I was certain I was destined to be a lifer.
I had an excellent job in an industry I love. I had been there nearly a dozen years and everything about it felt as comfortable as an old shoe. I was deeply appreciative and rightfully so. I told myself I would be a fool to go anywhere else. Ever.
What I didn't admit, even to myself, was that I was scared.
I can see now that the birth of my child coincided with the slow, steady death of my nerve.
I grew up presuming that fate would smile on me, but the trauma of Graham's birth showed me that fate laughs at presumptions. I had always assumed that my baby would be perfect and yet I was forced to consider that he was not.
Several stressful events occurred in the months immediately following his birth and almost overnight I became a worrier. I worried about everything. I felt insecurity creep over me at the strangest times, like a rogue dark cloud on a sunny day. I mourned my old self, but felt powerless to truly reclaim the loud, brassy girl, brimming with confidence, who always thought she would rule the world by the age of 40.
I know now that Don Mills Diva was a last-ditch effort to rescue that girl - a way to try and write myself back to the place where I wanted, needed, to be.
I wrote my way through a heap of pain this winter. I wrote brave, declarative statements when I felt the most shaky. I reached down inside myself, gathered together my shredded guts and sent them across the Internet, desperately hoping the the bravado contained therein would reflect back and somehow restore me.
And a funny thing happened: it worked.
The more I wrote the more confident I felt. The more confident I felt, the better I wrote. I found my voice, in every sense. I gained a lot of readers. I met - virtually and otherwise - a lot of people who expected that Don Mills Diva would be a woman of strength and confidence.
And I found, quite suddenly, that she was. Once again.
I travelled to San Francisco for the BlogHer conference and I met dozens (hundreds?) of you. I dressed up and acted sassy. I even bogarted the microphone at a packed seminar.
And then this week I started a new job: the kind of job I had started to resign myself to never getting.
Thanks to Don Mills Diva and to you, I now feel certain that I am indeed destined to be a lifer - here on the Internet anyway - where I will write my way into whatever my heart can imagine.
