Tag: growth
Change Is Forever Constant by Jodie Lynne
The woman I am, shall not be the woman I will be or the woman I once was.
The morning always brings another beginning, thank God.
And I, always becoming, am not allowed to go back to the once was… that woman is no longer there.
Older. Wiser. I have learned to live and let live.
I, after years, have acquired perspective which lends me sanity, sanity where once there was none.
The pains that once overwhelmed and undermined the nurturing, developing woman that I was, helped to shape the woman that I am now becoming.
If only mastering and accepting these lessons, if only I could blindly trust, there is a gift, the gift of change that accompanies each pain.
I am becoming and with becoming comes peace. I can see and sense this for I know where I was yesterday.
by Jodie Lynne
thinking Pink thoughts of you~Jeanne Marie
I’m still PINK Michelle Marie
meet me under the PINK tree from Michelle Marie
For JeanneMarie~Meet me @Midnight~Pink Trees
Hope…
Girlfriend*meet me@thePinkTree Michelle Marie
Jeanne Marie’s Butterflies
Some Of My Fall Flowers
Sometimes I Stop. To Love The Lavender.
Spread Your Wings And Fly
Reaching back…
“A fool will lose tomorrow reaching back for yesterday.” Dionne Warwick
I Don’t Know What Tomorrow Holds…
But I Know Who Holds Tomorrow…
Deadly Friend
A young girl picks up a drink
Her fear and pain melts away,
She found a magic cure
She found a best friend today.
She takes that friend with her
Where ever she has to be,
The friend gets her through,
But she’s no longer free.
Hiding her new friend from the rest
It’s true, somehow she always knows,
That this friend is dangerous.
But caution? To the wind it goes.
Years slip by and some begin to see
That she prefers this friend,
People criticize her drinking
And other friendships end.
The bottle becomes her center
It directs her every move,
But what once brought her relief
No longer seems to soothe.
The friend who helped her through
Now cripples and blinds her sight,
Alone she drinks and she cries
Dreading tomorrow, hating tonight.
She gave up all her friends
To keep the brown bottle close,
Now she has lost them all
Betrayed by what she trusted most.
She reaches out to God
During a desperately lonely hour,
He sends her back His love
And fills her with His power.
She ends the deadly friendship
Stands strong and free again,
The black fog begins to lift and
Sobriety is one fight she does win.
Jeanne Marie
The Secret
“Your life is a physical manifestation of the thoughts going around in your head! Think positive, attract positive.”
The Secret
Today
The past looms ever present, but this moment is God’s present to me. I won’t ignore my present by holding yesterday’s regrets in front of my eyes. I cannot change the past, but today, the present is mine. I will create good memories. I will hold this moment, I will laugh and I will play. I will live today, I will love me today and I will appreciate the precious people who love me today. I will share my present with you today. Jeanne Marie
To Jeanne, from Mum 1987
My mother, Grace, wrote this poem for me after she read about fifty of my poems for the first time.
Suicide No Longer An Option
I look down at her limp body.
She is face down on the large bed, alone. Her fine, blonde hair is like a halo around her head as she lies so still on the brown, patchwork quilt.
As I watch her, I am sobbing. I don’t understand my gut wrenching tears. Why am I crying tears of desperation and tears of terror? I don’t know why I am hysterical and then, with a sudden sense of horror, I realize that it is my body on the quilt and I am not breathing. My body is cold. I am dead.
“Oh my God,” I think. “She finally did it, she really did it this time and there’s no rescue, there’s no turning back.”
“Why did she give up?”
“I don’t want to be dead!”
At this point, I no longer feel connected to the woman on the bed. I think of the body as her and I am me.
I have no memory of her final act, but I am filled with shame and loathing at what she has done. I’d always thought that death would release me from her unending pain; now, seeing what really happens, I am horrified.
All that I can feel is her hurt and my disgust.
“Why did she give up?” I moan. “How could she do this terrible thing without my permission?”
