That thing you do

I am picking up my stride of posting on this blog of mine. Yay for me! I am glad I can cover my journey to my dream of working in museums, along with all the intermediary chapters on the way. This blog is a way to update my friends and family with my progress, but I am happy to share my experience with those who are on similar journeys. Reaching your dream takes hard work and persistence. If I can give hope to my fellow compatriots, then I am happy to do so.

Why do I keep this blog? Why do I even care to share these entries with you?

It's because I am, and have always been, a writer. Creating and telling stories has been one of my passions for as long as I could remember. However, this love could not trump my penchant for anthropology and cultural studies, so I was resigned to an English Minor in college.

For a long time, I was a fiction writer. I loved creating a universe of characters who had their own struggles and defining moments. Fantasy was my topic of choice since I could make things happen that didn't exist in the real world. I've also dabbled in poetry and play writing, but fiction was always my home.

That all changed, however, when my father died. As my friend Jeremy attests, when you are a writer and someone close to you dies, all you want to do is write about the one you lost. Writing becomes more a coping mechanism and all you want to do is preserve memories. You forget about what you did before. That's what I did. I forgot fantasy fiction and wrote about my father in anyway that I could. What fiction I could write ended up as coping mechanisms disguised as stories. Every shred of my grief was poured into them and hence made me much more sensitive to criticism of the particular pieces.

Since then, I have transformed how I write. Fiction has become somewhat foreign to me. I enjoy writing about my thoughts and the effects of the world around me. Blogging helps me tell stories while I try to find my way back to the world of fiction. Blogging is my new storytelling, at least for now.

So keep enjoying the posts I bring.

--Ellen