Looking Back: 21 Dragons' 2009

Hav­ing some fun look­ing through what I wrote in 21 for the year of 2009. There aren’t a lot of posts, 44 in total for the entire 12 months (post­ing fre­quency was an issue, heh) but there are some in here that I’m pretty happy with.

Traces of Life Coaches Blog remained, with per­sonal growth posts like The 3 Declut­ter­ing Boxes in Jan­u­ary. I ven­tured into more poetic and per­sonal writ­ing like East Coast Night in Feb­ru­ary, which was some­thing I wanted to do more of. I’m proud of the Mar­tial Arts is Deal­ing with Self-Defense Fail­ure post I pub­lished in March, I spent a lot of time mak­ing it as good as I could and it encap­su­lates a lot of what I think about mar­tial arts and self-defense train­ing today.

The 2 Ulti­mate Secrets to Blog­ging Like a Rock Star (Hint: it’s Not What You Want to Hear) in April was awe­some, if I do say so myself. This was another post I spent a lot of time craft­ing, and I love how it com­bines snark with some seri­ous thoughts about blog­ging well.

Lessons Learned at 30 was writ­ten in May, the month of my birth­day in the year I turned the big three-oh. It was writ­ten in a rather reflec­tive mood, imag­in­ing what advice I would give if I had the chance to speak to a younger me. I look for­ward to writ­ing Lessons Learned at 40 a decade later, I won­der what I’ll have to say then.

I wrote Per­fec­tion in Motion after a great din­ner chat with an old friend about rela­tion­ships , I love it when every­day con­ver­sa­tions like that spark ideas about arti­cles to write. To be hon­est, a lot of arti­cles like that are full of things I wanted to say at the time, but would have sounded way too polemic. Can you imag­ine me mouthing the con­tent in Per­fec­tion in Motion dur­ing din­ner drinks? I would have been get­ting weird stares all night!

I wrote Why I Love Writ­ing after being asked why I love writ­ing and find­ing myself unable to answer. I mean – did it have to be asked? How do you answer why your favorite color is, or your favorite ice-cream fla­vor, or why you love the peo­ple you do? You just do!

My Food & I, pub­lished in August, is another mega-post I’m really proud of writ­ing. I spent a long time craft­ing this too; doing the research and tight­en­ing the writing.

I had to keep remind­ing myself though that I started 21 Drag­ons for me, and not as another niche sub­ject pro-blog, and I wanted to share more of my per­sonal thoughts with my friends. More Million-Dollar Ques­tions than Answers in Octo­ber was a step towards that, a post that had offered more ques­tions than answers (a theme that some­times seems like the story of my life!). So too The Dig­i­tal Clut­ter, less a post about how to solve a prob­lem, but more like “here’s my prob­lem, what do you think?”

The Muse & The Work in Novem­ber revealed a the­ory about cre­ativ­ity I’ve had for some time, and I hope it didn’t make me sound too crazy.

I’m Keep­ing the Cash, Planet Earth was a dif­fi­cult post to write. It expressed how I really felt, but it was also a mes­sage that felt so polit­i­cally incor­rect. But it was a truth I needed to live with, and lo and behold, as the truth shall set you free, admit­ting it has already freed me to think­ing about how to con­tribute in bet­ter ways.

The Pho­tograph­ing Tokyo series in Decem­ber was fun to write. I really enjoyed shoot­ing those pho­tos in Tokyo, unfor­tu­nately I didn’t have an audi­ence to lec­ture to about the thoughts and events that hap­pened behind each photo – luck­ily I have a blog (with its mil­lions of read­ers)! Blog as Self-Discovery artic­u­lated how writ­ing in 21 Drag­ons has made me feel this past year, and I wanted to share the blogs I enjoyed this year with my Favorite Blogs of 2009 post.

Lessons Learned

All in all, I liked what I’ve done in 21 Drag­ons for the year of 2009. I would have liked to have posted more; it wasn’t for lack of ideas (those and drafts I have aplenty), but for lack of time, what with work and every­thing else. I also want to make 21 more per­sonal, it isn’t really now not because I want to make it a pro-blog, but because I have a real bar­rier to putting myself out there. Con­trary to what peo­ple might think of me as a writer, it’s actu­ally hard for me to express myself hon­estly – and it’s some­thing I have to work on every sin­gle time I write.

I do hon­estly feel that my writ­ing for 21 Drag­ons is supe­rior to any­thing I ever wrote for Life Coaches Blog. Sure, that blog was writ­ten at an ear­lier point in my life with less of the life and writ­ing expe­ri­ence that I have now. But I mainly credit the change to one major shift in atti­tude. When I wrote arti­cles for LcB, I imag­ined writ­ing for a gen­eral, face­less crowd, try­ing to guess what might please them. Con­se­quently, I wrote a lot of arti­cles that to me, now seem pretty fluffy and insubstantial.

When I’m writ­ing for 21 though, I imag­ine writ­ing for my clos­est friends, because I know some of them read this (you do right? I love you guys!). I won­der if he would like this, if she would actu­ally get some­thing from this post or if they’ll think it sucks – because if my clos­est friends think some­thing I wrote sucks, then it’s prob­a­bly a good sign that I’m going way off.

Writ­ing this way, I believe 100%, has helped me improve the writ­ing I do here tremen­dously, and has resulted in work that I’m really proud of, vis­i­tor count, Tech­no­rati rank­ing and SEO be damned.

Here’s to an even greater 2010.

Related Posts

1. The Curi­ous Case of the Miss­ing Dragons
2. Look­ing Back: 2009
3. Why 21 Drag­ons Exists