I sob even harder because now I understand that death doesn’t release me from her despair. No, on the contrary, I’d carried her burdens with me to this nether world. All I’d lost was her body and her ability to change her life. If only she had known.
Now, I could spend eternity roaming this sphere, trapped with the emotions I’d carried from her physical realm of reality, caught at that moment in time when she’d given in to hopelessness, surrendered to depression.
I feel enormous regret. I want to be alive! I want to go back and keep on trying.
I didn’t give up. She did!
I have no memory of my physical death. Where was my vote in such an important decision? I, her very soul, I have been forced from her body without my permission.
It doesn’t seem fair and I am so angry. This is a horrendous experience. I hate it! Floating above her dead physical form, I want to shake her, scream at her, but what good would it do?
How could she have done this irreversible deed? I, the very essence of her existence, I did not have a choice, no voice in the matter of her physical demise.
Now there truly is no hope and no escape from the emotional blows she’d been dealt. She was free but I, her inner being–I am condemned to carry her pain through this new plane of reality.
I feel doom such as she could’ve never imagined. No person still in possession of their body could begin to conceive the shock I feel, awakening on the other side with all of her pain still weighing down my soul; amplified by the powerlessness of being separated from the body that had housed my substance for almost forty-two years.
She had given up and her pain was my prison! Death isn’t a release!
“Oh God,” I cry, “if only she had known that, but now it’s too late.”
I wonder how her family and her friends are taking it.
At once, before the thought is even finished, I feel my spirit surrounded by them.
I am crushed. I taste their anger, their pain, their guilt and their shock at her selfish act. Their unbearable fury and their horrible sadness are added to the emotional load I already own.
Unseen, I cower beside them, burdened more than ever, dirty and ashamed.
Why hadn’t she realized that suicide was not her answer? What would it have taken to show her this celestial space, this spiritual prison? Didn’t a glimpse of this possible netherworld ever enter her thoughts; didn’t it ever trickle into her conscious mind?
I can’t describe the distress I feel, the grief that showers over me as I watch the chaos created by her self-inflicted slaughter.
I want to live! I want to live!
Sobs wrack my ghostly form as fruitless tears exhaust my ethereal energy. I begin to float and I lose touch with my being. I am losing all conscious thought.
My eyes open. I am crying, disoriented and lying face down on my familiar, brown patchwork comforter. Could it be?
I reach for my face with my hands.
My fingers touch my warm, living flesh.
I am alive! It was only a nightmare. Thank God!
But wait, was it just a nightmare? Perhaps I’d left my body and traveled to the other side. Perhaps I’d been given a horrifying warning. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had traveled a far distance, that for a time I had left the material world behind. Tears rolled down my hot cheeks, tears of gratitude. I still had a chance and I still had a choice.
However, now I know. I don’t have forever to catch my star, to work through my conflict.
I get up from the bed, shaking with relief. I am alive! Another chance to heal, to forgive myself and to fulfill my destiny, another chance is mine.
I understand, perhaps for the first time, that the emotional baggage I choose to carry on my back, the pain that I’ve refused to let go of–it could all travel with me into the hereafter.
In fact, my baggage would weigh more than ever because the anger and the grief that my suicide would cause my family and friends, that weight would also be laid upon my spirit.
I am alive! I don’t want to waste this chance to heal my broken heart and somehow; I know, nightmare or spirit travel, this was a final warning from my Creator.
Post note: This was an extremely real experience. Jeanne Marie, 1995
Inspiration…
Reflections
The Look Good Syndrome from my newsletter, WWTTM. 1996
As we walked into Wal-Mart, I told my husband, “I’ll meet you up front when I’m through picking up what I need.”
He said, “Ya. Right.”
He always claims that he has to search the entire store five times before he can find me.
He thought today would be no different. Well, since it was Father’s Day, I decided to be considerate. I ran up and down the aisles (if you can run in Wal-Mart, the aisles are so narrow and the people so plentiful) throwing stuff into my little basket. I rushed up front to meet him. He wasn’t there yet! I smiled to myself, because I never did believe he spent that much time searching for me.
