My husband reads and comments to me each time I post something new.

Well, I am about to go and have my dream day… a trip to the zoo with the fam. I’m really looking forward to this day! I wish all of you a wonderful Sunday and hopefully this will be your dream day too.

Gentle hugz!

Tamiko