So I kind of figure if you’re here reading this then you either know me or you’d like to know who the crazy person writing this blog actually is. I’m a wife. I’m a mom. I’m an INFJ. I’m a dreamer, I’m a poet, I’m extraordinarily ordinary, and yet completely unique. I love fitness and food and fashion, playing my bass, drawing, and braiding my daughter’s hair. Some days I feel like I can conquer the world, most days I’m happy just to accomplish half of my to-do list and take some deep breaths. I’m a writer who has decided it’s time to write, it’s time to stop being afraid.

I’ve been on a journey these past few years, one that’s left me bumped and bruised and smiling despite it all. It led me to Finding my long lost self buried beneath a pile of obligations and “shoulds”, and realizing that there was a beautiful girl become woman who had forgotten that she mattered. Becoming a mother at 19, marrying at 21 can do that to a girl I think. Growing up as an only child, raised by a single mother, moving, moving, moving, surviving but never really living leaves its mark.

Despite a story I don’t often tell, the truth remains that I’m thankful for all the scars this life has given to me. They have each contributed to the person I am becoming, they make me uniquely beautiful, and for that I am grateful. The people I most love and respect all bear their own scars, ravaged by the realities of a cruel world, yet radiantly alive with hearts that beat tenderly, caring deeply for their fellow travelers.

It is with these fellow travelers that I long to share life, bearing together the burdens that would alone weigh upon us too heavily. It is for these beautiful souls that I will bear my own, shaking as I write the musings I’d prefer stay hidden in a notebook, probably beneath a mattress, perhaps eventually stuffed into a trash can far from the critical gaze of prying eyes. But hiding is no longer an option. Hiding is not living, and living is what I aim to do.