Beginnings are hard
On November 4, 2009, the love of my life passed away suddenly at 31 years old. I met Tony in 7th grade, fell in with him love in 8th grade, and endured an on-again-off-again saga throughout junior high, high school, and college. He finally moved in with me during my last semester of college and we began building our life together. Losing him at 31 was a gut punch, to say the least. I didn’t know how to move forward from that.
I started small, doing only what I had to do in those first few weeks without him... All the routine stuff like working and feeding the dogs and feeding myself. I gave myself grace to figure out how to navigate grief as a young widow. Meditation became a huge part of my healing process and eventually led to my love of fly fishing. Many years later, I started a fly fishing business for women.
Throughout my whole life, I’ve had this voice inside me telling me to write. Write about anything and everything. Live your life and write it out. Feel your feelings and write about them. Fill a journal. Write a book. Take notes about the life happening around you. Take notes about your life. JUST WRITE.
Before Tony moved in, my goal was to be a professional writer and live a life abroad, exploring the world and sharing my musings. Love interrupted that dream so I decided to become a technical writer. I wrote professionally but it was really boring stuff like work instructions and policies and standard operating procedures. I stopped reading books for fun because I felt like I had my editing hat on all the damn time.
After Tony died, my career transitioned from tech writing to something like corporate coaching and facilitation. Then I started reading for fun again. Then my imagination began buzzing. It kept building and building until very recently, I knew I needed to take this step. I needed to start creating and see where it goes. Here’s my attempt at starting somewhere.
I’ll be sharing writings from a recent 100-day project I completed based on Suleika Jaouad’s “The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life.” This project really had me digging deep and discovering my voice a little more. It made me realize that I’ve been keeping some form of a journal since I was at least 10 years old and I’ve never gone through and re-read them. I will now. And I’ll share those tidbits as well.
All of this is intended to build more discipline around my craft so that I can finally write that book. That book is for me - it’s been yelling at me for decades and I need to listen.
Initially I’ll post at least once a month but that may increase. I may also include some video testimonial because why not? I hope you’ll join my journey and find some joy in what you read. Then if you like it, let me know. You can let me know if you don’t like it too. In any case, maybe you’ll get the writing bug too.
