Would you tell me a story about overcoming adversity in your life?

Change comes with time. On your time.

Don’t be pressured or rushed.

I once was laid off from my job. It was the first time I had ever left a job non-voluntarily and even though I knew it was coming, it was a shock.

But I offered to go back as a consultant and help the CEO with some tasks of writing offering documents to sell the divisions of the company.

I accompanied him on trips to do the presentations. As a result I was asked by the buyer of the publishing division to stay on when he bought the company at a pay increases and with a new title.

I have a lot of them. Father was an abusive alcoholic, mother became addicted to drugs and abandoned my sister and I – literally – she completely disappeared one day, and all of the tons of crap in between that I don’t feel like detailing out here. My best friend killed himself not even a year ago, which completely destroyed me and made me want to kill myself. Here I am. Why? Sometimes I don’t know. Other times I know it’s because there are people who love me – and I could never do to them what Tigh’s suicide did to me. I could never do it.

If I have to live for other people in order to live at all for now? So be it. Their happiness means more to me than my own. Even if there are only, literally, a few of them.

I have experienced two very traumatic losses in my life, one just after I turned 20 and the other just before I turned 30. For nearly a year after each one, I pretty much lived as a zombie, with a lot of help and support from my family, who took care of me.

For the last 35 years, I have been the happiest, luckiest person in the world.

I could write and entire volumn on this subject of what I have experienced and been through. I guess one of the worst was losing 4 children through my life. There has been worse and I will not go there right now. What I did was become a help for a hospital counselor for the parents who have lost children and help them through the grieving process.

I come from a small rural town with an abnormally high youth suicide and murder rate, and grew up on and off welfare and living in government housing. I was also diagnosed with depression in my teens. I moved to a large city in my early 20’s to seek better employment and a better life.

Unfortunately, it was very alienating. If I heard one more university educated middle class white kid try to tell me about white privilege I was going to choke them to death with their Ipod headphones. However I stuck it out, found a decent job, and learned to surround myself with other hard working people of various races who don’t carry chips on their shoulders and look at all white people as having everything handed to them in life.