By Carolann Patterson

I love writing. I especially love writing letters.  I love searching for and finding an understanding of another person, where once there was none.  I love looking at life from all angles, at the three sides of every coin...

but I am not so brave when it comes to sharing personal stuff I've written, especially with people I don't know...a simple facebook post can give me anxiety for days...did I open up too much? were my words misconstrued? Creating this blog is a BIG, HUGE, COLOSSAL leap for me. and a meaningful one, too. It's time for me to move on and "just get over it"...so from here on, I would like to be able to write to strangers as though they were my friends. I would like to create a dialogue within the ether about life's lessons, starting with my friends and seeing where their leads will take me. I would like love and courage and creativity to lead the way.

For years I have been writing. I've banged out press releases, business proposals, fundraising and press strategies, brochures and advertising jingles, you name it ... basically I wrote anything in the name of corporate communications. and absolutely none of it was personal. It was all about building a story, keeping a message focused, meaningful, and above all relevant within a broader context. but the story was never mine.

It takes time to craft and nuance a "corporate voice," all in the name of consistent branding, but how do you tell a former corporate fashion PR girl, that she has no voice of her own? that she's been an "oid" for too long [ie, robotic, "Armani-oid," "fashion-oid"]. This blog is an exercise, a self-dare for a writer to shed her layers of corporate tongue twisters and move away from the cautious, and closer to the honest. In this blog, my challenge will be to let go of pitching stories and move toward finding stories and in order to do that, I will need to push myself beyond my comfort zone...will the principles of writing I learned on the corporate playing field be enough for me to build a new story, a story of my own? on vera...let's see.

In that sense this blog is about me, but just because my persona is shifting from the corporate to the personal doesn't mean "it's all about me"...it's really MORE about the amazing people in my life and how they teach me and guide me along the way.

Some times, you have to slow down in order to go.go.go...