When I think back on my life I wonder, how did this blogging thing come about? It takes confidence in writing something and sharing it with people. When did I get so confident?
I can’t really answer that and I still don’t think I have the confidence I need to share all the things I want to share but I’ll get there one day, just like I got to blogging.
I never liked writing in school. I disliked poems more than anything on the planet. I much rather work out a thousand math problems rather than decipher a poem even today. I’m still not a huge fan of poems, although; a little over a year ago I bought Helium by Rudy Francisco. He has poems that have gone viral on the internet and some of his work is truly inspirational.
Back to my writing though. I can remember back to my first paper in college. The topic they gave us was Heroes. Who was my hero? This was not something I put much thought into before. I remember sitting at the kitchen table of my parents’ house with my laptop Pa, my granddad, had just bought me as a starting college present. I remember begging my mom to write my paper for me and there were tears, lots of tears.
Finally, instead of thinking about a hero I thought about it from a different perspective. Who was I thankful for? That was easy. Adam Edwards.
You see Adam was a friend of mine. We had spent some time hanging out together with mutual friends and we had shared some pretty fun times together. That wreck I had a few months prior to this paper I was writing happened to be on the curve around which Adam lived.
Adam was the first person I remember hearing when I was laying in the ditch after being thrown from my car.
I was thankful it was Adam that night, someone I knew, someone I trusted, someone who calmed me. Things could have gone much different for me if it had been a stranger trying to calm me.
The topic was chosen! I still struggled with writing it. I still complained. I most likely still cried. But, it had to be done! So I did my best, printed it, and off to class, it went with me the next day. I was terrified we would have to read them out loud or something lame like that but thank goodness we just turned them in. I dreaded the day we would get them back with the grades. I like good grades and am horribly embarrassed when I make poorly on assignments. I didn’t want to disappoint one of my first college professors.
Days later we got our papers back. Not only did the teacher give me an A, she asked me if it was okay that she make a copy of my paper to show as an example to future classes.
I was smart enough to know then, it wasn’t the writing skills, it was the story. But, that boosted my confidence quite a bit.
During college, I also went through a lot of things. A lot of things that were not bad but were emotional. I’m a strong person, I’m not emotional, I don’t let things get to me. Or, that’s the way I’ve always liked people to perceive me. So I wrote. I wrote in notebooks and journals and got stuff off my chest that way. I hope those journals found themselves to a fire-pit and they are not still floating around somewhere out there!
Almost 2 years ago, that blind-sided break-up of a lifetime happened and I was crushed. How was I going to handle that? A journal.
I still write in that very journal when I go camping today. My first entry was on May 30, 2018. Who knows when I’ll make my last entry in that journal. As of lately most of my writing is here.
To think that I have gone from just trying to help myself to trying to help people all over the place makes my heart happy. I’m not sure what sparked that transition in me but I’m glad it did and I hope you are too.
Grammar is still not a friend of mine. There are tons of writing rules I don’t understand. As a matter of fact, I had to message a friend asking for grammatical help on this very post. I’m not here to be politically correct or grammatically. I’m here to share who I am, shed new light and a new way of looking at life from eyes that are a little different than your own.
As always, I hope you enjoyed it, and don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone to do something different or scary. Beautiful things have come from the scariest things I have done in life.
Carmaflow Trails 