As far back as I can remember, I’ve met most life problems head-on with a good, long nap.

Or sometimes by just not getting out of bed at all, in which case I guess nap isn’t really the right term.

I can admit this about myself now and be okay with it. I read once that we are always doing our best, even if we don’t realize we are. If we could’ve done better – if we had had the resources, emotionally or otherwise, to do better – we really would’ve. I believe that, and I think there’s something to just looking the-you-that-you-have-been-until-today right in the face and saying, “Thank you for getting me here. You’ve done a damn good job.” We all arrived here without a guidebook on how to handle anything that would happen after arrival. No one told us how scary it would be to be who we really are, or how hard it would be to put our feet on the floor and get out the door some days.  We didn’t know anything about how any of this works, but we found a way. We kept getting up. We got here.

Unfortunately most of the important things in life peskily linger – they wait for you to wake up and actually deal with them. For me, the biggest of those has been this nagging awareness that I’ve got more in me than I’ve put out into the world. I started writing stories at the age of 4 and was pretty much obsessed with reading and writing into high school, but then suddenly it was time to grow up and figure out what I was really going to do with my life, and most writers don’t make any money, and they can be strange, and there were lots more sensible things to do.

The stronger this feeling I should be writing becomes these days, the more incredulous I am that I’ve never taken any real step to see what would happen if I actually did it. I never even realized that somewhere along the way, I’d looked over at everyone’s-opinion-of-me, and said, “Hey, you wanna drive this thing?” Then handed over the keys to my own life and went to sleep.

So I’m going to take it from here. This blog is meant to be a travel log of the journey – a journey about becoming a writer, but about so much more than that, too. It’s about finding the courage to show up in my story as who I really am, to create a life I’m proud to step into every day.

Join me? Don’t worry, nothing’s stopping us from grabbing some power naps along the way.

 

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