I am a participant in a fantastic Writers Group. We meet weekly via Zoom and have writers from all over the country from varied writing genres. This group has been going since February of 2023 and it has been incredibly inspiring and impactful on my writing career. We often practice writing prompts together then immediately share what we write as well as enjoying private writing shares from other members.

To hear the superb storytelling from the fiction writers in the group often leaves me in awe. When they share their writing, I visualize the “movie” of their worded creation playing in my mind’s eye in vivid detail. I am beyond excited to read their final masterpieces when they are published. Without a doubt I can confidently say every single one will be a page turner!

What is an Un-Writer?

I see myself as an Un-Writer of late and you may wonder what I mean by that term. While I have been actively writing and sharing in the Writers Group, I have rarely been posting on my blog. In fact, I have paused nearly all my blog posting because of a desire to change the description and direction of my blog site to match the recent expansion of my heart and mind. The Un-Writer part comes from the tear down of nearly 150,000 formerly posted words dating all the way back to 2017.

Why would I tear them all down?

Well, I am tearing them all down because I am in the process of growing and transitioning both my mind and my worldview. This process has been underway for several years and it has been both wonderfully freeing and intensely excruciating at the same time.

Over the past few years my mind started to think outside of the former ironclad boxes I kept it in. Then, I realized I had always been free to think outside those boxes and that led me to deconstruct my inner foundations. This deconstruction has rocked my world, more accurately stated it was like a nuclear bomb exploded in my personhood. Couple deconstruction with surgical menopause and add the loss of an intimate friendship and you have a recipe for complete and utter internal annihilation, or at least it felt/still feels that way some days.

As my world changed, I reviewed my former blog posts and I was dismayed and disappointed. I saw many of those prior posts as a little too Pollyanna and bereft of beneficial content. I was also fearful that my prior posts contained content I would now view as harmful or disempowering and while I may not have all the answers, I certainly do not want to cause harm or disempower anyone.

I know I shouldn’t be mad at myself for what I believed and what I shared then, but it sometimes takes a daily conversation to remind myself that I can’t judge past-Pam. I need to let her be and focus on being overjoyed that present-Pam is here now…and be excited at the possibility of future-Pam, ’cause who knows what she will think?

All of the personal transition and trials therein pushed me to a place where I chose to remove the old content, all 150,000 words. Wow, Un-Writer indeed! It seems strange to me but I am not sad about taking down my former blogs, instead I am excited and inspired to fill up the coffers once again with new thoughts fully unencumbered by the former ironclad thought boxes I lived in.

What is next for this blog?

My new blog will be filled with new rivers of thought, with shares from the fire of my deconstruction and also with details from dark nights on my menopause journey. To be clear, there will be thoughts I have not fully fleshed out, there will likely be a fair amount of cursing and there will probably not be a metric ton of sunshine and unicorns in each post (as in the past). Suffice it to say, this new blog site will be altogether different from the past blog site. The door is now closed to “pamela in training” and the door is now open to “pamcake banter”.

What is next for you, dear reader?

We need to chat about you, dear reader. Since I wanted to keep the general thoughts and words from my past blog the followers of that blog are inadvertently attached to my new blog site. This makes me nervous and I seriously considered removing all y’all.

It isn’t that I don’t appreciate the readers I have built up these last seven years, its that I have a feeling, or perhaps more appropriately said, I have a fear, that the followers I have accrued will not appreciate this new direction my sharing and writing is taking at this point and time in my life.

However, as I am unpacking myself and my thoughts, I realized that I have always had choices at my disposal. They may not have been choices I liked or wanted to make, but there were always choices. So, dear reader, I am here to remind you that you have choices too. If you’ve been on this journey with me for days, months or years, you have a choice to make: will you stay or will you go?

I am prepared to allow you the absolute freedom to make that choice, without me playing “big sister” and trying to protect you. Or without trying to protect myself from any fallout should you disagree with the new thoughts I share and choose to vehemently let me know about it.

The most amazing part of this move is that I am now in a space that whether you stay or go, neither my self-worth nor my opinion of you will change. Rather, I realize I am not everyone’s “flavor” and more importantly I realize I do not NEED to be everyone’s “flavor”. I can be me and people may come and go freely without taking parts of me with them.

I do hope you allow yourself the freedom to go, with well wishes for me, or stay and open your heart and mind to new ways of thinking. If you stay, I implore you to engage with me and ask deeper questions about my point of view and experiences. At the very least, I hope you open your heart to my personal experiences and see my soul at a deeper level, perhaps even gleaning a bit of wisdom or insight from it all.

So, here goes my first post in Pamcake Banter with many more to follow.

I love you dear reader! (whether or not you stay or go!)