Making a change...

Wow, it's been since April since I last posted. I've often thought over these months about closing down this blog. Seems that I wasn't doing anything creative to share here and that was the iniital reason I had started this blog in the first place. Through the years of scrapbooking, cooking, and papercrafting, I had a place to share what I was doing with a few of my family and friends. Life sometimes took the content of my blog in a different direction and that was okay, it became a forum for me to open up (at some level) about my life, and how I was living it.

I say, at some level, because for many of those years I was living in quiet. By quiet, I mean that I was telling only the surface stuff, the vacation pictures, the cards or layouts I'd made, the nights out with friends or what my beautiful daughter was doing in her life. I wasn't really sharing me. I was, and at times still am, ashamed and embarrassed by my life, and what had become or should I say, not become of it. I wasn't living my life out loud!

Last January when Roger and I divorced, I posted about how I had been putting on a front for many years. A front of living a happy marriage. Most people close to me were not surprised when I finally announced my divorce, many said they had seen it coming for years but never wanted to say anything to me. I thought, all that time, that I was being really great at hiding my unhappy marriage and my unhappy life, and while I maybe succeeded in hiding my unhappiness, the fact that my marriage was not doing well was not something I was hiding very well. After all, how can a marriage survive when one partner checks out and stays away for months at a time? I vowed at that time that I was going to start living my life out loud! I had spent years keeping it all in and it was awful. I felt awful most of the time. Not being able to fully express myself, my thoughts, my joys or even my sorrows. I really thought that after my divorce, I was in a place where I would be able to do that, finally. I was wrong.

Don't get me wrong. I've had lots of blessings this past year. I have someone in my life who loves me, and that I love. I have my health. I've been going to school in pursuit of an education in Health Coaching and Nutritional Counseling. My daughter is in her last year of high school and doing wonderfully. I have friends I enjoy, I'm financially stable (however, I seriously need to learn to budget myself better..LOL), I've got a roof over my head, food in my pantry, a running car and the cutest little fur-baby you could ask for. Why then, do you ask, am I still finding that I can't live out loud? Why am I still hiding in the shadows? Why is it that I am not as happy or as free as I would like to be? I am going to answer all those questions, and I'm going to use this blog to do that. I am taking my blog in a whole new direction. I might lose some readers, heck, I've probably already lost many of you due to my extreme absence, and maybe I'll find a few new readers over the course of time, but either way, I'm making a commitment to myself to live my life out loud! This is where I will start to do just that. I would love for you to come along on my journey....

Until next time,
blessings!