Deep breath …

Inhales deeply.  Exhales slowly.

Hi there!  This is my first post, so I suppose it makes the most sense to start at the beginning.  “A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …” – oh wait, sorry, that’s just how my brain derails.   Let me try again.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who liked to write.  She wrote many things when she was younger, short stories, poetry, random thoughts, deep thoughts.  She kept many notebooks and was always jotting things down.  Then life intervened, she married, got a job, became a mom, life became very busy, and between diaper bags and keyboards, she no longer had enough hands to carry her notebooks around with her.  They sort of got put on the shelf until she had time (ha!) to write.  And there they stayed for many years.

Then a few years ago, she became somewhat involved in social media.  She reached out to people and they reached back.  They told her they valued her words, her thoughts.  They told her how much she encouraged them, that she was a light in their world, that her words were a gift, that they liked her “voice,” and they asked her to keep writing.

She was first astonished that people wanted to hear what she had to say, and then she slowly began to realize that maybe she did have a voice and that maybe she should use it.

The biggest thing that both surprised and meant the world to her was when people told her how much her words had impacted them, how much her words had encouraged them.  She would sit and rack her brain trying to remember what on earth she had said that could possibly have affected them in such a way and she rarely could, but she was pleased that her words had helped in some small way.

The two things that stood out the most that people told her again and again were that she gave kindness and encouragement, and that the world sorely needed more of both.

Of course, that girl is me, and I have no idea why I wrote all that in the third person.  Woman? – I probably should have said woman about the here and now, because my girlhood was (*cough) a few years ago.  At any rate, I’m more of a first person kind of girl, talking directly to you (with you, not at you).  My best self-analysis is that as an introvert who is unsure what to put in a first post on a brand new blog, it was a little easier for me to speak in the third person to break the ice.

Now that we’re over that hump (awwwk-ward!), I’ll try to just be me, talking to you, hoping you’ll forgive how socially inept I can sometimes (often) be.  I hope what I lack in social ease I will make up for in honesty and openness.

I’m just a girl woman, standing in front of a – well, you, asking you to – wait, I can’t ask you to love me, we just met! – how about asking you to bear with me, give me a chance, read my stuff once in a while?

Let’s just go with that, shall we?

(Phew!  Wipes sweat from brow.  Hits publish with slightly trembling hand.)