My First Blog Post

“You either walk into your story and own your truth, or you live outside of your story, hustling for your worthiness.

-Brene Brown “Rising Strong”

I have a blog. I have succumbed to the world of web. Just like everyone else-or so it feels. It’s the hip happening thing to do, everyone has one except for me, I don’t. I have turned up my nose, run away in fear at the thought that I might have something to say or heaven forbid that my thoughts might be read by someone else. I hid from the idea, burried the thought and avoided the idea because of fear.

And here I sit in front of my computer writing to an unknown void about my heart, on a blog. After posting simple little blips here and there over the last few years on my facebook page, I found myself reading comments from friends that I should start a blog. I sort of blew it off with a brisk non-chalant “we shall see where it goes”, with no real intent to pursue the thought of actually doing anything beyond a few posts a year. And fear that if I did I would be tricking the world, stepping into a space where I didn’t belong. Hello Imposter Syndrome! My hiding was layered in pretense, fear, posing as something I most definity wasn’t and couldn’t be. “A writer”.

In my professional life as a Speech-Language Pathologist I tell stories, I work on verbs and I teach langauge skills with questions like: “What do you call a person who writes? A writer”. The word writer in itself does not imply any other attributes to describe the type {skilled, good, bad, professional, laymen, clinical, boring, narcissistic, self inflated, fake, valuable, etc} and yet I found myself replacing the word “writer” with the attribute as more important and always with negative context. WHOA.

I journal often, I crave the outlet. It’s the place I set things I don’t know what to do with. It’s the place for all the things that take up space in my life, the things I feel, struggle with, the feelings that exist within me in their unrefined state before they can be named and processed. I kept all of those places to myself for years and slowly I started sharing some of them and this shocking thing happened. People started saying “Me too” and I realized two things; I wasn’t alone in my humaness and by sharing my real self others told me it helped them.

I have a blog. I am not an imposter. I am not a poser nor an impersonator. I am a writer. I am facing my fear of stepping too wide and jumping too far that I fall on my face at the expense of my vulnerability. I am choosing to walk into my story, picking up a simple label that “I am a writer” with the hope that in doing so, what I share through my journey of swimming in the depths and wrestling with the monsters I find there, I will surface with new perspective and by sharing that struggle it’ll create a ripple that goes beyond the splash touching others with a “Me too”, and that is the whole point of this thing called being human.