Today is the first day of Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge and the prompt for the day is to share why we decided to get involved this year. To be honest, I was really excited when I first saw the event about a month ago but as the day got closer I was really wondering whether partaking in this challenge was right for me this time around. Although I am a newbie to this particular health activist writer’s challenge, I did participate in National Health Blog Post Month back in November and blogging for 30 days straight with designated prompts was a bit taxing.

When I first started this blog last September, I was writing constantly because my mind was so flooded with emotions that I just felt an incessant need to let everything out all of the time. But as time went on, my need to write daily (and sometimes multiple times a day) lessened and this blog has become an incredible outlet for me. It has not only helped me to sort through a wide variety of situations and emotions but it has helped open the door for me to connect with fellow health activists who have helped me in more ways than I can even explain in words right now.

As I sat looking through the prompts for this coming month, debating whether or not I should be a part of this challenge, it made me realize that one of the greatest benefits that National Health Blog Post Month brought me was feeling immersed in such a wonderful and inspiring community. So although November’s writing was quite difficult for me and this month I anticipate will be even more so, I would truly hate to miss out on reading about other peoples’ experiences and connecting with a group of health activists that I know make such a difference in the lives of so many.

We are all community of people meant to support, inspire and educate each other and the rest of the public about the lives, experiences and diseases that we have to deal with day in and day out. I look at this month as another opportunity to do just that and I hope that I can help shed some light on what living with IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) is like.