New Reader

There are a few unconditional loves in my life. One of those is old fashioned, pen-to-paper writing. When I find that I'm stuck on something, when I feel like my heart might burst, when I feel like I can't get my life together, when I'm anxious about something, when I can't gather the right words to pray out loud, I find solace in writing. There is something so private about writing in the sense that it can be this emptying of thoughts onto paper, but writing can also be a source of community and gathering together.

I initially created this blog during my freshman year of college to keep my mom updated on my new, exciting life. I then began to post my creative writing assignments - a poem here, a short story there. I started a series of posts in which I typed up my La Vida journal entries and this became a sort of public diary that displayed the horrors of my backpacking trip through the Adirondacks (once again, mostly for Mom and Grammy). A few months passed and suddenly I had to Google my own blog name to find it again. My second and easily my longest "journal" series on the blog was created during my junior year of college, when I lived in Orvieto, Italy, for four months and decided that it was important to keep my dear Americans updated on my daily choice of gelato flavors (and also the struggles of being abroad and living in a small community). The journal-like style of my blog changed once again when I decided to post my entire English honors senior thesis - a compilation of creative nonfiction entries (this is a fancy way to say "important stories from my personal life"). Flash forward to graduation and a new job and a family vacation - and a few more travel journals / diary entries including my food tour through Austria and Italy (again!)

Are there a few posts on here that I hate and would love to delete? Yes. For sure. Nothing makes me roll my eyes more than my 18-year-old self and the diary-like posts on here from 2010. Will I delete them? Probably not.

And so here we are - a few new colors and layout changes to a blog that has served me as a diary, a travel journal, and a space to post my creative writing work. I don't know where I'll go next in terms of informal to formal blogging but I know that I've been missing the community that comes with sharing writing (whether that is simple posts or longer pieces as well). It's this pen-to-paper (or, you know - fingers-to-keyboard) writing that I always return to when spoken words seem to lose their meaning. It is here that my unconditional love for writing begins again.