The first rule of blogging is there are no rules of blogging. At least not here. So I do what I want.

Even when I was younger and perfectly healthy, I had trouble sticking with my personal blogging commitments. A decade ago my grand idea of posting every day morphed into a reluctant acceptance that life is just too complicated.

Maybe just three times a week, I thought to myself.

And here I am ten years, five blogs, four jobs, and one chronic illness later finally accepting that all I can do is write when I’m feeling up to it. Hell, I might not even be able to complete this 30-day challenge.

I’m nowhere near as prolific as I used to be. In my twenties, I’d go from writing a term paper for my Organizing for Social Action class to drafting website content about funeral customs to writing a magazine article for nine-year-old kids to blogging about the funny, if inconsequential, things that happened to me.

Today I write for my 9 to 5, and then write a few blog posts a week—depending on how badly I need to access my “outlet” and how much energy I have left. I haven’t done any freelance work for well over a year, though God knows the extra income would be nice. And even at this modest pace I often feel like I’m stretching myself too thin, egging on my next flare.

The perfectionist inside me (the oblivious twenty-something that would read a post thirty or more times before hitting publish and want to just fucking die upon realizing a week after posting that she’d still missed a typo) hasn’t completely died. She spits and sputters to life occasionally.

I’m learning to embrace errors the same way I learned to embrace my shower chair and walking cane—slowly and stubbornly with lots of internal melodrama, until forced to admit there isn’t another way forward right now.

I guess overall my goal is to approach this blog as an act of self-care. That means no rules, no scheduled posts, no trying to drum up more traffic, and no feeling like a failure for posting a dud or going long stretches without writing.

I do what I want.

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This post is part of the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge (#HAWMC).

Prompt 2: What’s the blogging process look like for you?