blogging about blogging

During high school, I was on the school newspaper. I wrote editorials my senior year and I loved it. I was called into the principal's office for some of the stories I wrote and even had the entire football team angry at me. I had a little taste of power and decided I wanted more. Eighteen years old and excited about leaving home for the first time, I had Big Plans. I was going to write, I had things to say. I entered college as a journalism major.

I never took a single journalism class, not one.

There are moments so powerful that they become a mark of delineation in the timeline of your life and once you survive them, you are a new person. In the aftermath, you look back at your "before" and will, for the rest of your life. Two weeks before I was due in the dorms, our family had one of those moments. My father was diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live. I talked myself out of my journalism major not too long after that because, well...writing requires thinking, something that I was actively trying to avoid. I'd say, "Journalism is like constantly writing term papers. Why would I want to write every day?"

And yet, here I am. Writing every day. Isn't life strange?

Stranger still to me is the fact that there are people who read what I write every day. In less than a year, this site has gotten more than 40,000 visits and I am honored by each one. You cannot imagine how surreal it is for me to be called a "celebrity" and to receive admiring emails when all I do is sit in my basement in my pajamas (with cats fighting over who gets to sit in my lap) tappity-tapping away at the keyboard, hoping that I don't sound stupid.

Most people who read my blog first visited because I write about guns and shooting. The fact that you keep returning to read about things like recipes, cats, my love affair with my husband and my work at the library is an unexpected delight.

We may never meet and you may never comment, but I want to thank you for helping me on my journey back to myself.