Look and Listen

Biography

I am a single mom to Olivia Grace, age eleven. She is in the fifth grade and always telling me that she understands fashion and hair and boys far better than I. That may be true as she is single at eleven, as she should be and I remain so at 47. I was a teacher of English to high school students, public speaking, and education at the college levels of bachelors and masters students. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2000 and have been unable to teach full-time since as I always start to go blind upon accepting a contract and beginning fulltime work. I wish it were more universally understood how hard teachers work every day in this country and across the globe. Not only must we master several specialties, we must figure out how to make a group (generally an overcrowded one) want to learn something they have zero interest in pretty regularly for a year, be it a list of vocabulary words or a poem or novel written by an American author or a play by William Shakespeare. I was constantly trying to find relevance to their lives in the works of authors often long-dead who were smitten with morning dew and fish sparkling in a river. Now that I am free to speak about addiction (my own as well as the groundswell beneath all of our feet in this country), write articles about gambling addiction and food addiction and books about drug and alcohol addiction, I am afire with my mission to do so. What used to be my greatest shame has become my material for telling the truth to teens and their parents, civic groups in my community, churches who are awakening to the problems rampant in our communities, and youth gatherings of kids who want to help their friends but need the tools in order to do so. I hand them those tools. I heard Joel Olsteen on television one Sunday morning say that God takes the biggest messes of our lives and turns them into our message if we just let him. This has happened for me. Instead of feeling ashamed of my many scars and the endless stories of being physically unable to breathe, or finding blood stains in rooms I swear I had not walked into for several days; I feel an incredible sense of freedom at not having (or thinking I was able) to hide. At 84 pounds, leaning far to the left, balancing often on only one leg, shaking and weak and gray-skinned, I doubt I fooled many people (including my students toward the end of my addiction to cocaine). There is a great freedom in coming clean not only from the drugs, but also to my little corner of the world, and in so doing, opening myself as a vehicle for others who need help. Often that is literally true as I'm driving a heaving, vomiting, shaking, stinky addict to the emergency room that does not want them but is duty-bound to accept them when they get around to it. Addicts are often not treated well by otherwise well-meaning medical personnel. It is heart-breaking, as these people are not BAD people, they are instead sick. And often it is hardest to love someone sick who continues to stay sick and harm him or herself. These are the very people I have been called to love, and I love my calling more than I can express.

Inspiration

My parents and several friends literally held me on the shore of life and refused to let me fall into the alligators waiting to chew off another limb. Please visit my website at www.addictionovercome.com and read for yourself the horrors of catching my own hair on fire and calling 9-1-1 to ask how to get it to stop burning. They kept asking if I needed someone to come out and help me. I kept insisting that no, I did not need assistance at that moment and they would not be able to help me anyway. There are anecdotal stories aplenty to convince you never to travel the same road I did and millions have met me there. It is a horrible way to live, without food, without sleep, without friends, without a job, without a purpose. My inspiration was sheer survival at first, and then as my life began to blossom in its return to me and those who loved me, my gratitude grew exponentially. I finally had to write after reading James Frey's somewhat fictionalized account of addiction. Mine is the unvarnished truth. There is no need to apply varnish to so much pain and ugliness. I believe my sincerity shines through even the gruesome parts of my book.