As the sun had set that evening and brought the cool evening air to the mountainside, I had somehow managed to lose my voice. One minute it was there, the next it was gone. No warning, no pain, just gone, as if it had never existed.
Which meant that on the drive home there was nothing to stop my friends Nurlan and Yura from lecturing me about wasting my talents.
I was living in Kazakhstan and working as a high school English teacher. It was a good job and fun, but I had come to realize that it wasn’t really me. I just didn’t know what job was me.
As we bumped and bounced down the road back to civilization, the boys – because no matter how old they get, those two will always be “boys” to me – took turns encouraging me, reprimanding me, and challenging me to make use of my talent for writing.
It was Nurlan who suggested I blog.
Blogging. I didn’t know a thing about it. But after thinking it over, I realized that if I posted the poems that I had written, the anonymity of the Internet could act as a safety net.
So that was the birth of this blog: timid, uncertain, and very, very quiet.
I know now that a blog should have a purpose, a theme, or topic. This blog has evolved in so many ways. I don’t post a lot of my writing here any more, and certainly no poetry, but that’s more to do with the fact that I don’t like writing poetry anymore. What this blog has become is an outward, Internet version of me.
The four passions in my life are traveling, books, writing, and God. That’s what you’ll find here. I try to refrain from over sharing, but you will learn little things about me as you read along: that I tend to run away to exciting places, even though I long for a place to settle; that I am obsessed with Owl City; that I really love the book and film Atonement; that I’m trying to become a published author; that I have book crushes and literary loves; and so on.
If any of that appeals to you, then I hope you’ll stick around. Lurkers are liked, but comments are loved.
We ARE the story of our lives.
– Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, Rachel Cohn & David Levithan
Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.
– Paul Desmond
I am the black in the book,
The letters on the pages that you memorize…
I am the white in the walls that soak up
All the sound when you cannot sleep.
– Owl City, “The Technicolor Phase”
WanderLust 
Wow, what a great welcome letter to your readers! I am one of those people who moved around their entire childhood and have started posting my writing about it online too. I didn’t know what blogging really was until a friend suggested I do it, like you.
Now I post a story about Michelle, a third culture kid, very much like me who goes through the typical global nomad growing pains of the early twenties- where should I live now that I am from nowhere and everywhere? Who am I really?
I hope you can take a look at my blog, I’m certainly happy to have found yours here!
Emily! Just leaving a note to say that I’m still around my blog, and hope that you’re still lurking around yours. I’m still not great at updating, but I have some new posts in the works that I hope my old readers will still enjoy. How are you?