Monsters In Our Closets
Our house was a very strange house, with two kids in the yard, and life was so very damn hard. I felt a little creepy and spooky, delirious and loopy. Our house was no museum and not many friends came to see us. My dad was a funeral director, the norm for me was growing up among the dead. I had no idea I would wander through life like a zombie, hungry for attention, guided by unexplained urges and afraid people would see this scared little girl buried in a very deep and dark hole. We had monsters in our closets and I felt like one of them.
My mom was mentally ill, addicted to amphetamines, barbiturates, alcohol, cigarettes and antidepressants. She was up, down, either drunk or sleeping during the day and speeding her ass off at night cleaning the house. I usually did not have friends over to my home, thinking we were hiding our dysfunction from the world. I was just a kid and learned at an early age how to be quiet, not talk about it, just hoping it would all go away.
Our family grows strong with addiction and the apple did not fall far from the tree. As a young child, my addictions were already formulating; I was already a sugar-holic and had ADHD as a very young child. As a teen, I became a workaholic.
I always felt different than others and had the lowest self-esteem. I was very overweight as a kid so I always had trouble with my weight. At 13 I started taking amphetamines to stay thin. Although I hated the feeling and felt conflicted doing the same drugs as my mom, it was more important for my self-esteem to look good.
I Was Bad To The Bone
I married twice in my twenties, divorced twice, and had many dysfunctional relationships—reliving my childhood. I was also drugged and raped, which made me feel emotionally numb and helpless. The realization of it haunted me years later. As a teen, I already had a lot of health issues from eating fast food, prepackaged food and junk food most of my childhood. I also suffered injuries from two car accidents.
When I was in my forties, my mom died, my best friend died and my dog died. I suffered a business and personal bankruptcy, lost my home and developed a herniated a disk in my spine. When I turned 50, I was diagnosed with eighteen diseases, lost sixteen teeth, started losing my hair, my nails were dying and I could not sleep. I thought “Hey this is rock bottom.” But Nooo…
God thought I needed to go a little deeper, just getting completely down to the closest part of nothing…. bathing in the filthy, grimy, dusty ground …. feeling like dirt. The bomb dropped. The doctors told me I had an incurable disease: Syringomyelia (a spinal cord injury).
Nice. OK, so now I found rock bottom; this is where it can’t get much worse, unless I die! I thought “what the hell, if I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”
Loss Turns Into Gains
The good news is: I am alive!
Here I am today helping others with issues I have suffered and survived from. While we feel buried within our problems, we gain perspective and experience and we grow stronger as we live, learn and heal.
I am so proud to be so much like my mom, having inherited so many of her wonderful talents including art and music. She had a profound effect on my life because of her life-long struggles with addictions and depression. Mom gave me incredible gifts; the desire to take a chance, make a change, and offer new ways to help people achieve optimal health. Thanks to Mom, I am able to touch a few hearts, help Chemically Addicted People (CAP’s) heal from “our personal hells with a little touch of Heaven.”
I am also so proud to be so much like my dad, having inherited many of his talents including his work ethics, outgoing personality, silliness, humor and being a workaholic. He had and still does have a profound effect on my life, giving me the ambition to accomplish many things in life, with incredible energy to juggle several things at once. He showed me at an early age how important it is to be respectful of others and the desire to help others.