I had plans for this month. More or less. It had been my intention to write every day this month. I had an outline of what I was going to write about each and every day – a small prompting idea to keep on task and focused, something to share, not always a big idea, but the idea doesn’t have to be be big to get your brain going. The idea was to write.

And I made it to Day 15 and then I hit a wall. On Day 16, my prompting idea got me stuck. A challenge you’ve overcome so far this month. I drew a blank. I could think of nothing that I had done that seemed to qualify. Day 17 – something that inspired you this week – same problem, though I did have a spark of an idea that blended them both, but I wasn’t able to get them to come out right on paper in time to post them that weekend, and time slipped away.

One day tumbled into the next, and then it just seemed to snowball. I never picked it back up, for one reason or another, and next thing I knew, it was the end of the month. I had nearly two weeks of unwritten pieces and therefore, half a month of an unfinished challenge. Is that failure?

Technically, failure is (the) lack of success or the omission of expected or required action. Now, I suppose the case could be made that I was successful and there was no omission of required action – on the part that was completed. While I didn’t lay out the expectation that I was going to write every single day of the month, it was (more or less) implied by the simple fact I was doing an October Journal Challenge. The very name implies it will be a month long endeavour.

I failed.

I have to be okay with that because I made a decision that day. I could have written that I felt I had overcome no significant challenges – as that was a completely rational thing to do, or I could have written about why I was feeling that way. But I dove into my little hole of hiding and lived there, happily, for two weeks. I ate dark chocolate, went for wings, gained 5 pounds, and avoided my own reality. But now I must crawl out of it and see what November brings.