A new year is right around the corner.  For me, New Year's day is also my birthday.  So when other people are making their resolutions, I do a total life-evaluation.  It has always been a turning point in my life.  I always feel like I get to make more of  a fresh start than others.  The resolution that I always make is: I will write more.  

So, let's back up and have a little Crystal writing history.  I remember loving the creative writing exercises in grade school.  My mother still has plenty of material written by her little genius.  Those were fun, but one of my favorite memories is writing poetry outside at a really young age.  It was all very dramatic . . . . I would sit under the stars, light candles, and tears would literally fall onto the paper as I poured my heart out about the love of my life.  If that boy could've seen how much I loved him, the writing probably would've stopped before I turned 11.  But he didn't see so the writing continued.  I still have plenty of those poems too and  some still have wax drippings on them.  I continued to write from time to time and felt particularly empowered my senior year of high school when I started receiving the highest grades in English class at my Catholic high school.  I would write about the injustices of the world.  I think I came out of the womb feeling more intensely than my peers because I was often saddened by so many things and used writing to express those extreme emotions.  It was during one of these writing experiences on Animal Cruelty that I stopped eating meat.  I wasn't against meat, but I couldn't participate in the meat industry as I knew it.  Sixteen years later, I still feel the same.  All of this because of writing.  By the time college rolled around, I was writing more than ever, but just in journals.  On two occasions, I actually read aloud something that I wrote, but only because it was a class requirement.  Those two things . . . . each 4 years apart . . . .were so hard to read and they were not that good.  Yet, those two things got so much reaction from people.  The first was about a friend who died.  It was a really simple poem  written in seconds.  Everyone told me how honest it was and how much they loved it.  I had a well-read and well-written boyfriend that really enjoyed it and that was empowering.  The second was a little piece on my grandmother and it received the same reaction.  So, that was all of the sharing that I ever participated in.  The rest of it stayed in the journals.  Then my husband got sick and when we found out he needed a heart transplant, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to continue to repeat myself 20 times a day during phone conversations so I started updating on a medical site.  People could enter their email address and when something happened, I could type it in and everyone got the info.  This all seemed to spiral too.  These entries were particularly rushed and mainly just informative, but they also sparked interest.  The words I heard repeated over and over to describe my writing were raw, honest, real, emotional.   To me this meant that my writing was just simple and that I didn't have enough of a vocabulary to be anything more than raw.  But people enjoyed it.  Weekly and often daily, someone would approach me or my husband and tell me that I should write.  So, here I am.  Maybe this will keep me committed to my resolution.  I enjoy it.  I really don't think any of it is worth reading, but whatever.  I'll probably repeat myself from time to time . . . .especially concerning the successful heart transplant my man had last February . . . . that was and continues to be a major source of inspiration.  And it probably won't be as touching as the medical site caringbridge was, but this is what I've got.  If you're interested, subscribe and stay posted.  Oh, and I'll just go ahead and apologize for all of the grammatical errors.  I'm sure there are plenty of corrections that need to be made and will continue to be made, but I'm sure I'll barely have time to write . . . .much less have someone smart review this.  Cheers!  

Peace and Love, Crystal