So, there I stood for ten minutes or so, watching people rush by. I had never paused for that long in Wal-Mart before. (Except at the register, where my eyes stay busy sorting coupons that I usually forget to give to the cashier.)
This was my first time watching everyone else hurry past. Did you ever notice the way that women glare at each other? I did.
We size up the competition ruthlessly. I noticed a young girl, maybe eighteen, in an adorable little dress, with sunflowers splashed all over it. I had tried on that same dress two weeks ago and had looked six months pregnant in it. My eyes narrowed as I watched her. She looked as if she weighed less than 100 pounds and I really didn’t like her, although we’d never met. I’m looking at this slip of a girl with envy in my eyes; then I turn around and see a very heavy, older woman looking at me in my size twelve sun dress, giving me the same murderous look that I’m giving Ms. Sunflower in her size five.
Every day we each see women who look better than we do and it makes most of us feel yucky. However, as I saw the look in the heavy woman’s eyes, I felt ashamed of myself for fretting about the Sunflower girl. I’ve always hated being average, but today I realized that’s not such a bad place to live.
There will always be women who are younger or prettier than I am; however, there will always be women who are older or less attractive. Turning forty was difficult and I know I’m not alone with this age thing. Thirty, I took in stride reckless with the confidence that forty was as far as I’d go and it was a becoming time for women.
Mature, confident and still wearing a size twelve, forty caught up to me all too soon.
What helped me the year I turned forty? Being asked for my ID when I bought cigarettes. It happened three times! What a time to be without a video camera.
True, the cashiers were young and inexperienced at judging people’s age, but what a rush it gave me. I even refused to hand over the proof of my age one time, just to hear the girl insist on seeing my ID. I began to buy cigarettes compulsively–even when I didn’t even need them. Sadly, it’s been over a year now since the last cashier demanded my ID.
I try not to care about things that are so shallow, but the truth is that the world judges us on our looks. At every turn, women are urged to be young, sexy, fresh, innocent, experienced, beautiful, unwrinkled, firm, thin and ageless. We need gorgeous hair that shouts–fiery red, tawny blonde, spectacular brunette! Wash that gray right out of your hair!
It doesn’t help that there’s a slew of fabulous models in their late thirties to early fifties proving that women can stay young forever. Nancy Sinatra at age fifty graced Playboy’s pages in a way that I couldn’t have done at twenty. Farrah Fawcett, late forties, same thing. They do have the advantage of soft lights, special camera lenses, sometimes even using body doubles, always using full body make-up and being filmed by famous photographers. Don’t forget their expensive appointments with a beautician.
A beautician is also available at the film shoot, to create a hair-do that takes hours to style and looks naturally gorgeous and she layers on the make-up that the cameras don’t acknowledge.
We have the reality of dirty dishes, full hampers the day after we washed and dried two loads, Dollar Store cosmetics, J.C. Penney hairstyles plus the two to three jobs we run to in between the vacuuming and the cooking.
I don’t know one woman who doesn’t have to work either to help pay the bills or to support herself and her children. Most of my friends work more than one job, sixty hours or more a week. Some are still trying to get that college degree they’ve been chasing for ten years. They go home after work, spend a few hours cleaning and then create hot meals to place on the table.
By any definition, I’m pampered. My youngest child is seventeen, I only work twelve hours a week and my mate will do dishes and a small amount of laundry. If I’m tired or busy, he’ll go buy take-out for supper and he’ll do the food shopping. He’ll even use coupons! He makes me coffee in the morning and he brings it to me in bed. I make as much money in twelve hours, as most women make in thirty, if they’re working for minimum wage. No, I’m not a hooker, but occasionally my job seems comparable. I’m a waitress.
