I Was Issued a Challenge

A friend of mine, we’ll call her “Kate” since that’s what everyone else calls her, told me she’s cut out sugar from her diet. I was like “Woah!? How?! Teach me your magically ways!” She strives for everything that she puts in her mouth to have less than 8 grams of sugar. That doesn’t sound so hard. I could totally do that. Sure, I’ll start first thing tomorrow!

Enter my Venti Iced White Chocolate Mocha with an extra pump of white mocha sauce this morning to keep me upright. I mean, if I took more than 11 sips, each sip is less 8 grams of sugar. I don’t think that’s quite what she meant. So I’m going back to my first thoughts- cutting sugar is magic.

Luckily, Kate offered me an easier/harder challenge for the next 7 days: write and publish a blog post a day. Don’t overthink it. Just tap out some things and hit publish.

This isn’t my first attempt at starting this blog. I may throw those old articles back up here as throwbacks when I’m done with this challenge. Also part of the challenge: I can’t use already written material waiting to be published for the last two years. Believe me, I whined about that.

I have struggled with using my voice. Not necessarily finding it, but sharing it with people. I’ve been hiding behind technical “reasons” for why I couldn’t get started. I wanted to have everything planned out and perfect for the entire foreseeable future. Perfect theme. Perfect fonts. Perfect colors. Perfect understanding of SEO. Perfect niche. Perfect grammar in writing. Perfect rule breaking of grammar.

Kate called me on it last night. She even called me selfish for not sharing! Here I was struggling with the idea that I *might* be a narcissist if I endeavor on this little journey. But you know what? I LOVE Kate’s blog. It’s her. It’s her voice, her experiences, her struggles. I can relate, and it feels like a nice conversation over 85 grams of sugar frou-frou coffee-comfortable, but with less risk of diabetes. I don’t judge her up to this intensely high perfectionist bar. I reserve that level of icy blast harsh critic for myself alone.

Well, sit down tiny critic in my head. I have a challenge to attend to. And it doesn’t even need to be perfect. It only needs to be real.