The New Page on the Blog: "Foster The People"

A new part of the blog is the "Foster the People" page!

🎉YAY!!! 🎉

It's rightfully earned a separate page and mission and now is on this blog!

As you know I started the year off by asking you to help me find my siblings. The reason for that being was because I had grown up in foster care and all of my siblings were adopted and I was not. So I was wanting to be reunited with them when I haven't seen them in several decades. (This is still a project I am working, so please feel free to help out and share).

I also know I made a goal at about the beginning of the year that I would also begin writing my book about my experience in foster care and I have to be honest with something.... *Shhhh* That this was incredibly hard for me to start. In fact, it's been something that's been incredibly hard for me to continue working on throughout the year. But I am still doing it. I am determined on finishing this story in the best possible way to share and show people how amazing (and cruel) of conditions one can come from and be.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that when I move to the city I wanted to separate out who I was my past and who I am now. I want my past which was something I couldn't control to not define who I was or was going to be.

The truth of the matter is as I feel like I'm being pulled more back in that direction and that we are all given our past to be able to help shape our own futures and the future of other people.

So here I am and I'm going to be embarking on a journey to make people more aware of foster care and what is and what it isn't (and it's different for each person to be honest. It doesn't just vary by state, county, or city, believe it or not). I also want to show the diversity that's within foster care that most people are not aware of.

So I'm going to begin this journey and it's an incredibly sensitive one but by the same token it's going to be (hopefully) incredibly empowering for those that read this and that will be reading this eventually.

You can easily say that I am letting go of the anxiety I have around a lot of things- including telling this story and the stories around me. In hopefully doing so, I will care more about the journey within and around me rather than focusing the other way around.

This is something that I feel incredibly called to do. I don't feel like it's necessarily something that I am choosing to do but rather that it's choosing me. This may sound like I jumped off a cloud in outer space, but it is the truth. There is a truth, something choosing you, and the responsibility to follow through on that. There is a reason for everything.

I have had many people tell me over the last decade and a half or so that I have an incredibly powerful story to tell and yet they only get a glimpse of what that story is. I can't even begin to tell you that for me, that's incredibly telling. And I also want to start a series where we really kind of dig into the idea of diversity within foster care and being a  refugee and being a ward of the court and having other people telling their story as well. This gives the ability to have Via Bella be this platform that can help give people voices and show how incredibly powerful people can become out of the foster care system.

Even if you've never been in foster care the truth of the matter is you probably know someone who has but they keep it sheltered because it is taboo and it's not something many people speak about. So you can gain great knowledge from reading a lot of this and you might actually be able to relate to some of it yourself whether you ever were in foster care or not.

Go ahead and read this and take from it the beauty and the pain then grow something incredibly rich from it.

Deeply looking forward to connecting with you on this journey, a little bit deeper each time!

Blessings on your Monday!