I’m going to address the elephant in the room here, one that has been resident in my room since last spring and has been pooping on the carpet ever since.

I speak, if the subtle post title didn’t clue you in hard enough, of my Besst series, where I aimed to take each day and write down the Besst (see what I did there?) thing that happened that day. And do it every day for the entire year.

I think I made it to April 20th before I curled up in the fetal position and quit blogging entirely for a while, in part because I couldn’t face my shame at abandoning my series.

I had sort of a compelling reason to fall apart there, I guess. Big, zillion dollar, high profile, highly visible project at work with my name and face stamped all over it, long hours at the office (fourteen hour days were not uncommon), insane stress that culminated in me snapping one day and screaming, and not entirely at random, either.

Not my best moment. But the project launched and no one died, least of all me, and you can tell when I sort of recovered because I started blogging again, which meant that I a) wasn’t leaving little bits of my brain on my desk at the office every night and b) I could pretend I hadn’t noticed the little matter of The Besst series hanging out there like a big ol’ bagel.

But I cringed every time it popped up in a search. This…this is the sign of my Scanner personality and you can lump it in with every other project I’ve ever started and never finished.

It’s galling. I was resigned to pretending I’d never started the damned thing, maybe even deleting them from the blog entirely, just to re-write history like a Stalinist and bury it in my recycle folder.

But yesterday something happened: a woman I respect and admire greatly, S,  told me that my little Besst series had inspired her to do the same, and she accomplished what I did not: she did it all year.

Another woman I respect and admire made it known that she had done something similar, but did not finish out the year. I feel better, because K has her act together.

So what I’m going to do, out of respect for S and K, is to try it again. I may go down in flames here and just add this to the Unfinished Quilt Project Pile I’m growing in a corner in my bedroom, but I’m gonna give it my best shot, even when I’m praying I haven’t taken on another career-killer this May.

And I bet you can’t guess what The Besst for January 1 was. (Hint: it used the initials S & K)

© E. Stocking Evans 2014