Yep, five.
You might have read somewhere that I have been blogging for more than 10 years - and yes, that is correct. But we didn't call it blogging back then, we called it online journaling; and it was basically that, an online journal. It was written by me, for me.
Then in 2007 -a few months after starting my business, moving into my first office, and traveling to my first entrepreneurial development program- I decided to blog as a way to share my view of the world with others.
My blog posts were mostly written out of frustration for what most business women, that happen to be Hispanic, go through. Add to that, the fact that I was in my mid-thirties, single, and childless. To say I was an oddity, is undermining every single stereotype that I broke by simply being me. Which gave me an unlimited amount of content to blog about.
Boy, was it fun!
But then my business grew, while my personal life seemed to mix incredible highs, with very disturbing lows. Little did I know that documenting my (then) views on my life would bring me attention. But it did.
It was scary...readers found me...without trying.
My blog posts were the topic of conversation among friends and a counted few relatives (that knew I was blogging). I was (then) deathly afraid that my clients would read anything I might write...
So I changed my blog name four times between 2008-2010 hoping to loose my readers. It was in 2010 that I threw caution out to the wind, deleted a few questionable blog posts, made my blogging public, and adopted a blog name that seemed to be fitting of me:
Cabeza de Coco.
A statement that when literally translated means: you have a head of a coconut. But in theory, it means so much more.
With that blog name, I finally embraced what I was called by both friends and colleagues: I am a coconut. Meaning, I conduct myself in a way (stereotypically) associated with non-Latinos.
Although intended as a put-down, I embraced that statement wholeheartedly and made it my own...because in my book, it's not a put-down. I like marching to the beat of my own drum.
If anything, that has been my biggest learning of the last five years:
It doesn't matter what others say about you. What matters is what you do with what they say. ~ ALOM
I hope to continue to be inspired, enlightened, and challenged by what you say and do, to take my writing and my life to new heights -