Courageous Blogger Award

My friend Karen at A Deaf Mom Shares Her World http://putzworld.blogspot.com/ passed on to me the Courageous Blogging Award for my Palms to Pines blog: http://palmstopines.blogspot.com/

Later, Stephen Hobson over at Adversity University passed on the award to me for this blog.

Thank you, Stephen! :)

Here is the post:

http://adversityuniversity.blogspot.com/2007/07/courageous-blogger-award-for-adversity.html

Stephen said that he thought of people for this award because of taking part in his "overcoming adversity" experiment. In his blog, he talks about how some people had refused to participate, because their stories were too personal. As a writer, I could relate to this. There are MANY personal experiences that I've had which I'd rather not share unless I am compelled to. And sometimes, being compelled to write about something takes very little, if any, encouragement.

I have learned that sometimes, writing about the personal stuff and about the hard stuff can be a very healing experience. It can help us to grow, to understand ourselves better and come to terms with our past. There are, of course, SOME experiences from my life I could NEVER share. Maybe I wrote about them, but I just can't share them with the world. At least, not at this point in time. But, I think, if we are able to separate ourselves from an experience and put it to good use with our writing, then it's all the more worthwhile to take the time to write about it.

This is, at least, the lesson I have learned as a writer. And I hope it is a lesson others can eventually learn and benefit from, as well.