Why do you write?

Since I live my life in recovery from gambling addiction and alcohol abuse for more then 8 years now, and even as a young teenager, through treatment, therapy, I have always had some sort of diary or journal with me most of the time. I enjoyed writing, made up poems with a wish that someday they would become some famous words in a song. Just having dreams. Maybe being a writer someday.

As a little girl with many dark secrets being held inside me for many years, years of heavy handed discipline and hurtful verbal abuse by my parents, sexually abused from age 8 to 12 years old, not by one, but by two men, friends of the family, and certain things that happen in a dysfunctional family that linger with you, I seemed to hang on to, and stuffed way deep inside me. Then adulthood comes calling. Life begins to happen. The job, the responsibilities, the bills, and the stress. And you think your just another normal, average, everyday person like the rest of the people living in the world.

Except, one day, something happens. Something changes inside you. A sort of shift. Not a particular event, but just something inside you doesn’t quite feel right.

Then, you lose a very special person in your life to cancer. He was only 36 at the time of his passing, and he was like my brother I never had. And, . . he happened to be the only person I ever told what I went through as a little girl. Things no little girl should have to endure.
Now he was gone . . . .

That set up the “Perfect Storm” in my life at the ripe young age of 30. And for the next 11 years, I lost myself. I lost myself to a deep dark monster called gambling addiction. Now your most likely asking yourself about now, “what does all that have to do with writing?”. . . I’ll get to that shortly.

I was about 36 when it began. I started using gambling to “escape the old past haunts knocking at my door.” I was also suffering undiagnosed mental and emotional health disorders. Went undiagnosed my psychiatrist says, since I was that little lost, hurt girl. Then the gambling addiction and alcohol abuse on top of all that pain? Lets just say it didn’t end very well. All of that story can be read in my current book out titled, Addicted To Dimes, Confessions of a Liar and a Cheat.

My writing was my saving grace. Even after all the bad I went through with my addictions, and there was a lot of bad, and yes, due to my poor choices, but I was a very sick person at the time. No, no excuses, just insights into an another addict. Another addict who has turned her life around for the better. And I wrote like crazy through it all. All the bad, all the good, and even in my darkest of days, even after my 2 failed suicide attempts, and crisis center stays in a Mental/Addictions crisis center in 2002, and 2006.

WHY?
Because I needed an outlet to purge all that old hurt, pain, shame, guilt, and so much more! Writing for me was like my bible. Yes, it was along WITH my bible. Writing helped me to sort through it all, begin to heal, and to begin to start letting go, and begin long-term recovery. Writing was my life line into my soul. It helped me to recover from this cunning addiction of gambling and alcohol abuse. Writing was also responsible for my 5 notebooks I hand wrote for a year, of all I went through with my addictions, which became a published book.
But the rest was gods intervention and doing.

Even today, it still brings tears to my eyes when I read those dark pages in my diary after both suicide attempts. I was so angry the first time at God! I just wanted him to let me die already, so I wouldn’t hurt myself, and those around me any longer. I didn’t have the strength to stop compulsively gambling, and was really tired of being sick and tired. The second attempt? Well that was all me, as I had stopped taking my bipolar, depression, and PTSD medications. And in just one short week, I spiraled out of control to another suicide attempt.

Until that day when my mind, soul, and world went totally BLACK . . . . .

Until till next time everyone.

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson ~