Ana's Miracle
About the Project
In 2007, I started a blog called Ana's Miracle to write about being reunited with my biological family from El Salvador. What began as a way to help my adoptive mother with her memoir became a six-year experiment in figuring out how to tell a deeply personal story in public. I taught myself web development and hosting, experimented with video blogging and live streaming, and slowly learned what it meant to write with honesty about something I was still trying to understand. The blog eventually became the foundation for my documentary film, a novel based on my life, and even my web hosting business. After six years, I ended the blog, but I kept the site live as a record of that journey.
The Challenge
My adoptive mother was writing a memoir about my international adoption and the astonishing revelations that emerged when my birth family found me in 1997. When she interviewed my sister Eva and me for research, we couldn't articulate what the experience had been like. I wanted to help, but I didn't yet have the words.
Then in 2006, I was listening to a podcast featuring Robert Rebholz when he said, "Now anyone with a library card can publish, and for that reason, the world has changed." It hit me, I could write about the reunion myself. Not for her book, necessarily, but to find my own perspective on this complicated story.
But that created a different kind of challenge: How do you write publicly about something so personal and unresolved? How do you find your voice when you're still figuring out what you think? And practically speaking, how do you build a platform flexible enough to experiment with different ways of storytelling—text, video, images, whatever format felt right?
My Approach
Getting Started
I launched the blog in 2007 using Google Blogger because it let my sister Eva and me start writing immediately without worrying about technical setup. We named it Ana's Miracle, after our birth mother, Ana Milagro. But I quickly realized that if I wanted real control over how I told this story—the design, the features, the ability to experiment—I'd need to learn how to build and host my own site.
Over the next nine months, I taught myself how to set up and maintain a WordPress installation using old computer hardware I had lying around. In February 2008, I migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress install using the Linode cloud platform. It wasn't just about having better tools, it was about owning the entire process, from the writing to the infrastructure supporting it.
Finding the Story
With the technical foundation in place, I spent the next several years trying different approaches to telling our story. I experimented with video blogging, tried live streaming conversations, and played with different writing styles. Some posts were written as memoir. Others were more novelistic, even including bits of dialogue. I was learning in public which aspects of the reunion I could write about authentically and which parts I wasn't ready to touch yet.
The technical skills and creative exploration fed into each other. As I got more comfortable with web development, I could test new formats and presentation styles. As my writing voice developed, I had clearer ideas about what my platform needed to support.
The Results
Ana's Miracle never went viral or attracted a massive audience. Over six years, I built a small but loyal readership of people who followed the story and occasionally reached out to share their own adoption experiences. More importantly, excerpts from the blog made it into my mother's memoir, Missing Mila, Finding Family, which had been my original goal.
But the real value was less tangible. The blog taught me how to write about difficult, unresolved experiences without needing to have all the answers. It showed me that sometimes the process of figuring out how to tell a story is the story. And it gave me both the creative confidence and technical skills to tackle more ambitious projects. From these humble beginnings came a documentary film exploring identity and adoption, a novel drawing on these same experiences, and eventually a small web hosting business born from all that self-taught infrastructure work.
Looking back, I didn't know I was finding my voice as a writer. I just knew I had something to say and needed to learn how to say it. The blog was where I figured that out.
Share
