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Albertyn’s life after infertility
Mike Stopforth is a communications strategist and keynote speaker with TomorrowToday.biz. His column appears in the Citizen every Friday.
One. Drive an Aston Martin. Two. Climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Three. Write a book. A snippet from the list of things I’ve always wanted to do but never really thought possible (for a number of reasons).
As we grow up, our lists get smaller – we stop believing that we can do stuff.
The world teaches us words such as “impossible”, “ordinary” and “never”.
I was so encouraged (and my list was revitalised) when I met Tertia Albertyn, an IT consultant based in Cape Town.
Tertia is a prominent South African blogger at www.tertia.org with a significant local and international following. Her one line bio: “After being So Close for so long, I have finally arrived. Life after infertility.”
After learning that infertility treatment would be her and her husband’s only chance to have a family, Tertia began to engage online forums to seek support, advice and counsel from women in the same position.
She picked up that many of her peers used blogs to tell their stories and so decided to start up her own.
It didn’t take long for Tertia’s brave and colourful writing style to capture the hearts of families in similar situations around the world.
Her readership grew day by day and now she is arguably SA’s most widely read blogger.
Tertia’s blogging success promulgated a book deal. Her novel, chronicling her journey with infertility and life after it, is called So Close and can be purchased at your local Exclusive Books.
The story of this ordinary IT consultant’s journey from arbitrary blogger to mainstream author is typical of the new world of citizen publishing online.
People who never believed their stories ever would or could see the light of day, never mind touch hearts and lives, are finding blogs to be the perfect enabler of that dream.
If you have a story to tell, tell it. Get online and be courageous. Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying that “there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed”.
You never know who may need to hear it.
Mike Stopforth is a Communications Strategist and Presenter with TomorrowToday.biz. Check out Stopforth’s blog at www.mikestopforth.com |