Last Updated on January 30, 2022
Yes, no matter how well you’re rolling along with your blog, there will come a point where you feel like your blogging rhythm suddenly disappeared.
For a while, I was regularly at least a week ahead when it came to planning blog posts. It was particularly important to me to reach that point in September because I knew I had wisdom teeth extraction surgery coming the first week of October.
(That, for the record, went far better than I expected.)
But not knowing how well it would go, I was sure I wanted to have at least five days of blog posts written and scheduled to appear beginning with the day of the surgery so I could focus on resting without having to write a new post every day. In other words, I planned to be able to take a few days off without the added stress of daily posting in the days immediately following the surgery. If I was able to write a few more posts a day or two afterward, I reasoned, I’d be that much further ahead.
And that’s pretty much how it worked: two days after the surgery, I wrote a few more posts.
Two weeks after the surgery, I was going on vacation and knew I wanted to stay a few posts ahead then, too, so I could enjoy myself but still keep the blog updated. So I posted ahead of schedule again.
And while I was on vacation, I wrote a few more posts, so that I was ahead of schedule again.
I remember distinctly thinking, “I’ve finally gotten to the point of staying ahead of schedule.”
That was just a couple of days before it all came crashing down.
There were a couple of days where I barely got a post up at all. If you go back and look at the calendar, you’ll see I didn’t miss a day in October. But what the calendar doesn’t show is the struggle — yes, the struggle was real! — to be able to post something every day.
Just a week earlier, it hadn’t been a problem. Now, it was all I could do to come up with a topic I could write a reasonable post about.
What happened? Nothing in particular, which is what every blogger dreads: For no rhyme or reason, you suddenly just feel you have nothing to say.
It does happen to us all. And once you get past that kind of moment, you realize how easy getting past it actually was.
But it’s in that period where you’re feeling your worst Blogger’s Block that you begin to question if you’ll ever get out of it, just as it’s in the moments when you’re in the worst part of the flu when, somewhere in the back of your mind, you wonder, “Will I ever feel well again?”
You will.
You keep writing. You keep pressing on.
You take any idea that you can find: read a book, watch a TV show or movie, listen to a song, browse some other blogs or news websites. Or, go through your own blog archives and recall what was on your mind when you weren’t feeling that lost blogging rhythm.
As soon as you allow yourself to remember that this is a temporary situation and as soon as you allow yourself the grace to have a moment of Blogger’s Block, the ideas suddenly start coming in.
But that last part is the biggest challenge for me.
I have to remind myself that I’m not a machine, I’m a human being. I’m not perfect. My blog, therefore, won’t be, either.
Sometimes, it takes something as simple as giving yourself “permission” to have a slight case of Blogger’s Block to start moving that block right out of your way. And once that block starts sliding away, those ideas start coming back as if they were just hiding behind the door to play a practical joke on you. (Only this joke didn’t seem all that funny.)
So when you lose your blogging rhythm, don’t do the thing that, for whatever reason, seems the most natural: don’t beat yourself up about it. That only makes it worse.
