Skip Down Memory Lane

Because that’s where I left my heart

My first blog, years ago, was called Something She Wrote.

You could enter that phrase into your search bar and find it online; still read the old me. Not sure you’d want to. I don’t.

That gal is fuzzy. A distant memory I should be able to slip into as an old and favorite jacket, but ill-fitted and long past my style.

Something She Wrote existed, in its heyday, when I was married. When my kids — now 19 and 16, closer to 17 — were just starting their grade school years. It was before my sweet dad passed away, too. I was still writing fiction, existing in a bubble that was not of my conscious design, and living with domestic abuse… without any awareness in it.

Until I became aware, of course.

I retired the blog soon after the divorce. As any survivor knows, layers upon layers slough off as you learn and grow and heal, and so the old writer and her craft were skins I shed out of necessity.

In the decade since, my creative world has ebbed and flowed but most certainly shifted to nonfiction in both scope and output. More often than not it takes shape through my advocacy, for my sister survivors of domestic abuse, over at Breaking the Silence for Women.

While I believe that everything I share there has value, I sometimes feel like my content is missing an element. Perhaps a transparency, a realness about my own journey; the personal narrative that drives how I know what I know about abuse and why I share it.

I’m not just a coach who churns out facts and advice from an inaccessible platform, behind a pre-made graphic, which is how it’s come to feel to me.

No, I’m also a living, breathing human — a survivor of domestic abuse — who has lived in the trenches herself, and who needs to step down from the podium more often, to exist amidst the narrative and with her fellow survivors.

Breaking the Silence for Women Janna writes with her brain, while Something She Wrote Janna wrote with her heart.

That’s what’s been missing. Heart.

This post is my realization,

and I’m slipping it on like an old favorite jacket that will never go out of style.