Welcome to My World! Start Here!
Join me as I explore topics such as family secrets, LGBTQ identity, and other things that matter to me while trying to live the best life I can in community with others (and that includes you!).
Welcome to Annette’s Wanderings! I’m Annette and I’m so glad you’re here.
As a way of introduction, it’s important for you to know that I’m not one of those people who has a singular passion and puts all their energy into sharing about that one thing. I admire people like that, but I’ll tell you right up front that it’s impossible for me to settle into one focus for my newsletter.
In other words, if you subscribe to Annette’s Wandering’s, at some point or another, you will read about travel, faith, books, gardening, writing, strong women, family secrets, aging, untold history, LGBTQ life, anti-racism, and a million other areas of interest.
I’m hoping you might appreciate that!
Restoring Community
I’m someone who loves to build community. I think that connecting with each other is a lost art, especially for us introverts. Whether we blame social media, COVID-19, or the rapid pace of the world today, most of us don’t have communities that give us a sense of connection and belonging. We’re more isolated and lonelier than is healthy for us to be (even the United States Attorney General has warned us about it: New Surgeon General Advisory Raises Alarm about the Devastating Impact of the Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation in the United States | HHS.gov).
Therefore, my goal is to build Annette’s Wandering’s into more than just a newsletter, but a community of people who want to talk and share with each other about the things that interest, inspire, and challenge them in this new millennium.
I do that by publishing what I hope is engaging writing and hosting online events for us to come together to talk about them. I have three free events coming up this spring. You can read about them here:
How to Get Started with Annette’s Wanderings
Start by subscribing, so you’ll always receive my latest posts in your Inbox. You can get everything I publish for free, or, if you like what you see and want to support my writing, you can purchase a paid subscription and get a few additional perks.
In addition to my writing about the topics I mentioned earlier, I’ve published one serialized book already and am in the process of publishing another. If you’re interested in these, you can read all the previously published installments here:
If You Only Knew: A Memoir of Family Secrets and their Undoing
When I learned that the man who I thought was my father was not, I had to find a way to understand and reconcile this truth with the lies I had been told. I had to take a close look at everything I knew, including choices I’ve made in my own life to reconcile this new understanding of myself.
My parents were long gone when I learned the truth. During their lifetimes, the secret they kept lay dormant in a mine field ready to explode with just one faulty step, but somehow, they navigated their way through that field and each of them died of natural causes—Dad when he was 69 and Mom, almost twenty-five years later, at the age of 88.
I’ve written what I know of my story in If You Only Knew: A Memoir of Family Secrets and Their Undoing and am releasing it in weekly chapters from January to July 2024.
It’s my hope that you find this to be a book of healing and light after a journey of revelations—my parents and mine. In this memoir, I’m exploring themes of MPE/NPE (misattributed parent experience/non-parental event) discoveries, DNA surprises, adoption, LGBTQ life, death journeys, and reconciliation.
I invite you to follow my journey of discovery and healing.
Accidental Mentors
I created Accidental Mentors: Inspirational Stories of Women Who Shaped My Life by Just Being Themselves because I believe that when women find courage from each other—courage to write and speak our truth, to go where we want to go and see what we want to see, to live how we want to live, and to leave the world better than when we found it, a kind of magic ensues.
By supporting each other in our dreams, we can make the world a magical place for all women, and ultimately, for all people.
Published in serialized form in 2023, Accidental Mentors: Inspirational Stories of Women Who Shaped My Life Without Even Trying is a collection of micro-memoir stories about women who have influenced me in untold ways. Watch for the print, e-book, and audio versions in 2024. You can read all of the stories here:
I believe it’s my responsibility to use my voice and be involved with the world around me in as many ways as I can. Writing is one way I can do that.
I work hard to write and publish stories, ideas, and content that matter. My dream is to have the resources—personal, financial, spiritual, and physical—to support my writing. If you share my dream, or any part of it, I invite you to come along.
As a subscriber, you’ll join me on the journey and hopefully find inspiration along the way. As a paid subscriber, you’ll make it possible for me to write and publish my writing, and I hope, you’ll be inspired and supported to do the same.
Thank you for exploring Annette’s Wanderings. I look forward to getting to know you better.
Annette
Hi Annette,
Wow, I look forward each week to a new installment.
Not being a polished or published wordsmith let me say, thank you.
Joe