One of the things I love about the Slice of Life Challenge is the way it forces me to be on the lookout for things to write about. Seeing, experiencing, thinking or wondering about things causes me to think about how I might write about them, or how people might respond to them. Just today, I had an entire bumper crop of ideas:
The military-level logistics it takes to navigate each and every day
The joys of receiving big hugs from a former students
Using a metaphor in conversation and having my colleague say – with respect and love – that of course I’d come through with a metaphor
The heart-bubbling satisfaction of finding the perfect .gif for a situation
How choosing an ELA curriculum feels like dating (there I go with the metaphors again)
The parallel joy and anxiety of having kids in early adulthood
The guilt connected to preaching about the importance of commenting on blog posts and then not having the time to do it myself
The deep connection of mathematics to cheese and peanut butter crackers
Honestly. For each and every one of these subjects, I toyed with how it might look as a blog post. What would I say? What format would it take? What tone would I use?
Funny…I’m big on pushing for students to feel like writers, but a lot of the time it’s hard for me to feel like one. But March lets me step more comfortably into that version of myself – a version that I have to remember, during the other months, how much I enjoy.
Soapbox: The Way I see Things 
I agree with you that March nudges us to look at everything we do with a writer’s eye. After all, we need to come up with 31 posts. Yikes! Everything we see or do is a potential topic for a post.
I think I always feel this way, and always think about how I might write about it. And then I don’t. But this month has been the push I needed to just sit down and do it. I think of writing like meditation. So many experiences and thoughts go through our heads each day, and when we write it’s like picking one to hold and fold over and look at from all different angles. Thanks for this post!
Your metaphor for writing really resonated with me. That idea of holding a thing with curiosity, of turning it over and examining it from all angles…YES. (Sounds like a post for you to craft!)
You perfectly capture that March shift in perception, where–because we are writing–we find the role and stance of writer so much more comfortable and fitting. Ideas most definitely lead to more ideas, and knowing we will be writing does help us see the world through different glasses.
Yes! I keep telling myself to carry that spirit year-round, but that mindset takes a lot of stamina for me!
“Funny…I’m big on pushing for students to feel like writers, but a lot of the time it’s hard for me to feel like one.”
This feels so personal to me. We don’t always see ourselves as writers, most especially when the words hit the page but don’t feel ‘good’. We want every post to be ‘good’, to resonate, to hit the mark, but the sad reality is Neil Gaiman, Rebecca Stead, and Jason Reynolds don’t always get it right.
All of which is to say, keep grinding. I see you.
Exactly! And your point is exactly why I love to listen to writers about their writing. It makes me feel closer to being among them, to hear what they struggle with or worry about.