Nimitz Highway and River Street is an intersection on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.  This is where I impatiently came out of the womb ready to start on my own personal history.  I think my birth story reveals a lot about who I am. Impatience fueled by passionate conviction. I’m working on how these traits manifest themselves outwardly. In word, I’m trying to be more Zen.

I grew up in upstate New York against the backdrop of the flowering women’s rights movement with different ideas from my mother as to what my life as a woman should be. As I moved deeper into my teenage year, I couldn’t avoid the awareness that I was attracted to other girls. This caused me guilt and shame and put a wedge between me and my family as struggled with self acceptance.

In college, I majored in psychology with the intent of being a “death & dying” counselor. This would be my paying job while I wrote the next great American novel.  Plan B kicked in and I graduated with a B.A. in English, packed my car, and upset my parents by moving to Florida. It was a necessary move so that I could come out and be fully me. The Sunshine State continues to be my home.

I wanted to be a writer but not a starving artist, so I pursued a career in business. By leveraging my innate leadership skills and my skills as a creative thinker to solve business problems, I found success in the business world. My success would not be possible without the people along the way who saw something in me, encouraged me, believed in me, mentored me, and gave me a chance. I am eternally grateful to many that are part of my leadership journey. Never underestimate your ability to change someone’s life.

For years, I balanced life as a successful business executive by day and women’s fiction writer by night. When my daughter was born, the demands of work and motherhood and the balance all women seek to strike meant less time writing. As my daughter grew older and less dependent on me, I did publish a couple of women’s fiction works which you can find on Amazon. Drafts, story outlines and partially finished manuscripts sleep comfortably in my filing cabinet waiting to be reanimated.

Writers got to write. It’s in us. When my wife passed away on March 1, 2020, the thoughts, the feelings, and the grief I was experiencing needed release. The page was my shoulder to cry on; my way of processing what had happened to me; to us. I launched my Hijacked Traveler blog on April 7, 2020 on what would have been my wife Christy’s 56^th birthday.

 Grieving is challenging. Grieving during a global pandemic was unimaginable. But I moved through it. I wrote and edited and when the words on the page read raw but felt less raw inside because of the cathartic process of writing soothed me, I posted them.

I am going to continue blogging and writing and using this platform to share my musings, my stories, thoughts, experiences and perhaps begin dropping some chapters of book I will be reanimating. The journey continues. Not through grief, but through life.

Besides this blog, you can also follow me on Medium where I publish my stories in An Idea as well as Prism & Pen, with my other writers sharing their stories and their journeys. https://elainedwalsh.medium.com/

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

John Steinbeck