6/1/2025

Yay! Beginning of a new daily month blog. I want to keep this fun. Journaling is tricky, especially for a fiction writer. I am so tempted to dive into any number of directions and characters - to where even I lose a sense of my own identity and personality choices.

What we fail to recognize, communication itself is difficult. It's obvious we live in a new digital age. Instead of the continual confusion and aggression - we should strive to thrive.

How to thrive?

Integrative Communication Strategy - Balancing professional and personal identities is possible.

For me, a living website is the best channel to express myself. I love that I have full creative power over this small space of digital atmosphere.

This entire month I will be randomly pulling prompt inspiration from a book I picked up at Walmart.

Story of My Life.

Welcome!

I've had an insane life. Even those closest to me, don't know me. Cannot believe how someone so small, gentle and quiet, knows of extremism.

In addition, every day I am exposed to unusual circumstances in my career field. It influences my life and continually refreshes me on how I got here.

>a photo from today while in the McDonald's drive thru line. My kids earned chicken nuggets.

Ah, this is such a good one to start with because I am 41. I blissfully remember life without the internet and social media. However in my case, I grew up in a Fundamental Baptist community in Kansas. Technology, the existence of it was just as controversial back then as it is now.

My parents were counseled to not allow me to access a computer while at school. It was upsetting to me at the time, to be excluded from those types of activities. Back then we had those large blocky Apple computers with the floppy disks. Mostly played Oregon Trail on them. I'm grateful for the teachers who allowed me to participate anyway.

With time, my parents dropped those kinds of demands and were led to focus on other issues but they were not hard core anti-tech people like others in our close knit community. They were simply poor and mostly embarrassed they could not afford electronics. My parents were young married teenagers and I am the oldest child. In many ways, I grew up with them.

This early tech decision of theirs - didn't last long but also I attended public schools compared to church peers who were encouraged to be privately homeschooled. However my access to tech was limited to school time and the schools I attended were in poverty districts. Equipment was either broken, unusable or nonexistent. It made keeping up with educational opportunity more difficult. I was a straight A student, gifted in many ways but I grew bored and frustrated with school. I think anyone would under those circumstances.

Once I turned 16 and was able to get a full job in order to fund my own preferred and sometimes forbidden lifestyle compared to my parents. I still didn't buy a computer. I bought a phone, one of those Nokia bricks. A car. I had it made. My first job was in sales at a department store. All those years of church gave me socialization superpowers.

I used a wordprocessor throughout high school. I kind of miss that thing sometimes. I finally broke down and bought a computer when I went to college. It was way too expensive and even to this day I regret buying it because it contributed to me dropping out of college. I was a working student. I had no safety net. So many things but living on the edge in poverty, one busted budget starts a chain of consequences.

Tech in my life? It's been a weird trip for me - to go from nothing - into today for my job I'm constantly connected as a human data collector while applying therapy, running trials. Tablet, phone, kids, chaos.

Tech. It's a tool. It's not life. I enjoy unplugging. I also enjoy maxing it out, getting lost within it - music blasting while I write or paint.

I feel like if you can regulate yourself, then you don't need to regulate tech. But that's probably an unfair opinion. I have a therapist in my life (me). Others don't.