I feel a strong impetus to write. It’s grown stronger in the last few years. It’s like a monkey on my back now demanding to be set free from the confines of my journal, where I so often scribble notes-to self, prose and poetry.

I am not a writer by trade. I don’t have an MFA. What I do have, is a lifetime of minor heartbreaks and missteps and words that were left unsaid. I also have one great big rock of a tragedy, the details of which I don’t feel comfortable sharing (just yet). For now, I’ll say that the shame of it feels like wolves at the door and if I don’t do something about it, they are likely to eat me whole one of these days.

I write for catharsis - I need somewhere to lay my grief.

But it’s not an endless valley! I've had epic love, moments of clarity and profound gratitude. I have found resilience when I thought the well was dry. I've danced in the rain, laughed harder and sung louder at the bookend of sadness than I thought was possible. And what a wonderfully nonsensical, beautifully human thing It is - to smile and to cry, to lament and pontificate and rejoice all at once.