My name is Jorja.   Yes, it is like the state, Georgia, but just spelled differently. I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend and a multitude of other things. But first and foremost, I am a woman, a human being and a very unique soul. I am gifted, thoughtful and discerning in ways that make me wholly different from every other human being on the face of this earth.  Sounds really fabulous doesn’t it?  I still struggle to believe that and I certainly did not live the first three decades of my life believing it.  I am forty-two now, looking out at the next forty years of my life, looking back at the last.  Trying to process what has been and really consider what I want to come.

I am not hokey or ridiculously introspective, I just want to live a full life, one that will make my children grin and say, “my mama learned, loved and laughed til the day she died.”  I think I have spent the last few years struggling with regrets, regretting what I haven’t done, havent’ finished and didn’t pursue.  I stood at my fortieth birthday and felt like my life was a shell of what it could of been, like someone had stolen the best years of my life.  There was this awful sense that I wanted to leave the last two decades behind and start over because there was so much that was contrived and arguably false in those twenty years.  I was angry and sad and in a free fall of sorts, trying to get a handle on my sense of self.

A great deal has transpired in the last couple of years, a tremendous amount of processing, lots of laughing, drinking of red wine (Pinot Noir is my favorite!), processing with wise friends, reading, praying and just being.  I am not really a whole lot better off than I was, other than to say that I feel as if I can see with a bit more clarity both my past and my future.  I think all of life is a continuim of sorts, that we are ever growing, changing, evolving and always learning.  The moment we think we have arrived, that we know the answers, that the mysteries have all been solved, we are fools.  I have witnessed that foolishness, even been a party to it in my past.  It is brutal and chokes the life from your soul.  (More on that another time.)

But in coming to a bit more clarity, I have learned about myself, who I am, how I have functioned in the past, how I function now and how I long to function in the future of my life.  I hope I have grown in self-awareness, which I see as crucial to personal development, and in that growing I have seen how sensitive and attune I was and still am to the expectations of a multitude of voices in my life.  Those voices have a variety of origins for me, they come from family traditions, they come from personal demons that were born back in middle school, they come from the religious culture that dominated the second eighteen years of my life, and many other places.  I began to realize that so much in my life, my decisions, my anxieties, my fears were being shaped by these voices and my life was very small as a result.

It is my hope, that through writing this blog I will learn more about myself, learn to push beyond those limits and boundaries that I have both knowingly and unknowingly set for myself.  As this happens, I will share it with my readers and encourage them to share with me, their stories, their pales, their lives.  I do not know where this will lead, but I intend to pursue it with passion and to work toward being an “EMPOWER” for all those who travel along with me!