Welcome! I hope you’ve brought your beverage of choice because we’re celebrating 100 published blog posts on Debit This, Create That!
I actually struggled to write this post, and I think the reasons why sort of capture the blogging journey so far in a nutshell:
Asking it to hold deeper meaning than it’s meant to have.
Seeking insights unique enough to share.
Trying to do too many things at once.
Grappling with the same old writing skill and clarity-of-thought struggles.
And inevitably, focusing on all I have yet to learn rather than celebrating how far I’ve really come.
I suppose I thought my 100th blog post would feel different — like a real milestone, marking considerable leaps in my writing skill and clarity of thought. Perhaps by now I’d be able to fire these out with ease and soulful brevity.
I expected to feel like I knew what I was doing.
But as with most milestones, it’s not really a magical threshold where suddenly everything changes — it’s just a lovely blogger’s rite of passage that marks the writer’s commitment to the craft.
In other words, it’s about the journey.
It’s tempting to say gosh, I suppose nothing has changed — but that’s far from the truth! A lot has changed, but those changes were intangible. They shaped my creative practice.
Blogging has been one big lesson in flow, self-expression, authenticity, and permission. The point of it has been to be real — and to be on the creative journey with you. I hope to exemplify those principles here.
If you’re on your own creative journey, whether quiet and full of heart or just a lot of shouting into the void, I hope you’ll find some encouragement and companionship here as you continue to show up to your craft.
If you’re new here, welcome! I write because the world needs more happy creatives, and that includes you.
If you’ve been longing to reconnect with your creative side but don’t know where to start, this is a great place to begin: Choose Your Creative Path
How it started: a new venture
I started the blog almost three years ago. Longer, truthfully, because I hesitated for years before I finally decided to start publishing.
My very first post contains the original premise of the blog, although it certainly makes it difficult to find the actual point of the thing (as is the case for many, many subsequent posts): Debit This, Create That: A New Venture in Balancing the Books and the Creative Life
TLDR: The blog was a vehicle through which I could explore my creativity and bring more balance to my life by having a low-stakes, just-for-me project that I could return to after hours.
The catalyst was a realization that I missed being creative, and that ignoring my creativity created an imbalance that grew too large to ignore after 10 years focusing almost entirely on my career in public accounting (which I have since left).
I called the blog a “venture” ironically — it was far from one. No business models, no strategies, and although I was aware of SEO basics, I refused to entertain them (until I started freelance writing). The writing itself was scattered — heartfelt and inspired, but lacking focus and structure.
I wrote because I wanted to see what was in there and let it out. From there, a framework formed, and creative lessons emerged.
Lessons from the creative practice
First of all, it worked.
I was a self-proclaimed burnout queen, and adopting a creative practice (any — mine started with painting and evolved into blogging) helped me stop living on autopilot. It gave me that much-needed distance from the grind so that I could show up at work, find balance, stay present with my young family, and contribute to the world in a way that felt meaningful.
But publishing 100 blog posts is also just what happens when consistency creates a creative practice.
A creative practice is really just showing up consistently for your creativity and treating it with a degree of care.
It’s consistency, then, that shifted how I related to my blog and my creativity at large. What follows are some of those shifts, learned and earned by hitting publish 100 times.
1. When you’re shouting into the void, meaning matters more
Many of us go into blogging thinking about growing metrics — building an audience, one day.
Of course, this is most effective when you know exactly what it is that you want to say. You just start saying it (perhaps while honouring SEO), and then use your metrics to notice what’s resonating, allowing it to guide your next move.
I took an opposite approach and came to blogging without really knowing exactly what I wanted to say or why. In that sense, blogging started out as more of a creative exploration.
Showing up consistently without an audience meant that whatever I was saying had to matter if I was going to bother writing at all — not to the internet, but to me. And not just what I was putting out there, but why I was writing it.
The meaning behind the writing became intrinsic.
For the first couple of years, the intrinsic meaning was to have something creative to do outside of office hours. This blossomed into a more grounded identity outside of accounting, which shifted my approach to work and helped me circumvent burnout.
