WRITING FOR MY LIFE
From the time I was a small girl, I used writing as a way to make sense of the world and to understand my own thoughts and feelings. I still have diaries I kept in grade school, and notes that I passed to my girlfriends in Biology class in high school.
These pages let me raise questions, speculate and imagine and I did it for myself and for those who were close to me. I wrote the most during times of upheaval and transition. In the months following my retirement, as my life was going through many unexpected changes, I began writing once again. This time, I knew I wanted to share the sense I was making about my life with other women and invite dialogue.
When I first began my blog in 2008, I entitled it “Beyond the Classroom,” with a focus on my life as a teacher who no longer had a formal classroom. As my journey began to take me WAY beyond the classroom, I renamed the blog “Her Own Terms: A Post Mid-life Woman Writing for Her Life. “ It’s a record of my inner and outer journeys – the one that led me deep inside to the source of my creativity and the one that propelled me to Italy, England, Greece, Peru and my new home in Northern New Mexico.