The Precise Thing

I think I was nine or ten before I realized that writing could be for any other reason than printing spelling words in your campfire notebook. In grade four, I had an innovative teacher for the era and she actually introduced her students to poetry. We read poems and learned specific poetic forms. My first poem was a Haiku that I wrote and illustrated for my mom as a gift.  At this moment I understood the power of words to express myself and I was hooked. 

My next experience with any consistent written form was after reading my favorite childhood novel, Harriet the Spy by  Louise Fitzhugh.  I am sure I am not alone in transforming the campfire notebook into a written collection of clues, as Harriet did, to understand the mystery of the people around me. Then again maybe I am.

From then on writing was always a part of my human experience, expressing myself through written words in journals, letters, and poetry. All of which aided me in escaping an overactive mind.  In my late teens, during the times of what I will describe as Taylor Swift ( Oh how I wish her songs were around back then) and more currently Olivia Rodrigo, style breakups, I filled entire books of heartbreak poetry and coming of age understandings and ramblings. 

Over the next years of marriage, career, and babies, writing was only a few minutes before sleep, jotting down things I was grateful for in my day or a  quick journal entry of special memories I was too afraid to forget.

Being a public school teacher, I was always expressing my creativity and exercising my voice in a multitude of ways, and in the last decade adding writing meditations and yoga practices to the list of my written expression.  In more recent years, I  used writing to help explain, my then seventeen-year-old daughter's, neurodiversity to her through a fairytale.  I wanted her to see herself represented in a story and to show her experience in a positive light.  

Writing has been my voice in problem resolution, in the expression of creativity, and as a keeper of beautiful memories. 

All of this has led me to this moment and the creation of this blog. Not as the next right thing but as Glennon Doyle says, "the precise thing directed to me." I care a whole lot less about semantics, grammar, and others' opinions and I know that my voice, as does yours in whatever way you choose to express yourself, needs to be added to the many dialogues of the world.  As Barbara Kingsolver wrote, "A writer without readers is just a person alone in a room".  That is not to say that you need to write for anyone other than you but others want to hear your unique story and it is as important as the food you eat and the air you breathe to express yourself.  Your people need to experience the fullest version of you that exists from experiences, expression, and art form as a writer, painter, cook, knitter, poet, or however, your story arrives. I am excited to continue to write for an audience of one or maybe more and I am hoping that you will think about reconnecting to an old passion, or as in this case, continue a current one with more tenacity or even begin a new one. To all the stories yet to be written and to raising your own unique voice.