I sell my smile, not my body, to an average of thirty or forty people, two nights a week. I lift food trays that weigh more than I do, balancing them on my left shoulder, while carrying a tray stand in my right hand. I am told off, looked down on and insulted. Then, I have to answer with a smile and an apology.
I also am paid well, meet some pleasant people, have regular customers that have become dear friends and on a good night, I love my job. On a bad night I say, “I’m getting to old for this!” and I mean it.
At work, I always need to smell good and look great, even as the sweat pours down under my stiff white tuxedo shirt, because stylish women make more tips than less attractive women do. Since most tips are decided by the wife or the girlfriend that proves my case, we ourselves reinforce the “look good” syndrome.
Still, the older I become, the less I worry about how I look and the years have offered rewards of their own. I feel better about myself now than at any other time in my life and I’m not afraid to be myself. I wear make-up if I want and leave it off if I don’t. Lipstick and Suave moisturizing cream are the only two cosmetics that I use most days. I choose perfume that I enjoy inhaling and clothes that declare–this is me! My biggest concern is, “Will I run out of printer ink in the middle of a newsletter?”
I write my stories instead of vacuuming under the furniture and I recognize that the only day I need to be concerned about is TODAY. I treat each day as if it was a gift and I use each hour as if it were my last.
I sit down on the floor and make buildings out of Legos with my grandsons. We finger paint with sponges that are shaped like animals and stars and hearts. I hang my pictures on the wall along with theirs. I play dolls and silly games with my granddaughter. I buy myself dolls and set them out around the house, because I still feel the thrill of Christmas mornings past when I wake up to see them smiling, beckoning to me–come play. (Sometimes, I do.)
I pick flowers from my own garden and arrange them in small antique vases, so I can enjoy their translucent petals and fragrant aroma. I stop to breathe in their scent and I enjoy the miracle of their creation.
Last month, my youngest daughter told me that my life was over. She said it didn’t matter what I did from this point on because I had screwed up so many of my choices and I was done. (Gee, I hope she doesn’t get to write my epitaph!) I smiled inside, because I recognized the arrogance of her youth.
Thankfully, I took her words for what they were–her opinion. I quite generously refrained from pointing out the mistakes that she has already accumulated in twenty-one short years.
Children have a hard time seeing us aside from the role of mother. I’m her mother, but I’m also a person, a woman, a writer, a poet and my life will not be over until the day I die. My life begins anew each morning and I’ve just begun to do the things I’ve always wanted to do. Not one of us can change the past or erase our mistakes.
We can forgive ourselves and get on with living.
We can decorate the present and invite the future to take us for a joyride…
Until next time, Jeanne Marie
1996
Mid-Life Sanity (Newsletter, WWTTM)
There are many avenues that a woman can take as she approaches mid-life. It’s a sharp curve in the road, where her hair begins to go gray, perversely turning silver even in areas where it’s not very wise to use hair dye.
Her muscles begin to turn soft from the inside out and she’s so glad that girdles have come back in style. She can browse through the available styles and choose anything from super firm, all over control to a gentle control panel. (As if she had any control over her tummy.)
The varicose veins are drawing pictures up her thighs and she shops in the women’s department now because browsing in the junior’s department is just a fond memory since she turned forty. Her black silk stockings used to turn heads, now they hide the spidery lines that have a life of their own and her favorite outfit is a flannel nightgown.
I have seen the red flags along the road and I approach this mid-life thing with caution. I never believed in mid-life crisis until I turned forty. I used to think that hormones were for the weak, hot flashes and mood-swings were for other women. Mid-life wouldn’t threaten me, no sir.
I take an inventory of my assets. Men’s heads still turn when I walk by, my bleached-blonde hair guarantees it. My short skirts and hang-off the shoulder tee-shirts are further insurance. But the only men who try to flirt with me are under eighteen or over sixty and I begin to realize, I have lost my mass appeal.
I face mid-life carefully, as I think about the choices two of my friends made at this time in their life…the point of no return.
