Jason Murphy

My Own 30 Day Challenge

Aug 9, 2007 Blog General, Creative Writing

As many of my friends and peers know, I struggle with a vicious downward spiral of apathy from time to time. The experience is a serious drought of motivation that even if Tony Robbins himself wouldn’t be able to pull me out of.

The source of the apathetic mood swings? Who knows…
…who cares?

I suspect that the mounting layers of stress I let build up over time take my senses of priority, responsibility, and duty and line them up at the edge of the nearest cliff of moral dilemmas. Then a huge problem like my Ford Explorer losing a fuel injector (damn you Eddie Bauer!) comes and shoves them over.

Seriously, the stress is getting to me bad. I don’t know why I’m struggling so hard with it. Every day it seems like my list of “I need to do’s” and “I have to do’s” and “If I don’t do these immediately I could cause the universe to implode on itself: to do’s” just keep on growing and growing. For every to do I conquer, two more take its place. This sucks. Stress sucks. I suck.

I wouldn’t say that my blogs are causing stress. They’re certainly causing apathy, but not stress. As long as I pay my webhosting bills, my websites are a constant. They’ll always be there whenever I decide to come back to them. I might not have the traffic and readers I used to, but the site and all its history will remain as I left it. I see my blogs sometimes work as a nice surrogate therapist. Why pay $100/hr for someone to listen to me bitch and moan when I can freehand my feelings on my blogs for free. This post is about the worse I’ll get on this blog and is more for those who asked why I don’t updated my blog more often. Don’t worry, I have another blog or two under different aliases where I truly vent my frustrations (probably not a comforting thought, is it?).

But to pull my thoughts together, I decided to take wisdom from a previous post:

I have too much information coming in and too little going out. I started writing this post just because I couldn’t think about what subject to write about. And I didn’t even really care if my site was updated. I just decided to force myself to start writing. Any creative output is a good thing at this point.

So once again, I started writing for one reason: to start writing. By forcing my hand to write something, anything, I’m causing active progress. What the progress is towards is yet to be defined. But it’s better than sitting on my ass staring into my monitor.

To get rolling again, and hopefully to ignite some passion in my writing, I’m planning (but not planning to fail) on forcing myself to write something every single day for, oh I don’t know, let’s say a month. Blog everyday for a month?! Is that possible? I don’t know, but I’ll see. Who wants to take small wagers on whether I actually do it or not? C’mon Jake, John, Omni, Ed, or anyone else want to bet if I’ll do this or not? Put your (serious) wagers in the comments below if so. If not, no biggie. I’m doing this anyway.

• Today is Day 1 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.