From the time I can remember, I have been a bookworm. Reading has been both my salvation and my teacher. When I was young I read to escape, but also to learn and grow. As a very young girl, I would tell people that I was going to be an author when I grew up. In grade school, I loved to write almost as much as I liked to read. Then puberty hit and I entered high school. Although I remained a devoted reader, writing fell to that “I’m not good enough” place that so many adolescent girls go to.
I limited my writing to college papers. Then more papers during graduate school. I trudged through a dissertation at the end of grad school, but without much joy in that I was an exhausted mother of three babies and not particularly confident in myself even then. Writing was a chore and certainly not a place I felt either confident or competent.
Wait. Let me explain how that really went.
A few years ago, after becoming a life coach and making some rather profound changes in myself and how I look at the world, I decided to write a blog post. My first blog post was entitled, “Not My Time Syndrome” and I posted it on the local online newspaper. Wait. Let me explain how that really went. I wrote, rewrote, edited, rewrote, ignored, rewrote, edited, and then let that blog post sit in my word folder for months.
Finally, with absolute fear in my heart and shaking hands, I hit send to the editor of the online paper and waited for the criticism that I was sure would come my way. Certainly nothing I wrote would connect with any reader and thus they would either tell me what a hack I was or simply ignore my blog post. Neither came true, and friends and loved ones were quite gracious in their compliments and reviews.
That blog post has led to hundreds since then. Many of my posts have been shared in really cool places like, MindBodyGreen, Huffington Post, MSN, and others. I’ve been belittled on Yahoo and scorned in private messages, but I have continued to write. The more I write, the more I love to write and the less attached I feel to what others think of my writing. I write because I love it as a creative outlet and a place to express myself. If others benefit from it, even better.
Which leads to my big announcement; I wrote a book!
Which leads to my big announcement; I wrote a book! I took many of my past blog posts and wrote a bunch of new ones to put together in a book with a pretty cover and a dedication and all of the wonderful things that go into a book. I am an author! I am an author! I am an author! That little girl who told people that she was going to be an author when she grew up has done just that at fifty-four years old.
So if you’d like to buy my book on Amazon, click on this link to do just that.
Love,
Lisa Kaplin Psy. D. PCC