Why I started this blog

To explain why I started this blog, I have to go all the way back to when I was 15 years old. At that young age I started asking questions about the meaning of life. I don’t know if other teenagers think much about these kinds of things or not, but for me, finding the answers to my questions about life became an obsession. I couldn't turn off the questions in my mind. It was like a tape recording going round and round my head that couldn’t be shut off - “What is the meaning of life? Why am I alive? Is there any purpose to life?” Before that time I guess I was more like any other typical teenage girl with the main thing on my mind being, well, boys. And before that I was just a kid who only wanted to play and have fun.

But something shifted within me after I turned 15. It was as though all of a sudden I grew up and started to become aware of the real world around me. Maybe it was brought upon by the loss of my best friend who had just moved away, and I was lonely. Or that my father suddenly disappeared from my life after years of weekend visits since my parent’s divorce, and a hole was left in my heart. Or perhaps it was because I lived in a depressing and dangerous inner city neighborhood in Chicago where I regularly saw poverty, drunkenness and despair in the lives of people around me. Or maybe it was that this was the 1960s and I was right in the middle of the sexual revolution, the drug counterculture, and the uprising of blacks, with riots in my high school and bloody fights and sexual assaults on the bus back and forth from school (I stopped taking the bus, preferring to walk the two miles each way.)

So this was the beginning of my search for the meaning of life. However, it wasn't until a few years later that I actively (and drastically) took steps to find the answers to my questions.