Reflections on writing (for self, for others) in the stolen moments

It makes me sad, seeing the end of the month arrive. I always start to get stressed around the last week of the month when I know I haven’t written a blog post (and, ideally a good one). Not to say I haven’t written this month (I have, in paper notebooks, various mobile note-taking apps, and Scrivener), but the reason I cling to the habit of a monthly blog post is to ensure I remain capable of taking my errant thoughts and phrases and synthesizing them into something suitably readable in public. I’m not sure I’d characterize the below as ‘suitably readable,’ but it is ‘readable’ and ‘in public’ before the end of August.

“It doesn’t have to be good to be done,” I remind myself.

Just as I begin to beat myself up for waiting until the eleventh hour to spin up a blog post, I’d forgotten that technically, I did publish a piece of writing on Medium earlier this month: a 3-minute ‘read’ in the form of the speech I delivered to my mom at her 65th birthday party. I’m not sure I’d call it a post. It was a toast I turned into a post. It was a fleeting spark of inspiration that I seized as I hauled my sleepy self onto the 7AM flight to New Jersey and, unable to rest for the 40 total minutes in the air between Logan and Newark airports, thought, “If my grandmother and mother are both doing their usual little rhyming poems as speeches at the party, I should probably have something in my back pocket if I get called upon to say something.” All I had at my disposal was a flicker of a…