palmetto belle

I’ve never been one who was afraid to “poke the bear” so to speak. I have always had a knack for doing what I want, no matter how that might make others feel. These days I try to be a bit more graceful when push comes to shove. The photo above was taken at Renn Fest in Maryland during one of my many wanderlust adventures that happened during my twenties. From age 23 to 27, I lived in about 7 different places all the way from upstate New York to south Florida. My current home of Aiken, SC still served as a home base in between new cities I chose to inhabit for short periods. During that time, I also wrote a blog titled palmetto belle which was essentially my version of Sex & the City. I was the Carrie Bradshaw of southern women. If we are being honest, it was my way of venting and whining every time my heart got bruised or broken by some guy I shouldn’t have been chasing after anyway. Despite it being a personal outpouring of my own feelings, it became somewhat of a local favorite among girls my age as they related to similar situations & heartaches they were encountering.

This is when palmetto belle evolved for me. I realized that through revealing my own hurts, I was helping others to heal. Women I had never even met before would come up to me in bars and thank me for my latest blog because they felt like I wrote it just for them. Part of me also liked the attention, of course and being appreciated for my writing which was a talent I had coveted since I was in middle school. There were high hopes of being a professional writer at one point but as we all know, dreams are a fickle friend when going through adolescence and young adulthood. None-the-less, the attention the blog got from my “fans” was great motivation in continuing the blog through my twenties. However as I crossed the threshold into my 30s, the blogs became few, far and in between. Can you guess why? Well, I stopped being able to write them because I was finally happy.

I couldn’t quite understand it at first. Writing my blogs had always come so easily to me until I realized that I no longer had anything to complain about. But more importantly, the same audience that fell into the “misery loves company” crowd wasn’t going to be interested in reading about me finding my happily ever after. So, I stopped writing. I squeezed out a couple blogs once a year to make the effort but I’d lost my mojo. That being said, if you want to really get a good feel for what the original blog was like, you want to check out entries from 2009-2011 or one of my favorite ones called “Undeniable Thunder” where I could only put my feelings into what might be considered poetry. A poet I am not, so there weren’t a lot of those thankfully!

Fast forward to 2024: I’m a 41 year old wife and mother working as a full-time marketing director for a law firm. In my day-to-day, I’m constantly working in social media, content creation and branding. So, somewhere in the middle of all that, I wondered what would palmetto belle look like now? I had never thought about building out my personal brand but as someone who always has something to say, I figured, “Why not?” More than a blog, there would have to be video and social media to evolve with the times. Thus, the creation of the @palmetto.belle Instagram account and converting my YouTube channel as well.

I’m looking forward to exploring this new chapter for palmetto belle and I’m happy you’re here to be a part of it…whatever “here” turns out to be! Thanks for being along for the ride.