I'm trying to figure it out. I've written so many drafts, changed my blog title a handful of times and yet I keep coming back to "Extending In". I know for some it won't make much sense, but to me it does, and that matters. I can try to explain it, try to help one feel it, but in the end it's just a small definition of what I'm feeling these days. What maybe, I've always felt. My soul needs extending and the ability to do so comes from the opportunity I give myself in writing.

If one is a writer, one is usually a reader, and vice versa. I read and when I have time I read a lot. I also write. I love to write. However, I've never considered myself a writer. I mean, actually I've never considered myself as much more than a girl that keeps doing woman things and just kind of living life doing these grown up woman things. It's weird. I just decided though, like right now, that I am a writer. I am a good writer. I've been told so by my husband, my bestie and by my parents, so in my world that makes me good enough to call myself one who writes...even though I'm actually typing, it's still called writing.

As I read other women's writings it's inspiring. I love reading them say that they feel like they must write or they will "explode", or that it feels like a monster clawing to get out of them if they don't write. That's me. I have to get it all out so that I can feel cleansed. Maybe, it's comparable to people who love to run, dance, play an instrument, draw etc. Your body just doesn't feel the same unless you do those things. That's how I feel with writing. I have so much in my mind and in my heart to just get out that when I'm not writing my body isn't functioning properly. My soul is unsettled and my demeanor is low. It's my form of therapy and for that I am grateful.

I've written for years. I have online journals, hardback journals, spiral notebook journals, a "mad" journal ( you know for the things I want no one to ever read, but in those moments I just had to write and...one day I will burn it), a diary from when I was nine, several blogs that I've started and then stopped and endless amounts of single documents saved on several different computers throughout the years. Maybe I'll pull them altogether eventually, but for now I want to start a new beginning.

I want to start this adventure by giving myself the permission to call myself who I am. My stories aren't much different than the next writer or blogger or mommy, wife, sister, or friend. They are just what they are: Life. The writings are who we all are really. We all have glimpses of happiness, joy, peace, sadness, fear and loneliness within our beings and it's in all of that, in which we call life.