Writing entered my life while recovering from a head injury.

I began with trepidation to journal of the losses encountered in the pain and inability to return to who I had been prior to the accident. These first journals became my screams from a place that I resided in, separated from the world. All former achievements and talents, interests, and friends were gone into the muddled thinking that replaced my former self. I was unaware at the time, I was beginning a new journey that would take me full circle.

Everything I had cultivated, learned and enjoyed was suddenly foreign, frustrating and offered no joy. I had developed myself as a painter and now even this talent had deserted me, and anger resulted. I was lost.  I had a team of doctors who supported, and educated me as I fought for my old life back. They did not understand, I felt, although I desperately attempted to express myself in language. The myriad of losses became my obsession for a few years, expressed in spiraling slow motion within the continuum of head pain.

I turned on the computer one day, and sat in front of it for hours, attempting to remember how to use it, when my youngest son entered the room with encouragement. He patiently sat with me giving instruction, which gradually became the spark that offered a possibility towards expression. At that moment I began to use letters, sounds like beads I strung as sentences that formed words, and held my emotions in a crafted way that separated me from them.  Writing had presented me with an opportunity that provided a safe vessel for my creativity to fill, and return to the world again with renewed hope.