I have been preparing for this day my whole life.

As a child I was fascinated with diaries.  I don’t know when or how I discovered them, or who gave me my very first one… I just remember many of them.  Some with soft fabric covers, some with attached locks and little keys, most filled with lined paper upon which to pour my heart.

I know for sure that my first interest in them was a place where I could put my secrets.  I was so small that I didn’t really truly have any secrets to tell so the pages were mostly filled with doodles and practicing my handwriting.

At the age of nine my mother began requiring me to write journal entries during the summer to keep up with my writing while out of school.  This I dreaded.  It was a tedious task to document each boring day’s events. But I obliged her and let her read them as often as she requested to.  I wished I had adventures to write about, but I didn’t.  Just an average girl, in an average town, writing about common things.  My mother however praised my writing and that part I began to love.  Some how I didn’t really want my diaries to be a place for secrets anymore, I wanted them to be seen and read.

At the age of eleven I met a kindred spirit in the Diary of Anne Frank.  I was fascinated by her.  She wrote so beautifully, so eloquently for such a young girl simply documenting daily logs in a journal.  True, she had one of the most important stories to tell whether she knew it or not at the time of her writing.  I wondered if she wrote for herself, or if she wrote like I did with the secret hope that one day her stories would be read by others.  Though I did not envy her dire circumstances, I hoped that one day I too would have an opportunity to share my commentaries with the world.

It is a delicate balance learning to write the truth about your experiences and your feelings, but to write them in such a way that you wouldn’t mind others seeing them.  There was a constant questioning as I wrote whether I should really let these thoughts be known.  Whether I should really cement such things on paper.

Well now here we are.  It’s 2009 and Blogging is a dream come true.  I’m by no means a pioneer in the world of women bloggers as there are thousands who have already been hard at this work for years.  But I am graciously and admiringly thrilled to finally join their ranks and leave my own impression in this sea of ideas that is the internet.  No longer must my thoughts be kept tucked away in a trunk filled with journals.  This is a dream come true for a lifelong writer.

So here I am… On October 1, 2009… sticking my little, bare, quivering foot out the door into a new world.  I have been practicing for this my whole life.

Thank you with all sincerity for being my audience.

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