A Journey of 1000 Miles Starts with a Single Step ~ Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu said that “A Journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.” This is my new beginning. My step one.

To get this part out of the way (the Cliff Notes version of my last decade): In 2012 my life shattered. In 2016 I was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in a Federal Prison camp. In 2020, I was released to home confinement 3 + years early on the CARES Act due to COVID-19. I came home with a hellish case of PTSD (on top of ADHD), and thanking Source for the tertiary Lyme Disease that left me screwed for life in 1993 and the debilitating Post-Lyme fibromyalgia, musculo-skeletal, and immune system disorders that I’ve carried around like luggage ever since. I am beyond grateful for them all. My curses became my blessing.

I've been home for over a year with a GPS monitor the size of Manhattan adorning my left ankle, shell-shocked, in therapy, with my ADHD running rampant. I have been torturing myself over sitting down and writing my story, but strangely after reading hundreds of books while I was down, I am barely able to read an entire paragraph.

Memoirs Abound:

At 53 (gulp) years old, I honestly didn't know if I'd make it out of prison alive...so when I got home, telling my story became an obsession, but every time I’ve faced it head-on and began (again), it’s overwhelmed me completely. Coupled with my (hardly legible) journals from prison, and the "unpacking" of a life filled with loss, trauma, addiction, recovery, successes, and failures, I have a billion things that clog up my head and I need somewhere I can put it all down.

For decades I’ve bought and written in (and abandoned) journals. I’ve found many of them lying around the house in boxes and bookshelves…begging to be transcribed. Some of this...will be that.

I've also started, written in (and subsequently abandoned) blogs. Of course, I haven't been able to get back into any of them to continue writing there (ADHD remember?), so I've been copying and pasting them all from everywhere else and I'm going to publish them all here with their actual time-date stamps (bear with me...I know.) So, for those of you who have been my road dogs, you'll see some familiar stuff here and there.

My life has been a wild ride, an awe-inspiring journey, and I’ve had the gift of “glimpses” into so many different worlds, that I now have a bizarre and incomprehensible life’s story to tell. I can't promise it will be in order. I have been an absolute mess at times. At other times I've really had my shit together. I've lived a life I've cherished that's been filled with love, family, beauty, laughter and friendship. It's also been filled with dark nights of the soul, filled with tears, chaos, pain and loss. I've sat on the mountain tops (both literally and figuratively) and I've made some really huge mistakes and taken life's biggest falls.

Every moment of my life has proven itself to be a precious gift to me, an opportunity to grow, to glimpse, and to look deeper within and I wouldn't trade a moment of it. Hopefully I'll write it all down in a way that someone else finds something worthy in the reading of it, but if not...that's ok too. I'm just writing my story because it's mine to tell.