2018 has been a hell of a year.
When I look back, there’s a lot to be proud of. I dove headfirst into taking my writing more ‘seriously’, and it’s been incredibly rewarding. On January 3rd, 2018, I had my first-ever piece of writing published on Thought Catalog after being encouraged by a friend. Shortly after that, I was approached by an editor from Read Unwritten, a small online magazine dedicated to millennials. To date, I’ve contributed nearly 60 pieces for them, ranging from trending topics to essays. A few months later, Andrea also joined Unwritten.
Fast forward to August.
Andrea and I co-founded Words Between Coasts. We started it because we realized that we wanted to create a community dedicated to sharing stories that mattered and could resonate with people. It was fundamentally important to us that the content had substance. We wanted our community to be inclusive, while also being a sweet corner of the internet to allow people to exchange ideas and be heard.
In 2018, I transformed creatively.
2017 was a strange year, emotionally. I was a year and a half out of college and unsure of what I wanted to do, and I had absolutely no idea how to begin figuring it out. Therefore, when the idea for Words Between Coasts came along, I was able to channel different parts of my brain into one giant undertaking. Since then, it’s been so wonderfully rewarding.
Taking on such a project is daunting because it forces me (and Andrea!) to be active and stay on top of it.
We have to communicate, coordinate, plan, schedule, think ahead and write our own pieces as well. If we don’t coordinate on ideas or reach out to writers, our site would suffer as a result. We both have jobs and lives to maintain outside of our blog. We are slowly building a community of lovely writers who passionate about their beliefs and ideas, and it’s extremely fulfilling.
Looking forward into 2019, I want to continue the momentum I’ve started in 2018.
I will keep writing, reading, editing, working, making music, blogging and laughing in 2019. In a year, I went from having a few random ideas written in my phone memo pad to being published on Yahoo (even that, still feels wild!). I didn’t make writing a 2018 New Years resolution, but, somehow, it made its way to me. Opportunities came my way, but I also worked for them.
In 2019, I want to make writing a resolution for myself. I want to be able to reflect a year from now at all the ways Words Between Coasts has changed and evolved. I want to watch it all happen.
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
I live in New York, representing the East coast portion of Words Between Coasts.
