The Wego Challenge officially ends today with a prompt for participants to recap our experience. In short, the Wego Challenge has been… well… challenging! I realize I have this blog all set up and ready to go, but that does not make me a regular blogger. I tend to “put pen to paper” only when the mood strikes me or when I think I have some significant information to pass along, so this business of writing every day has been an unfamiliar experience. There have been aspects I have enjoyed, and some that I have not enjoyed quite so much, but overall, I believe the challenge has been beneficial.
One of the things I have found to be most difficult about writing a blog is generating ideas and topics. I am not a highly creative person, so unless a matter presents itself in a way that it cannot be ignored, I likely will not think to write about it. This past month, Wego solved this problem by providing daily prompts that gave me the chance to delve deeper into subjects important to the chronic illness community. The prompts were so skillfully crafted that they afforded me the opportunity to address serious issues while still being a little playful. A prime example of this is the prompt which instructed participants to create a word cloud. It was an entertaining and enjoyable activity, but it also forced me to think about which particular words truly express and reflect the nature of my illness, and thereby still addressed an important topic.
There were other prompts that were not quite so enjoyable for me – yet they may have been just as significant to my health journey and to my community. I found the prompts associated with food and exercise to be troublesome. Many of us living with GP can eat very little or not at all, and because of our low caloric intake, legitimate exercise is limited as well. I never like thinking about food, and on those particular challenge days, I did not wish to further upset my gastroparesis community by blogging about those issues. In the end, though, I believe it was valuable to do so. I managed to alter the prompts enough so that I could discuss the difficulties of dealing with food, eating, and exercise for those of us living with GP in a meaningful way. I hope I was ultimately able to educate and offer perspective on our situation through these writings.
It has at times been a rough and busy thirty days of blogging, but it has also been a month of opportunity – opportunity to share information, provide insight into our disease, and to perhaps help others struggling with the issues discussed here. I have been asked to continue this blog (okay, only two people have asked… but still…), and I will consider doing so. I am not certain if daily blogging is something I wish to pursue, but perhaps I could write just a little more frequently than I had considered prior to this inspiring Wego Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge.
I leave you with links to a few of my favorite blogs from the past thirty days. I hope you have enjoyed these writings and have benefitted from them in some small way. Thanks for reading!
I enjoyed reading your blog and I will look forward to your updates. Thank you.
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