I know it’s only been 6 days of Bloganuary, but I truly can’t believe I’ve blogged 6 days in a row. For me writing is something that doesn’t come naturally, so to write consistently is a feat on its own!
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is “why do you write?” This was an interesting one to reflect on because I have many reasons for writing this blog. As I mentioned before, I’m not naturally a writer, I’ve always had trouble writing essays and being able to articulate my thoughts. But in 2020, when I was out of work and was learning lots about occupational therapy and disability, I had a lot of ideas and no where to explore them. I also saw a lot of people struggling and wanted a way to share the knowledge I had and was learning, to help others in this weird time.
I started writing my blog in 2020 as a way to share the information I was learning and my experiences as an occupational therapist. As I continued to write, I found that it was a nice way to reflect on my occupational practice and celebrate my successes! I also started loving interacting with other people’s blogs and feeling like a community was being created.
As I enter my 4th year of my blog running, I hope to be able to put out more content to support people with their mental health and with their children’s development. I find that these are two topics that often are hard to address. Mental health support can be very expensive to access, as public mental health support is slim, wait lists are long, and GPs don’t offer much support outside of medication. With children, there is so much information sharing amongst families that it can be super overwhelming, and often ableist. This might not be intentional, but a lot of the mommy blogs I’ve read have very basic simple advice, which doesn’t help a lot of the kids I work with. Many of the families I work with haven’t even gotten much support from doctors outside of a diagnosis. In the past couple months I ran a support group for parents of the kids I work with, and the information and relatability they were looking for was very basic but hard for them to access. These are some of the reasons I really want to be able to share in a public domain that can easily be passed along online.
As this is not my first, second or even third priority (yes I work three different jobs), it’s hard for me to have the time to sit down and really research and put a lot of clinical reasoning into posts, but I hope for more of that coming up! This is one of the reasons I wanted to try the 31 day challenge of Bloganuary. I hope that pushing myself to post once a day will help me push past the perfectionism that rules my world, so I can post more occupational therapy content without it being “perfecto”! I have a lot of post ideas, some which are started in my drafts, so many more to come! If you have any ideas or suggestions please feel free to comment below!
Last but not least, Why do you write? I’d love to get more into the writing community and connect with people! Let’s be friends!
Be Your Own Sunshine 