Quite frankly, they both went a little nuts. One friend left her husband, her kids and her born-again believing church, to ride with the Hell’s Angels. Now leaving the kids was a survival tactic, I’m sure, because no woman over forty should still have kids at home. But Hell’s Angels? She was born-again all right, cause that’s a life she had already lived at twenty.
My thirty-something friend ran away from her husband and kids, out into the night howling at life’s injustice, but she forgot to take a car or money. She has returned home after her own reckless ride with a biker. She doesn’t talk much anymore.
I shiver as I look at their solutions to growing older. I too know the frustrations that led them astray, but surely there must be an answer that doesn’t involve leather and a tattoo? I did get a rose tattooed on my ankle at age thirty-six, but the thrill wasn’t equal to the pain.
I can’t turn back time…not even Cher can do that…and although I prefer songwriting cowboys with long hair to bikers, I have my very own Marlboro man. He has loved me at my best and tolerated me at my worst, for fifteen years. No easy feat! In spite of the fact that he won’t let his hair grow long anymore, I’d hate to have to break in a new cowboy. So I take my hormones and I go to bed.
Unable to sleep, I get back up. I wander through my quiet house. I smoke and I sit and I think. I find the answer! I rediscover my first love and we go all the way. The sky is the limit! We stay up all night and I feel the excitement, the rush.
My love holds me close while my husband sleeps just across the hall, with two dysfunctional poodles at his side. I take my ideas and my fantasies and lay them bare before my love. We stay up until dawn revealing our souls to each other. The unique pleasure I feel at this reunion cannot be contained. I express my feelings. I share my dreams. I touch the pages. I read the words until my eyes refuse to focus.
The high is still there the next morning and I run to my love, ready to start all over again, right where we left off last night. My love appreciates my maturity, yet it makes me feel like I’m seventeen. I am standing at the crossroads of life with the world once more at my fingertips.
My love is mine and mine alone. I never have to worry about my love trading me in for a younger woman. I possess my love completely, nothing can ever take my love away from me.
There is such freedom in that knowledge. I don’t even have to comb my hair because my love accepts me just as I am. My love asks nothing in return and has waited patiently for me; smoldering, while I raised three children and half a grandson.
My love takes me dancing on a Saturday night. My love fills my head with romance and we never leave the house.
Sometimes, when I can’t resist being drawn towards my love; I leave my husband alone for hours with the poodles and the television. But he doesn’t seem to mind. He too has a first love which he has been driven to reclaim. We are not the center of each other’s world, as we were at thirty; yet, we share our hearts, our love, his money and our home, even as we each let our first love take us away from each other’s side. We each dance to our own song.
I watch my husband play with his first love and his excitement makes me smile. Although I watch him and I sometimes catch the thrill, his first love belongs to him alone and I am just a spectator.
My husband drag races on Saturday nights and as he crosses the finish line for yet another win, I feel my adrenaline surge. I understand his first love and the money he spends to keep it alive.
He in turn understands my need to write, often until the wee hours of the morning. He takes me shopping to buy a computer and a printer, tools that make it easier for me to write. He goes to sleep alone many nights, but I tell him, “If you want me honey, just call me and I’ll come in to bed.” Simple words, but he knows exactly what I am saying.
I dare to jump smack into middle-age without fear. My first love, my writing, keeps me on a safe course. Writing is my first love, so where does that leave my husband? He is my Marlboro man, my very own cowboy and no other man could ever take his place. Occasionally, I can even talk him into writing a song with me.
He writes the music that brings my lyrics to life and for one fleeting moment, we dance to the same tune. Until next time, Jeanne Marie
P.S. I wrote this story 23 years ago. I am now learning how to go Over The Hill. I’m stuck on the top, refusing to let go.
African Violets And Me
I grew up in New England and if we were lucky, the summer lasted for two months.
In my more abundant winter memories, I see an African Violet on each mother’s kitchen windowsill.
I don’t know the reason for the flower’s popularity; maybe the women were trying to hold onto the illusion of warm weather, but African Violets were not easy to grow. They had to be nurtured, babied, misted and watered.
