She Started Writing Again...

I can't believe I'm Blogging!!!

You see, I’ve grown up feeling as though I lived my life in a fishbowl.  I was a preacher’s kid, often living in really small towns, feeling the eyes of the whole church & sometimes town watching my every action and word.  So you can imagine how this left me a bit protective of my privacy.  Yes I have a Facebook, and I once had a Myspace (back in the day when we all thought that was cool), but my security settings are cranked up to the highest level possible and I only accept friend requests from people I actually “know”.  Truth be told the thought of posting or “blogging” my thoughts for the whole world to read without any privacy settings makes me want to vomit a little, ok a lot. It’s not the thought of people knowing my inner thoughts that bothers me, it’s the thought of being judged by them. 

As a child I wanted to be a writer. My best memories of time spent with my father were when he took me out to write. We’d both take a notebook and pen and go out to a park to sit beside a body of water and just write whatever came to mind. He encouraged my imagination by brainstorming crazy stories during car trips.  

When my father became ill in my junior year of High School I stopped writing.  I just stopped.  I remember telling my English teacher that I just couldn’t express myself in that way anymore.  She told me it would take time and that I just needed more distance from the situation.  I had no idea it would take nearly 17 years for me to want to express myself in this way again!  I had no idea that Dad would still be alive and suffering this many years later.  Sure I have written throughout those years but always with an editors voice in my head, like a little devil on my shoulder pushing thoughts of evaluation by others into my mind.   It was no longer simply for the pleasure or cathartic release by simply expressing my inner thoughts.  


So how did I get to the point where I actually felt comfortable enough to start a blog!?  When we started the Caringbridge website for my Dad I realized it was somewhat liberating to be able to control the flow of information that went out.  Now when rumors began to spread around (which they do! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from others that my Dad died, which he still hasn’t!) we could point to the website & say, "look here’s the real truth!" 

This Blog is my own liberation, my words, my own ever-changing definition of myself for the world to read.  Dad is no longer able to fully communicate because of his stroke and severe brain damage.  He is no longer able to connect his jumbled thoughts into well structured and poetically flowing sentences like he once did.  He loved to express himself in writing and he passed on that love to me.  So now to honor him, I will fight the fear and once again, I will be “Writing Without A Grade.”  Here I will write free from purpose, without a goal, without expectation placed on myself to please anyone or win approval.  I will simply honor my father's request that I share my "special way with words" (as he called it) with the world.  Now as a grad student in a school so good that I often wonder how the heck I got in, more than ever, I need an outlet that is free from evaluation and critique.  There WILL be typos, there WILL be run-on grammatically incorrect sentences with consistent failure to use commas-get over it. Fighting all voices of fear, here goes nothing, Publish Post!