For me, the journey through life has mostly become understanding the importance of revealing who I am.

I learned there is little chance of growing outside of myself into a meaningful life without revealing the parts of me I was taught to hide. I think that was the hardest part of my experience.

I think we are all taught to be cautious of what we reveal even to the people closest to us. We are supposed to revere freedom, but so many people are afraid to be free.

I vowed never to lie to myself and to face the worst parts of me, not in shame or lament, but triumph and pride.

“Any time you hesitate revealing who you are,” wrote Mark Nepo, “picture yourself as a bird perched on a roof, wings tucked at your sides. To enter a relationship without opening your heart is to jump off that roof without spreading your wings.”

Henri Nouwen wrote that “every time we decide to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain.”

The power to love and live the life I want came not from hiding my true self, but in revealing what I always hid. To be authentic in my writing and my life.  There’s a price to pay for that, and I have paid it.

But this was the thing that opened all the doors for me. I’ve talked to scores of people about the new power we all have to write about our feelings and lives in the form of the new blog. There are now more than 30 million in America.

Once again, the authentic voices of media are not on cable news or prominent newspapers, but in the voices and hearts of individual people.  That was how our media began, with farmers posting messages on fenceposts.

People tell me again and again, “but what will people think? What if I misspell words? What if I upset my family? What if I don’t have anything to say? What if I don’t have time.”

One friend, a doctor, told me recently that “I can’t afford to publish a blog, I have nothing to say.”

My friend, I said, you can’t afford not to publish your blog. There is so little time to find your voice in life, to know what to say.