An Introduction.

I started journaling when I was eight years old. I remember writing two or three sentences a day about my first crush-turned-boyfriend. Detailing the day he smiled at me during a science lesson, and the morning we hid behind the classroom’s presentation easel while he read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to me. How we started talking on the phone (long distance) about episodes of Little House on the Prairie. How he held my hand on a field trip to the local theater, my heart pounding and my hand sweating and my mouth shyly smiling. How we exchanged rings secretly in our classroom while everyone else was at lunch, and we kissed — my first kiss — in front of a single friend. A witness. 

Those small moments should be cherished, right? Reread. Fears and firsts and puppy love.

But that journal, along with almost a dozen more detailing the secrets and joys and heartaches of the first quarter of my life, were tossed, unceremoniously, into a dumpster. By me. Or some self-preserving form of me.

After a cross-state move and major life shift at 27, I self-alighted the funeral pyre on my old life, writings, thoughts and feelings, as a hopeful attempt at being reborn more fully in the new life I had chosen, back in the town where my life first began. I even went so far as to delete my first blog, the one that detailed my travels through Europe in my early 20s. I had some great poems and memories stored there. My heart literally aches thinking about it now — all the words I’ll never read again. As time passes and the memories become blown out and harder to replay clearly, I almost hate myself for it.

But I know I did it for a reason that made sense to me back then. I didn’t want to be the woman I knew so annoyingly well, the woman whose mistakes and naivete were so boldly displayed in standard helvetica, publicly, on the internet. I wanted a chance to rewrite my self.

So, it is with great tenderness and some hesitation that I’ve decided to write again. And the push came from a rather unlikely but very lovely place — my workshop students who were learning, for the first time, how to blog. These students are adult creative writers, comfortable with laying bare their prose and poetry to other writers and their cohorts. But, like many of us, these men and women were terrified of posting their private thoughts online. As our objectives were met and the weeks flew by, my students began to open up to the medium, dipping their toes in before taking a plunge, and I’m happy to say that many are now sharing and posting on the regular.

I also recently fell in love. Which, ya know, makes you wanna write stuff. [Edit: originally this sentence said “right stuff” and my dear friend Anna pointed out the freudian slip. I think it’s rather interesting that they both fit, technically and truthfully — Thanks, Anna!]

After my now-boyfriend-then-crush hugged me tightly — a long, warm, lingering hug — and closed the door behind him, I immediately wrote my first haiku in 10 years:

It’s like being eight again.

This blog will be about backpacking and beginner buddhism and better living but it’ll also be about the things that I have held too close to my heart for too long. I’m tired of just cracking jokes about politics or sharing (amazing) GOT memes on Facebook. I want to be a bit more real. A little less social-media-perfect. We’re social animals, right? But it seems everyone, myself included, wants to share only the brightest bits of themselves and their lives. There are a whole lot of other parts. Dark and grey moments. Real, honest feelings. Slices that make us truly human. None of us are accurately represented in the perfect Perpetua-filtered instagram ad of Human Life™.

So, hello there. I’m Angela.