When I started this blog, I set a goal to post at least twice a week, on Sundays and Thursdays. That didn’t happen, so my goal became to post once every two weeks. Now I post twice a month.

So what happened?

Only one week after starting the blog, I realized just how unrealistic it was for me to publish twice a week. I would love to say that I was merely drowning in schoolwork and other duties. The truth is, I spent my free time getting addicted to new phone games or re-watching all nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother. Instead of writing, I immersed myself in other people’s worlds because I needed a break from my own.

I have long since accepted that as much as I love writing, I will still hate thinking about it. Sure, I enjoy it when the words start to fall in place, and I enter a magical flow where I’m inspired by everything I write and can’t stop typing out sentence after sentence. But pulling up the WordPress site on my computer? Tapping the WordPress icon on my phone? That’s usually another chore for tomorrow.

Mostly I procrastinate because of the immense pressure I place on myself to make every word of every post absolutely perfect. Unless I can be entertaining, sound professional, and wax eloquent, I don’t dare subject my writing to another person’s scrutiny. That means each post must be at least three hundred words of pithy musings with healthy helpings of self-deprecation.

I bravely admit that I am a coward. Just the thought of exposing any weakness through less-than-perfect writing is enough to make me avoid my blog for days on end. My own expectations for how others should perceive me ends up becoming my biggest weakness. Funny enough, I started this blog to reveal my imperfections and instead became more of a perfectionist.

Now I post twice a month. It’s difficult to set my own consistent deadlines because no one else is there to keep me accountable. But even as harmless excuses wrecked my original schedule, I realized that I enjoy having my own slow, leisurely “deadlines.” I never want writing to be a chore, especially when I’m writing for myself.