Rise

If you know me at all, you know I love music. At night, after the kids are asleep and I am finished with work, listening to music is how I relax. Headphones on, I let the lyrics and the music lead my mind through the years and reflect on the times in my life that best depict the music that helped me to celebrate or cope with the many events in my 41 years that have shaped me into the woman I am today.

If you know me at all, you know I love to write. Usually, I write with the music in my ears. You know, to truly feel it. A senior in high school, I projected in my Senior 1995 Memories Book that within 10 years I'd have graduated from Vassar or Columbia and actually be a novelist, living in a big city and visiting obscure art installations in a little black dress and pearls. Season tickets to The Met, not necessarily because I enjoyed opera, but instead because that is what refined and well-educated women did for fun. That's what my subscriptions to Vogue and The New Yorker had me believing, anyway.

For so long, I have felt numb and cheated, somehow left feeling like a failure because I haven't been able to achieve what, at one time in my life, were my main goals. I wanted to leave Nowata and trust me, I did...several times. Camp, summer jobs, college, a vacation sprinkled in here or there. Like a yoyo, the tape measure of life. Release, liberate...only to capture and detain yet again. Fragments of dreams evaporated and then rained down again. A cycle of continued discontent, but without means to make amends with Your Former Self for unfulfilled promises.

I have had a stirring within for the last year to really try and dig down deep and find a way to come full circle and get back to my happy place. I have so much to be thankful for and have been focusing on gratitude, making both a very intentional practice. Not every day is good, but not every day is bad. People outside of a few family members and friends, and women from a Bible study group I was asked to join have no idea about my history. I have revealed a few things in my writings of late, and it has been incredibly healing. No therapy session I've ever had has ever made me feel like I finally had a handle on it all, like I'd arrived at any sort of closure. But writing? Yes. It is quite possibly the most cathartic thing, like, ever. And music? Why not. Listening to music as I write fuels my passion for both forms of art. My vision is to meld them both together and inspire others in the process. Getting a book deal out of it would be good, too, but baby steps. 😍
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So. Without further adieu, I want you all, my friends and greatest encouragers, my cheerleaders in life, to know that I have decided to write and publish my own blog. I know, I know...While a blog doesn't have those same tactical pleasures such as the smell of a novel's woodpulp pages or the feel of the spine rested against bare legs, it does have this: Heart. It will have my heart. I have a story to tell. Several, really. But as I incorporate my love of music with my passion for the written word, I hope to tie it all together, alll that mess and fury, with a beautiful white bow. A signature blue box from Tiffany's. Simple and uncomplicated to begin with, but open it up and check out the heart-stopping, delicate gift inside. I have overcome much and have hurt plenty. But! I have rejoiced. I want to share my challenges, my triumphs; relationship, marriage, parenting, and recipe flips and flops. I intend to create a community of friends and followers to both inspire and draw from to make all our lives more precious. We all need each other in some capacity or another. Perhaps that is what is most exciting about being alive. We draw from the reservoir of sacred strength we are born with and lean in closer, hand over heart, and ask, "What do you need? How can I help you?" Isn't that what we are created to do, anyway? 💗