I'm on Substack Now?
A yet another venture into blogging platforms
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I started with diaries—the first one being a pink hardbound journal with Minnie Mouse on the cover. Minnie Mouse was witness to the stories of First Grade Ella and her crushes. After that, it was one notebook after another, my whole life documented in pages and paragraphs. Eventually, blogging became a thing, and I started transferring my thoughts online. A lot of the documentation went to social media micro-blogging platforms, like Friendster, Multiply, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but there were also long-form blogging platforms. I had multiple iterations of my journal on blogspot.com and eventually Wordpress, but it wasn’t until medical school when I wanted to makeover my blog altogether. I created a new account and transformed my “Dear Diary” entries to creative nonfiction. I wrote about what I knew —experiences I’ve had, realizations I’ve come across, any random thought that warranted more reflection. Soon I was also writing poetry and birthday greetings. Every now and then my work would get published somewhere, a magazine, a newspaper, and just recently a collection of essays by doctors called “Rx Narratives” edited by Dr. Joey Tabula, Dr. Noel Pingoy, and Dr. Sandra Tankeh-Torres. They’re no longer diary entries, but they still each create a fabric of my life, woven together through time.
Writing has become part and parcel of who I am, but recently I’ve had trouble reconnecting with that. It’s become harder to find my voice and unleash it through words, and I’ve been meaning to find it again. They say novelty gives birth to new perspective, so here I am trying something new.
I’ll start posting my essays here from now on, but will still be posting on Wordpress (https://ellathinksaloud.wordpress.com/) and Medium (@emimasamayor) but I’ll try to create a home for my stories here, and you’re welcome to visit anytime.