Why Ophelia???

Welcome to my blog! This is my first foray into the world of blogging...so let me be the first to admit, I'm not entirely certain what I am doing. I've wanted to start a blog for a long time but have never been really sure of how to begin. A part of me has always been torn between a desire to be heard and known through my writing and a fear that I don't have anything worthwhile to say. I guess this will be an experiment in finding out!

I have lofty and largely private dreams of contributing something that matters. My guess is that all of us who are inclined to write probably do. I first fell in love with creating stories and poems as an angst-y teenager, but as I entered adulthood, I judged my writing to be too melancholy, too juvenile and too inadequate to continue. For many years I stopped writing. What I didn't realize was that in halting that process, I had effectively shuttered my voice. The page has always been the place where my creativity, wisdom and honesty flowed best.

Maya Angelou said, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." What truth there is in that simple statement! Having bore years of untold stories out of preliminary self-judgement and fear of whether my content would be found worthwhile, I've decided to try something different:

JUST WRITE.

Write dreams, write memories, write about joys and hopes, and write about profound sadness and anger. Write stories, write poems, write honestly and write without expectations. It's a process, and with any process there is progress as long as momentum continues.

So...all that and I still haven't addressed the title of this post...Why Ophelia??? Ophelia Rue is my pen name or 'nom de plume', as I recently learned. I am not as concerned with being personally acknowledged for my writing as I am with striving to be unapologetically honest and free to express those untold stories. If remaining at least semi-anonymous helps to accomplish this, I think it's worth a try. The name Ophelia is inspired in part by the tragic Shakespearean character, but also by an anthology I read as a teenager entitled "Ophelia Speaks" by Sara Shandler. This book of writings submitted by female youth shaped much of my adolescence. Their raw and honest perspective on the struggles that they faced has always inspired me to want to speak hard things truthfully and to create characters that do the same.

Here goes nothing...Thanks for being along for the ride!