The solitary slow burn of the early days spent writing gave me the time and space to develop meaning and settle into the creative practice itself — without the pressure of external validation to shape it.
It also created time and space for the greater clarity over meaning to emerge.
2. Clarity began to emerge from the chaos
Entropy has been a concept of growing interest lately — the idea that chaos will naturally expand unless you apply effort to bring it back into order.
The blog started out as whatever was on my mind, which felt a bit chaotic — not just the topics, but the ideas within each post. A lot of them were about creativity and the forces that had guided me to start the blog in the first place. Abstract concepts.
(While I’ve preserved the original chaotic state of many posts, some I’ve since returned to and updated to extract potentially helpful points for future readers.)
The chaos gave way to clarity through practice:
- Within the posts themselves. I’ve slowly been learning how to find one unifying point from within the chaos — and make it.
- Over the mission of the blog. The themes and commonalities within the posts helped me develop more clarity over the purpose and the framework through which that purpose is delivered.
In the beginning, I thought I’d be writing about my painting hobby, with musings on creativity and creative hobbies as supporting actors. Yet over the span of 100 blog posts, deeper themes emerged, such as authenticity and recovering from burnout.
A unifying theme through my explorations was the prioritization of creativity. Beneath that the belief that we’re all creative, and expressing our creativity in authentic, meaningful ways is a fantastic disruptor, waking us up from the stupor that our busy, consumerist-forward lifestyles lull us to sleep in.
Post by post, I continued to build on those themes. When I finally took a step back from what I had accumulated, I was able to see my work as divided into the four creative chapters of the blog, and once I felt the underlying truths about what I was trying to do were well-expressed, I was able to venture into posts focused more on visibility.
This is all in support of the idea that the world needs more happy creatives.
The 100-post milestone feels significant, but this body of work is still in its early stages. It feels like I’ve only just gained coherence, and the next 100 posts will bring even more refinement.
The point is that showing up consistently kept entropy at bay and allowed a cohesive message and body of work to emerge naturally.
It just took a little (or a lot of) patience, and patience is part of the practice.
3. I had to treat it like a practice to keep writing
I filtered my blogging experience into two trajectories:
- Targeted expansion: Selecting a particular topic and exploring it from many angles, guided by the market and what they seem to be searching for (keywords and other SEO strategies).
- Creative practice: Exploring the writer’s own library of opinions and life experiences, and setting them on the potter’s wheel to eventually take the shape of a useful and recognizable vessel.
While there’s overlap, the first leans more heavily into strategy and resembles a business model, whereas the latter leans more heavily into discovery.
Both require you to show up consistently, and both require organization of thought. The latter incorporates self-discovery and self-expression more deeply.
It also requires you to treat writing as a practice because it lacks a set route or destination.
Treating blog post writing as a creative practice is like having a home base for your mind to return to — one that’s low-pressure and free. My saving grace after a gruelling work week.
Both trajectories are valid. I’ve spent far more time in the creative practice space than the targeted expansion one; in fact, I don’t think I could venture into targeted expansion without first building the body of work that the creative practice approach helped to shape.
There’s a sense of freedom in that.
4. The practice demanded that I let go of perfectionism
Forward movement — the feeling of progress and accomplishment — is important. In the beginning, one blog post may have taken three weeks or longer to write, edit, and publish, which felt like a lack of progress, and this was quite demotivating.
To stay connected to the work and continue to show up to the practice, I had to learn how to let go of perfectionism.
Treating it as an experiment at first, I stopped spending so much time polishing the last 5% of my work to try to match my taste. How many future readers would even share my specific taste?
And even if there were one or two, would they really notice that last 5% of tweaking?
The law of diminishing returns is especially relevant when trying to fit writing into the hour after the kids go to bed or quiet moments on the weekend. There comes a point where good is good enough: when you’ve achieved some semblance of authentic expression, and you’ve got your point across.
The additional effort in pursuit of “perfection” adds very little extra value.
