Who, What, and Why

From my favorite movie, "I <3 Huckabees," this quote kind of sums it up: 

"How am I not myself?"

I had a lot of beautiful plans and dreams and things, and, well, now I do not have those plans and dreams and things.  One by one they flew away, and I sort of lost myself along with them.  In the past few years, and especially this last year, so much has happened and changed that I feel like a different person, disconnected from much of who I was before.  So I'm trying to figure out who this new version of me is and where I'm headed, and I'm writing this to bring along any other weary travelers, lost boys, and grieving misfits who care to join me as I try to divine a new path leading to the happiness I thought was only to be found on a road now lost.  

I'll be writing about the various ways in which I am flailing towards better times, be they musings on daily life or opinionated rants about therapy techniques or excited rambling about online courses and experiments with art supplies, or...  well, I'm hoping things that eventually it will be a documentation of things I can't yet predict, because right now there isn't yet anything in my range of sight that feels like it is right, or at least not right enough.  Hence the flailing.  I may be short on joy, but I'm big on determination and have an absurdly wide range of interests, so really, we could end up anywhere.  It will be interesting to revisit this in a year (or it won't be, which would be pretty dire for me and dreary for all involved, so let's just assume the interest will be there).

In the meantime, there will probably be random posts about This Thing I Just Got That Is Really Neat (or This Thing I Just Got That Is Complete Crap), posts in which I get really mushy about my dog, posts in which I share my attempts to learn hand lettering so that you can join me in laughing at them (hey, it's hard!), maybe a short story now and again, long posts from the depths of my heart and short posts about the joke I heard that afternoon... You name it.  Basically, I make no promises about consistency of content type, tenor, frequency, length, tone, presence of iambic pentameter or lack thereof, or anything else one might expect from a blog.  But I will be honest, and probably pretty vulnerable. So be gentle with me, and if I can, I'll sing to you someday and soothe both our souls. 

For now, I'll send you off with the first few lines of a song my mother used to sing to me when I was young:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back. 
May the sun shine warm upon your face,

and the rains fall soft upon your fields. 

I hope to find you on that road someday.

Cheers, friend.

- Pearl