When Silence Is Broken
"Fifteen years ago I began writing my first book, "Coming Through With Grace," a memoir I was "told" to write by a small, quiet voice from deep inside me. I felt no urge to write a book, little desire to put out the effort, and probably less-than perfect writing skills to sound credible as an author. But what I had just been exposed to was so monumentally unbelievable that I knew my story (which had to be others' stories, too) had to be told, and I also knew (early on) that I'd be the one telling it.
I didn't know how I was going to do that. I just knew that I was going to some day, some how, branch out beyond my shyness and debilitating fear of public speaking and let others know that a thing called sex addiction had happened to me--a “normal” college-educated wife and mother of three young children.
When I began putting pen to paper to describe how my life had been impacted by such a “disease,” it was a story that came pouring out of me. While there was definitely tremendous effort involved, it came easily, as if the story was being dictated to me from an outside source.
Yet despite the ease and excitement I felt in writing, I also began to doubt the value of my story and tried to leave the book half-done and shelved, but it wouldn't leave me alone. It kept demanding that I finish writing what I knew about a hidden, lethal, and fairly unknown addiction.
Grieving the loss of a husband to the lure of sex addiction was the one defining event that catapulted my life in a new direction. I grieved, I reached out, I got honest about myself and my life, and ever so slowly, the veil of denial began to lift, and healing began. It was one of those events in life that, while it looked and seemed as if I'd never recover, it shaped me beyond what I'd thought possible. Through profound heartache and deep, deep grief I didn't even know I stored, I walked out of my old skin, eager to live a life fraught with possibility, and for the first time, hope.
But little did I know that when I began putting many of my new-found thoughts onto paper, something else would have to take place--that I'd have to figure out why I'd married a sex addict. I actually had an inkling about why when I wrote Coming Through With Grace. I'd admitted to a molestation deeply hidden in Chapter Eight, but purposely didn't disclose whom. Because it was not the theme of my story about sex addiction, I was able to mention it without really explaining it. Once I published my book, however, explanations were more than necessary, and believing that I'd been a victim of such a heinous event was even more imperative.
I finished the manuscript after two years of almost un-interrupted writing, but was unable to send it to to a publisher. I stalled. I made excuses. I filed my story away, thinking that I'd made a huge mistake. I was no writer, and who was I to think that I could offer hope to others? I was just a single mother who got her ya-ya's out by writing.
It wasn't until I sent a finished manuscript to a publisher and put 300 printed copies of a softbound book in my inventory that I fantasized about book sales and nationwide tours. Surely I'd reap the rewards effortlessly by the same universal force that prodded me to write the book in the first place.
But when sales only drizzled in, and 200 books sat on shelves, untouched, I realized that my real work was just beginning..."
When Silence Is Broken, coming soon...
