I'm just a girl in her twenties figuring life out for the first time
I’ve written gobs-amount of about pages and bios in the last few years, but I never feel like anything I string together accurately represents who I am. It’s either too professional and standoffish or trying too hard to be informal and humorous.
The truth is that I’m not funny but I love to laugh. It takes months or even years for me to warm up to people enough to be informal and irreverent and weird, even though I’m technically an extrovert. I’m an eldest daughter and a perfectionist but I’m also a Type B goofball who likes to dance badly and never make up her bed. I love fun drinks and cool weather and loud music and sunrises. I want to journal and draw and learn guitar but consistency eludes me. I love to cook but I hate cleaning up, except for once a month when I get a wild hair to scrub everything on my hands and knees and reorganize everything I own. I talk too much and to myself, but my best friends are the ones who talk even more than I do, so I can just relax and listen. I have too many interests and passions and opinions, but I’m terrible at dreaming big and setting goals for myself. I love to write, but it’s honestly like pulling teeth to do it.
I just recently left my job as manager at a local fast casual restaurant to pursue writing and, more importantly, God. I want to really commit myself to discerning His will for my life and put effort into the things I believe He’s place on my heart—writing, yes, but also ministry and missions. I’m taking this one step at a time, but I know where He’s leading me is good.
When I’m not writing or working on a project for my small press, I’m reading, teaching the elementary school girls at my church, or spending time with my family. Or updating this website for the upteenth time.
My hope is that this little about page is just the beginning—the virtual handshake, if you will—of a long-lasting relationship. That through the pages of my story, who I really am is revealed. That in all I do and say, I'm authentically me.
the creed
Many years ago, during one of the first iterations of my website, I started something called “my creed”. A creed is, aside from a rock band, a set of guiding beliefs or principles, and I thought it fitting to introduce my own to inform visitors of the kind of things I wrote and promoted. The original one read more like “I refuse to write bad, evil, non-Christian things” and the updated one was definitely more of a doctrinal/theological statement. Both had their merits, but in looking back, they sounded a little bit like “here’s why I’m better than everyone else” and less like “here’s what I believe.”
Convictions aren’t a competition. I don’t create for the sake of comparing myself to others or trying to spiritually best them. I create because I’m called to be like my Creator. What others do shouldn’t change or affect that in the slightest.
So perhaps the creed is just that. The guiding belief is that regardless of what goes on the world around me, I do what God called me to do. I create, whatever that looks like. I dream, I sing, I dance, I live, I breathe—because I am loved by God.
The minutia of what I believe may evolve and shirt, what I write and create may change subtly or dramatically over the years, but the fundamental truth endures: all I do, all I am, for the glory of God.
The creed isn’t about the content of my books. It’s about the content of my soul (Mark 7:14-23). The creed isn’t something written and pasted onto a webpage. It’s lived.