When I posted my last blog entry, which came after a long hiatus, I had a number of people express surprise that I blog. I found myself trying to explain … and not doing so very eloquently.

Which is exactly why I blog (and why I only lasted a few years as a trial lawyer).

It is much easier for me to express myself with the written word. My success as an attorney was documenting, in writing, multi-million dollar deals for large national and international institutional clients.

As I struggled to find my voice in my personal life, I should have known to turn to writing.

As a fan of healthy living blogs, I realized that there really wasn’t one for my age group. I set up this site and slowly started to write, intending at first for the blog to be focused on healthy living issues for those of us women entering our forties. I focused on recipes, exercise and some relevant social issues. People were kind and encouraging, and I kept moving forward.

And then I wrote Fortytude. At the time, I used my law firm email address for my contact information. The morning I published that post, I started to drive to the mountains for the weekend. About halfway there, my phone started to buzz constantly. I pulled over as I was certain that I was being sued for malpractice there was an emergency at the office.

There was no emergency. My phone buzzing reflected the over 7,000 hits on Fortytude. The entry had been posted on a national Word Press site called Freshly Pressed.  In addition to being the cause of crashing my firm’s email system, I was hooked on blogging.

As I got more and more confident, the subject of my posts became more varied. I got intensely personal at times, as evidenced in Hello my name is LeeAnn and I have … and Follow Your Heart.

I wrote often about my family and my pets. See (A Very Timely) Ode to Oprah and Wynonna is Crying.

My humorous posts are some of my favorites. I experienced pure joy writing Random Fun and Finding the Humor.

And in the process, I realized that, through writing, I am able to achieve growth and change in my life. It is almost as if it is a way for me to process my thoughts  … a way to hold myself accountable.

And that is why I keep coming back to it.