Today marks the three-year blogoversary of my time in this space. Almost three hundred posts later, I ponder what this blog means to me. I started this blog in an effort to deal with my father’s passing. When he passed, a large part of me couldn’t fathom a world without him in it. As I started to talk about what happened to him and the details surrounding his loss, I noticed I didn’t have much of an audience. Mortality is not discussed. Illness and death are certainly not enticing topics for conversation. The other roadblock that I experienced was this: Unless the person you are talking to has lost a parent and/or knows the gravity of home hospice, they are not going to really get the magnitude of your loss. It is nobody’s fault. Certain people are catapulted into crisis earlier, rather than later. My experience with my father left me with a gaping hole to explore and the people around me were unable to really help me. That is how this blog was born.

And three years later, this blog is not only an extension of me, but a living and breathing part of me.  Tomorrow also marks my sixth year anniversary of leaving behind my legal career and my decision to pursue writing as a full-time gig. It is scary to abandon a career that you spent most of your life pursuing and building for an artistic pursuit that has very little to offer in terms of a guarantee. I’ve been working on my memoir over the last year and more than once I’ve doubted myself, felt a lack of self-confidence, and questioned whether I needed to go back to my legal “roots.” There are days that I don’t really feel like a writer and other days when I dread answering the cocktail party question, “What do you do?” The truth is that I could spend the rest of my life writing this memoir and it may never grace the bookshelf of a single place in the world.

Despite the doubts and the very real lack of revenue, I still write and blog. For the most part, it has to do with my very loyal readership – my family (my mom gets worried if I haven’t published a regular blog post and calls me to make sure I have one in the works), friends, writer buddies, and this blogging community, including Do Six Figures. If it weren’t for all of you, there would be days that I would abandon my dream and give up. But the moment I entertain that thought, I receive a heartfelt comment on-line, an off-line email about how much a certain post meant to someone, or the occasional, “I really love reading your blog.” Those words are my revenue. They gratify me in ways that I can’t explain.

On this third year blogoversary, I thank all of you. For reading. For commenting. For sharing this space with me. You have my eternal gratitude.