Happy Monday guys, and of course happy springtime 🙂 I am loving seeing all of the beautiful flowers starting to bloom again, it always makes me smile!

This week’s guest is one of my favourite bloggers, Lauren from This Stuff is Golden. Lauren is a writer based in Edinburgh, UK and I have followed her blog for just over a year now. I adore Lauren’s honesty in her posts and her courage in speaking up about important topics such as mental health. I also love how Lauren tackles serious issues with humor and warmth.

I was so happy when Lauren agreed to write a guest post for Mindful Mondays, and I love her post all about her passion for writing. I hope you enjoy it too 🙂

I’ve always had an active imagination. When I was a kid I would be sitting at the kitchen table, drawing characters I’d invented or the people around me, and then pretend to be a teacher and mark my own work. I’d line up my soft toys and dolls and create stories about friendships and love and doing the right thing. I’d make up my own songs and sing them to my toys, once even to the ocean when on a trip to the beach.

This imagination lead to a great interest in English at school. I’d write pages and pages of stories whenever I was given the chance. Even essays were considered fun to me, giving me the chance to put pen to paper, to explain my ideas and what I knew about things.

Since school I have continued my passion for all things creative, with my main hobby being writing. I started my first blog around 5 years ago, finally kicking myself in the bum to get over the fear of others reading my work (and not liking it).

After ditching my first blog (it was a bit of a mess, though people liked it), I started This Stuff Is Golden – somewhere that would have the very best of my writing, with the intention of inspiring or helping those who read it. Doing so has helped me more than I could possibly say. I have been through the toughest time of my life and I can say that writing about it, sharing it with others, has probably saved my life.

Writing is a way for me to express myself, understand my emotions and get my thoughts onto paper. It has enabled me to connect with some wonderful people all over the world, get inspired by other writers, and improve on my writing style every time I publish a post. I couldn’t do without it!

However, there have been moments where I have thought about giving up. As I imagine many bloggers have done before, I’ve been disheartened by my low statistics. It can make you feel like there is no point in writing or continuing with your blog because nobody reads it, so who would really miss it? The thing that stops me from quitting is normally the fact that I would miss my blog, I would miss writing, and I would miss those times where I get amazing feedback from readers or other bloggers.

My passion not only lies in my blog writing but also fiction. I’m an avid reader (I genuinely believe reading makes one a better writer) and I would absolutely love to write a complete novel. Whether it becomes a bestseller or gets published, I would be so proud of myself for finally completing my goal of writing a novel. I did start one for NaNoWriMo almost two years ago, but now I’m afraid to go near it again. I hope to one day get over that fear and create fiction that captures my imagination (quite literally) and inspires, entertains and resonates with anybody else who happens to read it, just like my blog writing.

Thanks again to the fabulous Lauren for sharing with us how her passion for writing has impacted on her life. Hearing that someone whose writing I admire so much, also gets scared helps to normalize the feelings of fear that I think everyone gets! I hope Lauren does write a novel as I know that I would definitely read it! But as this post highlights, following our passion shouldn’t always be about what others think or what others would do, but more importantly about how reaching our goal (be it, writing a novel, starting a blog, taking a class…) would make us feel in the process. And if you think following your passion would make you feel good overall…what are you waiting for? Feel the fear and do it anyway and if others love your results too – great! If not, it doesn’t matter as long as you do 🙂

Until next week,

Chrissy x

Where to find This Stuff is Golden:

https://thisstuffisgolden.com/

https://twitter.com/tsigolden

https://www.instagram.com/thisstuffisgolden/