I spent the past weekend at the first blog voice of the West:

I’ve had friends and family ask me for the past 4 years why I blog. This is a change from the beginning of this humble journal, when I first had to explain what a blog was! This weekend’s events were a refreshing change in the cadence of the question. It shifted from the normal,

“WHY do you blog??”

to

“Why DO you blog??”

When I first started typing on that May day back in 2008, I was a new mom to 2-month old preemie twins. I was barely a year out of college, and hadn’t even celebrated my first wedding anniversary! To say that I was trapped in a land of transition was the understatement of my life.

I needed a place to recapture the therapeutic calm that writing provided me in my adolescent. I needed somewhere to be accountable to my goals; after all, every sane person decides that they need to fulfill a lifetime of experiences in just over 3 years while they’re nursing their babies one night, right??

I needed to find out who I was! I was not-quite-27 years old, and had just had every area of my life change in less that 12 months!

So here I was, armed with a keyboard and a lot of free time. I wrote. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I wrote about nothing, and I wrote about something. I wrote about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I wrote about heartbreaking decisions, and about the sheer ridiculous awesome that is twin parenting.

Somewhere along the way, I became MagzD…I became Me.

I became a woman who loves her family fiercely, who learned to cook, who tried to garden. I became a socially-conscious person, and a passionate fitness professional.

I journeyed through uncharted territories, falling back onto my writing as a means of decompressing my mind and using my words to help shape my decisions. The characters that spilled out of my fingertips became my sounding board: I could look back on them and see if I really was on the right path in my life, or if I needed to change course.

I became the editor of my own life.

MagzD started as a nickname. Then it became a domain and a twitter handle. Then, one day I woke up and realized it was me.

Through this crazy social media platform, I had found my voice. For the first time since high school, I felt like I had an identity. Someone could read my writing and feel as though they knew me. With every tweet-up and new friend, this becomes more and more apparent to me. I’ve lost the fear of introducing myself. Blogging has helped break the first awkward moments of introduction, and instead provided me with an instant connection:

I am MagzD. This is my life.

This is who I am. The voice in my head as I typed out words for 4 years became the voice that I spoke with in the real world. The laughter, the cadence, the inflection. @kimpagegluckie asked us in one session if our blogs reflected our voices. My blog does, but only because it helped me to find that voice in the first place.

So why DO I blog?

Because this blog is who I am, and I will never cease to be me.