I started writing when I was 11. It was the only way that I could deal with my feelings. I always felt like I never belonged anywhere. I often wondered if I was born the wrong sex, the wrong race, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. Just something wasn’t right.

My teenage years were full of funerals, depression, and self-medicating. By the time I turned 16 all my grandparents had passed away. My junior year in high school I lost two of my best friends, one to a car accident, the other to suicide. But I kept writing. During my senior year my cousin died of heart failure after lying in a vegetative state for 13 years due to a car accident in which he suffered massive head trauma. That whole time his wife cared for him while raising their three children. I kept writing. My twenties found me attending her funeral. She was murdered at work while her son looked on. Then my favorite aunt passed. I kept writing.

The bright spots of my late teens and twenties were my marriage to my high school sweetheart and the birth of our three children. I kept writing through it all. In the midst of dirty diapers, bottles, formula spit-up on my journals, crayon markings on my unsubmitted manuscripts, I wrote about it all. I wrote about the job, the husband, college, the kids, the affairs, the incarcerations, the self-medications, everything.

Then my whole world came crashing down around my ears when my husband’s truck crashed into a ditch, flipping and partially pinning him underneath. He died in MedFlight. He was only 37 years old. He left me a widow with three fatherless children between the ages of 5 and 15, and left me with no words to express my pain for the first time in my life.

I remarried a year later to a man that I later found out was the most abusive narcissistic human being I had met in my life. He burned everything I had ever written, including fifteen journals, over thirty poems, six short stories, and the beginnings of a novel. His reasoning was that I had written about everything else, I was surely going to write about him. So he decided he would put a stop to it. And he did.

Karma is quick sometimes. He got shot to death right in front of me in 2004, the very day after he burned my work.

I don’t tell this story to illicit pity, sympathy, or anything of the kind. I tell this story so that you will know that after all this, and after years of hard work on myself, looking deep within, slaying my own demons, I am finally writing again. I have ten years of words that have been bottled up inside me trying to get out, and now they are escaping.

Giving up is one thing I will never do when it comes to writing.