The best internet bio I've ever read was written by a former editor of mine. He posted a photo of himself in India, and in the text blocks where everybody else had listed a bunch of degrees and qualifications, he said something like, "Hi. I'm Mark. This is a picture of me in India wondering if the chicken I just ate is about to revisit me in an unpleasant way."
I've never been to India, though I have eaten bad chicken. I'm not going to tell you about that right now, though.
You'll probably want to know the normal stuff... that I've been married to my husband for twenty-one years; I'm a mom of three amazing kids; and I teach high school literature and philosophy during the work week. I've also been in one ministry or another for about twenty years, so I'm pretty sure no confession you could make could shock me.
If you lived next door, you'd find out that when I'm in a creative funk, I forget to match my sweatpants to my flannel shirt. I'm one of those introverts who can extrovert (verb) on demand, but fakey women's events can give me huge hives on my neck. I forget to put stuff back in the refrigerator sometimes, and right now I'm sitting in a leather recliner with an big old hole in the seat watching over my daughter, who just had her wisdom teeth cut out. I also ate four jalepeno poppers for breakfast, which was not a good decision.
I tend to stay up too late looking up stuff I'll never need to know on the internet, I get all feisty when I see the weak being taken advantage of by the strong, and gosh, I love fresh raspberries. Have you ever had cranachan? It's Scottish. I just got goosebumps thinking about it.
There's another poet online with my name. People confuse us. I'm not the Rebecca Reynolds who wrote The Daughter of the Hangnail.
If you've seen me here and there around the internet, then lost me, then found me here... well, that's because for years I've been avoiding developing a platform, and a brand, and all that stuff writers are supposed to have. I've already taken down one blog because people started reading it, and I got scared to be known. It's just kind of weird, you know? Throwing yourself out to the whole wide world?
But over the past few years, a couple of people who love me have helped me get some heart-level peace about what I think God has probably put me here on planet earth to do. So I'm writing a book that will be released from Nav Press soon. And I'm going try to walk with Jesus and post here when an idea hits.
I have the sort of personality that tends to feel a lot, think a lot and question a lot. That might overwhelm you if you are pretty matter-of-fact about life. The good news is, in all of my storms, Jesus keeps chasing me down and dusting me off, whispering His love over me. That's the kind of security that makes it possible to survive being human in a world like ours.