To get better at writing, my time was far better spent writing more blog posts quicker than painstakingly perfecting each one, a concept I wrote about here: “Learn by Doing” Works Best in the Absence of Perfectionism.
5. Writing shaped my identity, but with guardrails
Writers write. Artists make art.
Continuing to show up to the blog has helped me not just feel like a writer, but to explore various facets of what that really means. Fear of the blank page. Overcoming perfectionism. The tedium of editing. Shouting into the void. The struggle to formulate a coherent thought from seemingly random concepts on a page.
(That last one might just be me!)
The more I wrote, the freer I felt to explore other types of writing: niche website writing, freelance writing, and fiction writing.
Feeling like a writer granted me a few personal permission slips, too:
- To be experimental (or just plain bad) with my writing
- To take my writing seriously
- To stabilize the crisis of identity that would otherwise have ensued when I left my accounting career
But it also taught me that guardrails are necessary. Identifying with your craft can help you show up consistently and in all sorts of ways, but identifying too closely can actually hurt your practice.
Overidentification with a creative identity can hurt when:
- It causes you to compare your productivity, routines, and skills to those of other creatives
- It creates pressure to receive monetary or metric validation for your chosen craft
- Said validation (or lack thereof) becomes a reflection of you as a whole person
So I’ve learned a bit about me, or more specifically, me as a writer and what it means to identify with a craft — something I’ll continue to grow.
6. The skills compound in the background
I still have a lot to learn as a writer. I’m not quite where I want to be, and I suspect the bar will keep rising.
But after 100 posts, my writer’s toolbox did improve, such as my ability to:
- Generate ideas
- Recognize patterns
- Structure thoughts
- Edit instinctively
- Give my voice clarity
- Tolerate imperfection
Of course, to continue to improve, I must continue to write, and to continue to write it must be fun.
I could study more deliberately, analyzing each piece, targeting weaknesses, and actively working to develop my skills.
But it just wouldn’t be as fun that way.
One of the great things I’ve learned about showing up consistently over the years is that the skills will compound in the background anyway.
How it’s going: reality after 100 blog posts
As I mentioned, I still struggle with my quality of writing and clarity of thought, but I’ve also made peace with it. I write how I write, and those skills have improved and will continue to grow without forcing them.
It reminds me a bit of my adventures in running — I might not be running 10K in under an hour, but I have got myself to a pace and a place where I can enjoy my cadence. It feels fun.
The other thing I discovered is that I can’t not write. It’s become ingrained in my life as a natural inclination when I want to dream, to process, or to make sense of the world. It’s an identity stabilizer when everything else is in flux.
Maybe this is how you know when you’ve found your thing, if you’re someone who’s looking for it. It’s not what you’re best at or what you can make the most money doing or where people say your talents are, it’s the thing you can’t imagine yourself not doing.
I only found it by doing it consistently.
If you don’t have that yet, then you can begin at the beginning and try many things. Follow your curiosity, and when something seems like it’s sticking, push through the beginner phase.
As with most things, to find out whether something really is for you or not, you need to see it through the highs and the lows.
The next chapter
The first 100 posts of the blog have mostly been explorations — reflections on life and living it creatively and authentically, with a sprinkling of balance and burnout recovery.
I don’t think I’ve said everything I want to say on these topics, but this next chapter brings a shift toward greater coherence. I want to continue refining, finding what resonates, and bringing more clarity to the abstract idea of creative living.
I’m staying open to more adventures in writing.
But at the core of it — and perhaps the greatest takeaway from this milestone — is that writing has shifted from something I used to document life to something that is simply a part of life.
I can’t imagine it any other way.
If you’ve made it this far, cheers to you, and thank you for celebrating with me. Stay creative!
In case you’re looking for more:
Adventures in Writing: Love the Process, They Say explores what loving the process looks like, from inspiration to commitment
If you have a hobby that you wish you could stick with, you might enjoy: How to Stick With a Hobby When Motivation Fades | 5-Part Series
To explore more of the blog and reconnect with your creativity: Choose Your Creative Path
