Learning to Walk a New Path.

Launching this site again marks a new chapter for me in my writing life. I have fond memories of my first blogspot account back in the halcyon days of the early internet. I have scribbled notebooks of poems and stories from my teenage years. Back in the day, when someone would ask the dreadful question, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" I'd typically answer with "a writer."

My life took a very different turn, but I've always considered writing to be part of my identity. However, in the past year or so I've felt so disconnected from my inspiration for words. Every so often I'd feel the inner call to write again, to be creative, to see where the page might take me. And sometimes I'd find something interesting. But oftentimes it just felt dull and unalive. A small voice questioned if my writing years were over—maybe that was only meant to be a chapter. But yet there was a sense of lack. A longing, an absence. An emptiness in my world without this part of me. And I wondered if she would ever come back.

Then, sitting by a waterfall during a mountain hike, curled up on a mossy rock, I realized why I felt lost.

I couldn't find my way back to writing because the path for me has always been grief. Pain. Heartache. The thing that kept me alive in the darkness. A sliver a light, clinging to hope. That is what writing has mostly been for me. Words are my companion when there's nothing else. I find my way to writing through pain, and writing is the way I find my way out into the light.

But now there's no aching grief to guide the way. There's no tumult or shattering. This isn't a life I need to escape from or make sense of. I'm living a beautiful life, filled with love and joy and meaning. I'm surrounded by people who support me and care for my wellbeing. There's an absence of anguish to process, which did take me quite a while to acclimate to. It is curious to notice how accustomed we become to our environments, and how disruptive change feels, even when it is objectively good.

I'm looking for a relationship to words that has shifted.

Like finding a favorite trail reshaped by nature, new terrain to navigate. I think the challenge for me has been to realize how it has shifted. A new trail can be discovered and known, but only if you see it for what it is, and not what it used to be.

In this realization, I felt a weight lifted. I realized that I've been given an opportunity to tell a new story. To discover how it feels to write as the person I am today, not a self from years ago. What if writing isn't the thing that saves me, but the thing that simply brings deeper joy into a beautiful life? Perhaps this can be a practice, not for survival, but for delight?

And so I'm setting out here to discover where this new path of words might take me.

"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." - Kahlil Gibran