Have you read the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg?

Yes?…  Excellent!

No?… I highly recommend it!  It’s truly excellent.  Link again, so you don’t have to scroll up.

Throughout the book, Sandberg asks her readers to “lean in” and actually do the things that they would do if they weren’t afraid.  My thing, my dream: start a blog!  (Should I be dreaming bigger?  Maybe…  this is just a start.)

Even the mere thought of putting myself out there makes my stomach churn and my second track (the negative, ever present, stream of thoughts that constantly plays through my head) say things like: “isn’t it a bit narcissistic to write about your own life?  who cares what you have to say?! no one is even going to read it!”  (Then my third tracks says: “and you’re going to put that on your blog?  You sound like a paranoid schizophrenic!”  But that’s a whole other series…)

So, I am working very hard to forget that track, to be done with the second guessing and the negative nelly-ness, and to lean in and do it anyway.  (Oooo… lean in italicized, that’s clever, I like it.)  To silence that second track: who else would I write about besides myself? Isn’t it a bit narcissistic, really, to think I could write about anyone else?  And if no one else wants to read it, that’s fine, at the very least, my mom is obligated.  (Hi, mom!  It’s cool if you just catch up before I visit.)   At any rate…  This is what I would do if I weren’t afraid.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still afraid (omg, do you hate me?!), but I’m also leaning in and leaning past that fear and doing this thing… this thing I really want to do.  Woot woot!

Right, so the blog does have a point besides just being a thing I really, really want to do.

This is a blog about looking for the bigger picture, the blessings in disguise, and the long-awaited silver linings.  The name “Under the Tapestry” is based on a really great analogy for just that… the idea that we’re looking up at the messy underside and the tangled threads of a tapestry that, from the other side, is really rather nice.  More on that to come, of course– tomorrow, I present the idea in the form of a poem, a picture, and as a pseudo-quantum mechanical theory.  You know, for fun 😉  See you then!