Day 7.

1 week.

I've blogged 7 times in the past week and the experience has been all manner of things: enlightening, draining, really rather tricky.

1 day.

Today.

Today has been, well, a day. Let's leave it at that.

Again I find myself the wrong side of 10pm with words spilling from my fingertips and I start to wonder what it is I'm putting off by not writing things sooner.

The prospect of coming home and haphazardly piecing together the remaining scraps of brain power in pursuit of anything other than what was most easily accessible in my head made my limbs twitch with a heavy, restless unease, so for the sake of my mental health I have postponed today's topic and decided to just write.

I say just.

Every fibre of my being wants to curl up, switch off the light, start again at daybreak. Even as we speak I'm more horizontal than vertical, and with every jump for the outer edges of QWERTY and YUIOP I can feel myself slipping further towards sleep.

If I'm honest, there's no just about it.

When you've placed this expectation on yourself and you have no choice but to deliver, it has this potential to be really, really draining, or at least I think so.

Some people learn to thrive on this feeling; I must have been ill that day.

The whole point of this challenge was to force myself to write, to create, but most importantly, to finish.

There's an apt quotation from prolific wordsmith Scroobius Pip that perfectly illustrates the rut in to which I had so cosily settled.

"These kids love being writers, more than they love writing." - Let 'Em Come

I had become a theoretical writer.

I told people I wrote, I freely volunteered this as a Thing That I Love Doing to friends and strangers alike, but one cannot escape the fact that I just wasn't.

I tried though.

I attempted to justify my pause for creative breath with the meaningless assertion that I could if I wanted to and then simply proceeded not to.

Genius.

I say creative breath, but for me, writing almost doesn't feel creative, especially this stream of consciousness that is essentially the handwritten equivalent of a massive emotional clear-out.

I've said it before, but I write like others tidy, with the express intention of making this space which I inhabit 24 hours a day at least vaguely liveable. Often it works.

When you say creative I picture brush strokes, colour, sound, light; an abstract quality inherent in others, in people labelled as such either by themselves, their role, or society.

I would hesitate to describe myself as a creative person, but I know not why.

Even in my day-to-day, my everyday, my job, I am finding myself gravitating towards the more 'creative' tasks and making my mark on them to boot.

I've often challenged myself that I wouldn't be able to be 'creative' to task, every day, and on given orders.

I've rather spoiled my own argument.

Maybe when the non-creative becomes as draining as you envisaged the creative would be, it's time to swap the passive everyday for the deliberate every day.

Perhaps it's time I embraced my creativity; made a stand for what I apparently believe in, even if I don't quite know or understand it yet.

My name's Abi and I am a creative person.

There, I said it.
And I've not died from the conceited smugness of it all. Yet.

Perhaps it was all in my head.

Perhaps I'm subconsciously keeping myself small.

Perhaps my error has been in not entertaining the idea that creativity manifests itself in a myriad different ways in every single person.

So yes, writing every day is taking its toll, but 1 week down I can admit to feeling a little chuffed and just the teensiest bit proud of myself.

It's just writing, but I've just got on with it, and just let myself create.

Perhaps in 33-or-so days time I will have a clearer understanding of my creative self, this other that I have so far kept separate from my day-to-day, and maybe, just maybe it will get easier.

Maybe I will finally start to reconcile the pressure of everyday with the pressure of every day.