At the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, I had an English teacher who required all of his students to go out and buy Big Chief notebooks. They were horribly ugly things, with brick red covers and gritty gray lined pages. He told us that our ongoing assignment for the year was to fill a page in the Big Chief every day. We could write about whatever we wanted, with no worry of spelling, or other grammatical mistakes. And he said he wouldn’t read them. He’d simply check for completion every Friday.

I spent the first 2 weeks convinced he was lying. I journaled about the weather, and what my mom had made for supper the night before. You know….safe topics that my 50-something teacher could know about. And I made sure to check my spelling and construct grammatically correct sentences. But he didn’t read them. I’d watch him out of the corner of my eye while he flipped speedily through the pages each Friday, merely counting them to ensure completion. And I began to understand that for this assignment he really didn’t care about all the things an English teacher is “supposed” to care about. He just wanted us to write.

And so I relaxed for the first time ever in an academic assignment. I wrote about hot boys, and fights with my friends, and how my dad was the most embarrassing dad EVER, and how I peed in a friend’s pool one Saturday. On purpose. I cried real tears onto some of those pages and laughed my way through others. By the end of the year, the Chief knew all my secrets and I was in love with putting pen to paper.

It’s been 20 years since I was given that assignment, and my love for writing has become one of the few things about myself that I’m absolutely sure of. I feel compelled to do it. Maybe that’s because when I’m writing, I feel at home with my purpose….like I’m doing what I was meant to do. But, for the past decade, I’ve let my obligations and responsibilities as a wife, mother, homeowner, and graduate student, swallow up this one thing that I love so dearly. Because who has time to write when you’re trying to keep little human beings alive?! And the dishes are overflowing out of the sink, and nobody has any clean underwear left in their drawer?

So I stopped writing. And the best way to describe what that felt like, is holding my breath for a very very long time and refusing to let myself exhale. It created a huge tension inside of me that was accompanied by some depression and irritability.

So, God and I have been discussing it, and we’ve decided that this blog will be my ultimate exhale. This will be the place where I blow everything out in brutal honesty and let my words float and land into whatever hearts, and homes, and iphones, and computers He sees fit. It will be the place where I let myself be known. Not the version of myself that I show to the world, but my REAL, messy, failure of a self. I doubt the masses will be flocking here, and the truth is that I’m just one small voice in a sea of bloggers. But I’ve decided that God has called me to do this even if He is the only one who reads what I write. This is for Him. And for me.

And maybe it’s for you. I’m not looking to build an empire of followers through this endeavor. But I am looking for friends. Sisters, really. I’m looking for anyone who can nod their head at messes and failures and say “Me too.” If you are weary from the road, this is a good place for you to stop and rest. If you are a little insane, you belong here. If you pee in people’s pools….welcome. You are a Jane, like me.