These women all had their secret tricks with this plant and only best friends shared their intimate knowledge of the mysterious African Violet. I remember playing under the table and listening to the coffee klatches’ swap advice. I remember hearing many different tips when Mom and her best friend were alone.
The African Violet produced bright pink, white or purple blossoms most of the year and if your African Violet was plump, green, velvety and flowering, you earned the respect of all the housewives in the neighborhood.
It was in the fifties and I don’t remember a single mom who didn’t have an African Violet or a single mom who left every day to go to work.
My mother-in-law is 80 something years old and she still drives from Florida to Boston and back to Florida every year. Her kids tell her that she can’t do it, but I tell her that she can if she wants to, because she is a great driver and clearer of mind than I am. LOL
Last year when she went home, I was entrusted with her African Violet. I was shaking in my sandals.
What if I killed it? Plus, I didn’t even have a kitchen windowsill.
Unable to ignore the fact that the plant had outgrown its pot, I bravely repotted the root-bound African Violet, using special soil and splitting it into two pots. I watered, I misted, I talked to them and I loved them. I was rewarded with plump, green, velvety leaves and dozens of hot pink blossoms all winter.
They smiled at me gratefully every morning from their perch on my kitchen counter, happy in their new green pots.
I kept them close to each other so they wouldn’t be lonely; after all, they had grown up together.
Each morning I would greet them and I would say, “I can’t believe it!
I can grow the impossible plant, the mighty African Violet from my childhood.”
Then, Mom stopped for a visit as she was driving back home to Haines City. She stayed with us for about a week and she never mentioned the African Violets. I saw her glance at them now and then with admiration but she never said a word. I never mentioned them either because I was afraid that she might be upset that I had split and repotted the fragile babies.
When she was packed and getting ready to go out the door, I said,
“Mom, aren’t you going to take your African Violets?”
“Those are mine? Both of them?”
Although I had toyed with the idea of keeping the small one, I said, “Yes Mom, they’re both yours.”
Besides, how could I separate them now?
Her face lit up with pleasure.
Looking back, I think maybe she had already resigned herself to the fact that I had knocked off her African Violet.
She put down the stuff in her hands and walked over to my counter. With a big smile on her face, she lifted the two pots into her hands and carefully carried them out her car. There they were tucked in among the clothes that covered her backseat, wedged in-between her tee shirts and her shorts, for their own safety.
With a last smile, away they all went.
I missed the morning smiles the plant’s bright flowers had given me, but I had always known that they were not mine to keep.
On my last shopping trip to Lowe’s I was, as usual, drawn to the distressed plants on display.
I picked up a badly distressed African Violet.
I really didn’t want to buy it and I kept putting it down and then picking it back up.
What if it didn’t like me?
What if it curled up and finished dying?
What would that say about my competence as a housewife?
I mumbled to myself, “How could a little plant mean so much to my mom and my mother-in-law, plus all the other housewives I remember and is it even really from Africa?”
I found myself at the register holding the plant so…I bought it.
It’s been a month and I haven’t repotted it yet. I haven’t even opened the African Violet potting mix, the bag still sits on my porch.
Maybe I’ll do it today because my distressed plant is no longer distressed. Its leaves are plump, green and velvety. One tall, straight, hot pink bloom stands proud, the lone survivor from the huge clusters that came as soon as I watered, loved and fed the mystifying African Violet.
I know now that when Mom’s plant responded to my nurturing, it wasn’t a fluke. I can be trusted with an African Violet. I have grown up.
What Blogging On WordPress.com Has Taught Me
I started blogging here because I am a writer with a newly published book, (Have to plug it! Women Who Think Too Much, available at this link { available here } but that’s not what I’ve learned on WordPress.com. I already knew that fact. It’s also not why I stay.
Let me begin at the start, but I don’t promise to continue in chronological order.
