On the Move: Autobiography of a Survivor

Wouldn't it be nice to have software that can analyze all your life experiences and provide a report of your soul lessons? And when you "graduate," you become one of many teachers you learned from? I really DO wish software like this exists, but to my knowledge, it doesn't. I am still figuring all that out for myself.

Introducing... my latest book: On the Move: Autobiography of a Survivor.

Book Description

I’m still here. I am a survivor. However, I didn’t realize it during years of experiencing one situation after another with adrenaline rushes that wreaked havoc on my health. Resilience wasn’t in my constitution or my vocabulary. I wandered through life searching relentlessly for meaning and love in all the wrong places through the distorted lens of my false beliefs and programming. While this book is filled with my stories from the past, for the most part, I choose to let them live in my books while I create new, improved stories for my life. Prepare for a wild ride through the roller-coaster of a lifetime.

Preface

I’m still here. I am a survivor. However, I didn’t realize it during years of experiencing one situation after another with adrenaline rushes that wreaked havoc on my health. Resilience wasn’t in my constitution or my vocabulary. I’ve endured and survived childhood abuse, trauma, chronic stress, depression, way too many dysfunctional relationships, date rape, abuse and rape from partners, abortion, walking away from all my possessions, being a single parent, abandonment, car accidents, chronic pain, Epstein-Barr viruses, chronic fatigue, adrenal fatigue, losing my job, getting on disability, becoming wheelchair dependent, shame, self-loathing, homelessness, un-friendly roommates, slumlords, prescription drug withdrawal, disassociation, and moving 43 times. If life is an education, I’ve obtained a whopper of one. I wandered through life searching relentlessly for meaning and love in all the wrong places through the distorted lens of my false beliefs and programming. I was also a scaredy-cat, so I often up and moved when a situation became uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, in between all the above chaos, life was good. I lived in some very nice places, had mostly great jobs, got to do some traveling, and met a lot of interesting people. At one point I realized I was getting help from the spiritual realm whenever things got too intense.

Just like a parent must allow their children to become independent, solve their own problems, and manage their own lives, it seemed my spiritual helpers were doing the same for me. They didn’t interfere unless they felt it was necessary… or I cried out for help. Perhaps had I had a different type of career (I think of journalism in third world countries and other dangerous places), all my experiences would have been part of the job.

Ultimately, I wanted to do more than just exist like I saw so many other people doing. I wrote poetry, songs, letters, journals, short stories, blog posts, and books. I also kept logs of every job I had, place I lived, man I ‘dated,’ car I owned, and educational course I took.

Meanwhile, I had majored in business in high school and acquired typing, bookkeeping, and secretarial skills. Thus, despite all the chaos, I could always find and keep a job. I was dependable and rarely stayed home when I didn’t feel well, or the stress of a living situation overwhelmed me. When I had to move to an area that had temp agencies, I would get temp assignments which inevitably became full-time, permanent positions. Even though I didn’t go on to college after high school, I often took a class at a local community college, eventually accumulating enough credits to transfer to University of Phoenix and obtained a bachelor’s degree. If a company I worked for offered continuing education, I took advantage of that, too.

While this book is filled with my stories from the past, for the most part, I choose to let them live in my books while I create new, improved stories for my life. I combined content from two books I previously self-published: Appearances: A Journey of Self-Discovery and Love, Life, & God: Getting Past the Pain. Appearances was written by topic vs. chronological order, but the content needed to be modified so it would be compatible with the content of the second book. Thus, I reorganized it all to fit in with a timeline based on the logs I kept.

Linda Roper, the narrator of these two books for Audible, had asked if I considered combining them into one, but at the time, I couldn’t figure out how. Then, when I began to think about getting coaching for speaking as an author, I felt compelled to condense these two books down into one, eliminating the fill-ins such as poetry, song lyrics, quotes, stories about cats, stories about chickens, stories about mice, and more. My goal is to use my stories in speaking but with the focus on the transformation that occurred that made me who I am today.

Chapters 1 through 18 are out of Appearances which I wrote in 1998. In 2013, someone asked me how I ended up in Texas. Since it was a lonnggg story, I sat down and wrote Love, Life, & God. Content from my third memoir titled, Living With Symptomatic Spondylolisthesis: A Personal Survival Guide (2019) is not included. The names of some of the people have been changed to protect their privacy.

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A note on the word meanwhile: I use this word quite often to alert the reader that an event had been taking place in the midst of other events going on in the chapters. This eliminated the challenge of writing events in chronological order by date… which was almost impossible in many circumstances.
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 1. The Beginning

Once upon a time, I was a tiny egg… fertilized by a sperm. I grew… miraculously… into a human being… entering this world on October 29, 1955, the second oldest of six children.

(and the book continues)