Cindy Maria Bautista-Thomas

Cindy Maria Bautista-Thomas is my name and writing scares the crap out of me!  Thank you Vanessa Martir for inspiring so many writers to take the jump and write an essay a week for the next 52 weeks.   If you would have met me 30 years ago and told 10 year old Cindy that she would be a writer and that she would begin a blog, she would have been shocked.  In fact if 10 year old Cindy was informed that I would be the featured author at Barrio Poetix tonight, she definitely wouldn’t believe you.  10 year old Cindy was shy and never imagined speaking in front of a room let alone in front of an audience.   Most people meet me now and could not imagine  that I was scared to talk and petrified to share my opinions. Being the youngest of 7 it was tough fighting for attention and for air time.  I guess that’s why I became a social worker  – to help people find their gifts within to move into their greatness.

Ironically, 10 year old Cindy loved to write. I journaled every day, about everything, up until I was about 20 years old.  It was then that my writings were discovered by someone and made fun of and that day I destroyed all of my journals and regret it since.  I felt like that day, the joy of writing left me and I was blessed to have rediscovered my long lost love of writing in 2013, when I met my writing mid-wife, Alicia Anabel Santos.  Since then, I have reignited the flame within and have been writing in between parenting, being a wife, a sibling, a mother, a friend, a full-time social worker, a mentor, and a Phd student.   I feel blessed to be able to embark on this journey and look forward to 52 weeks of exploring life and writing.

2017 is off to a pretty awesome start already!