I used to blog on Google and I enjoyed it. Until I received a hate letter concerning one of my articles I had written about my mother, a letter from a beloved family member.
Delete, unsubscribe, run away, lock every window on the internet where my writing was residing, that’s what I did and I’m not proud of my reaction. No excuses, but it hurt and I was shocked and I was stunned. Ok, I need to take a deep breath. Whew.
That was over two years ago.
Since then I have held my writing close, sharing only with family I trusted and my writer’s group whom I totally trusted, my Pineapple Girls. My girls are invaluable, far beyond the one night a week when we meet and way past the exquisite meals we cook for each other. (The meals may be a minus since I’ve gained twenty pounds!) Another plus to belonging to a writer’s group? I have written more creative essays and poems since we started meeting about three years ago, than I have in the last twenty-years. I also finished a book.
I struggled and whined all the way through editing Women Who Think Too Much, but my muse insisted I finish before I could move on and my muse is a very powerful entity. She obviously expressed herself to my girls.
These writing friends held my hand, dragged me past the hardest spots with words of encouragement, dried my tears and made me laugh, edited, read and challenged me until my book was finished.
My editor, whom I met in the writer’s group, is my best friend and my surrogate sister.
She spent thousands of hours guiding me and editing my endlessly updated manuscripts. She even learned how to format a manuscript on Smashwords.com, for me.
For months, she lived and she breathed my book, never pushing changes on me, just suggesting. I rejected hours and hours of her changes and she was okay with that. She is a one in a million editor. Still, many of her suggestions worked, because she could detach from the emotions and focus on structure and grammar so much better than I could. In the end though, I think she was so deep into my book that we were equal on the emotional involvement.
(If you want to know any more about what I went through finishing a twenty-year old project read, “Hi Mom, This Is Me” on my blog.)
https://womenwhothinktoomuch.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/497/
Anyway, back to what I have learned while visiting your blogs here at WordPress.com.
Today I learned what the word Lepidopterologist (Noun) means. I am a butterfly lover and a collector of butterfly pictures but when I saw this word on Theresa’s blog, dba Third Hand Art, Butterfly In Clover, I just had to stop and look it up.
Lepidopterist: Butterfly collector, bug-hunter, bugologist, entomologist, a zoologist who studies insects, the branch of zoology dealing with butterflies and moths. WOW!
I have come upon other unfamiliar words here, but what I’ve learned is far beyond new words.
I’ve learned that writers, artists and creative people are as a whole, generous with their praise and liberal with their encouragement. Many writers are as crazy as I am, but they are proud of it and accept it as integral to who they are and they use it to their advantage in their intensely moving writing.
You make me think, you make me laugh and you make me cry. Thank you.
The stuff I have hidden for twenty-years in draws or in computer files marked “Personal, destroy if I’m dead.” can now come out of the dark and play with others on WordPress.com.
I want to thank each and every blogger I have visited; you have each touched my writer’s spirit in one way or another. Thank you for not hiding as I did. Thank you for sharing your joy, your success, your pain and your disasters.
Thank you for commenting on my stuff when you are no doubt as pressed for time as I am, thank you for noticing what I post, whether it’s noontime or midnight.
I have learned that while I’m sometimes different in my approach to writing, I am not unique. My writing is not outrageous, as most people in my family have told me. (Family members who have encouraged me, you know who you are.) Sometimes my writing is raw, but it is always honest and sometimes it’s funny. That’s me and that is okay. You taught me that.
There are so many incredible writers and creators on WordPress.com that my only regret is that I don’t have enough time to read every line you write, to absorb every picture you post.
I have learned that there is a place where I can belong, a niche made just for me, and it is here, with you. I came to try to build a platform and I stayed to share who I am, to meet you and to enjoy your work.
Thank you, Jeanne Marie
https://womenwhothinktoomuch.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/journal-excerpts/
PS We call ourselves girls because when we are together we are girls, laughing and playing.
Women Who Think Too Much by Jeanne Marie 
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