A dozen years ago, I began writing. While I’ve had many hobbies in my adult life, I called writing “my elegant hobby.” The ideas free-flowed from my fingers in a stream-of-consciousness style, likely stored fragments of everything I’ve ever read – and I’ve read volubly since age four – and feelings I’d felt compelled to stuff.

I created a slogan for my writing efforts at that time: “I write when I’m blue. I write when I’m black. And then I feel all better.” My spin on Joan Didion’s oft-cited opine, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Emboldened by another famous writer’s creed, I began to write boldly in blog posts. Blogging as a personal diary, weekly statements of my opinions, feelings, and personal statement of “I am.” No longer caring if the screed of a little sister with whom I shared a room in my angst-filled teens read my diary entries and tattled behind my back.

The results were often like song lyrics, which makes sense because music has played an integral part in my life.

Here’s one of my earliest blog posts from July 2014 as proof of my feelings on the topic https://www.pjcolando.com/words-music/

I recently sustained a terrible blow: a disaster of a medical diagnosis that will never end. Writing, as well as reading, my mainstay hobby, will

• allow me to process my thoughts by making them visible in the ink on a page
• provide catharsis, a cleansing of negative emotions as powerful as three deep yoga breaths
• help me quell fears, regulate my emotions, and move me toward calm acceptance
• forestall an unworthy pity party
• provide a distraction so worry doesn’t enter my soul
• create community if you, Constant and/or New reader follow my journey