A Post About Nothing

Project 365, Day 67/365

This is a blog post about a whole bunch of nothing. In case you didn’t know, I don’t actually plan my posts. I have 5 Quick Things that I run on Fridays, occasionally on Tuesdays I do a list of gratitudes, and when I feel like it on Sundays I share recipe ideas for what to cook the upcoming week, but that’s pretty much it. That leaves four-plus days to fill and I do it completely off the cuff.

I find that when I have an “editorial calendar,” I always veer from it, as I rarely ever want to write the things I plotted for myself to write. I have to feel like writing something in order to get through it, so I found the best way to go about this was to plop down every day, stare at a blank screen, and just start writing.

Of course, this fly-by-the-seat-of-my-blogger-pants, que sera sera attitude sometimes leaves me with a whole lot of nothing. You’ll be reading this on a Tuesday, and while I have lots of gratitudes I can share (my parents are officially fully vaccinated!), I don’t really feel like doing that. There’s that feel thing again.

This past weekend, I started writing a few posts, but I’m not so good at finishing something I started on a whim. If I don’t sit and write start to finish, I likely won’t get back to it. Until the feels come back to me.

I suppose that’s what happens when there’s no real grounding topic to lean on. As I’ve mentioned before, I started Arlyn Says first as a fashion concept. That didn’t even last past the first newsletter. Then it would be about home decor. I know a thing or two about writing on home decor. But then that felt like work, strangely. Possibly because it had been my work for a decade. Then I started getting into those feels, and writing about “life” and my thoughts, and whatever decided to birth itself from my finger tips, and that’s when I started to feel the magic.

There was always a part of me that wondered if I had anything unique to say about design. I feel like everything that could possibly be written about decorating has already been written. What more could I add to that conversation? Unless I was sharing some trick I had, or some product I loved, I sure as hell wasn’t going to blog about the 10 best kitchen trends. Again, that would have felt like work, and I left the editorial world for a reason. It was a hamster wheel of yearly topics, and my wheel was rusted, squeaky, and it would occasionally jam. I wanted off the rickety wheel.

Back to “my opinions.” So yeah, I found that every time my newsletter topic was me just writing…just talking, you would send me emails and notes. Conversations would start.

I let that settle into the back of my mind until January 1, 2021, when Project 365 began and I gave myself free reign to write whatever the heck I wanted, whenever the heck I wanted to write it.

Sometimes, I have conversations with all of you in my mind where I apologize for not having a direction. And while that does me a disservice on days like this where I don’t have a story to tell or a product to share or a recipe to blab on about, I don’t know…I kind of prefer it this way? I’ve never been a planner. If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m quite sporadic, spontaneous and my attention span is short. I become obsessive about something, and then just like that, I’m onto another thing. Not my best quality, but also exactly what I think has brought me to where I am today…wherever that is. My ethos for life is “things will happen…they will work out…somehow,” so I know that one day, I’ll land on THE TOPIC of this blog, and we’ll all look back, whoever is still there, and think “remember when you would just write whatever you felt like writing whenever you felt like writing it and that’s what you were trying to pass off as a website?” We’ll all chuckle. “Haha, oh that!”

I struggle very much with living in the moment, in the now, so my brain is most often three, five, 10 weeks/months/years ahead of me. Not in a five-year-plan kind of way, but in a “this is what this could become” way. Charles says I’m overly romantic (my words, not really his) and he’s not wrong. He’s the pragmatist, I’m the dreamer. He thinks about what needs to get done right here right now, and I’m picking tile for the kitchen we’ll one day have in the house we’ll one day buy in the city we’ll one day live in with the children we’ll one day have definitely not driving us nuts. I mean, someone has to, right?

So yeah, I can spend a little too much time up in the clouds, yelling down at people on the ground to come up and join me, all while they’re worrying about the fact that there is no ladder, and they aren’t entirely sure how I got up there to begin with. Well, I just pictured that I was up there and I appeared up there, of course.

It was like the idea for writing every day. It wasn’t something I thought and thought and thought about for weeks. Do I or don’t I? No. I was in the care driving around on January 1 with Charles, telling him a story about this and that, and I got slapped across the face with an idea, hurried to my laptop when I got home before I could lose the spark, and put my fingers to work. And just like that, we’re here on March 9.

And there you go. A post about nothing, complete with a photo of me from three years ago, sitting in a pool of sprinkles because why not? If anything, it’s just a further glimpse into the space between my ears. It’s not always tidy, it’s most certainly never planned, but I like it in there, okay? 🙂

See you tomorrow, friends.