I had what I thought to be a reasonably normal childhood, growing up in a moderate middle class family, attending public school, playing with friends, sitting on the curb reading comic books, sneaking out at night when I was a teen. When I was out of line, I was punished. I never really thought about whether my parents were better or worse than my friends’ parents, I guess I thought most kids were treated the same as I was. I didn’t know then the affect deep family secrets and minor abuses, both verbal and physical would have on me, my self esteem and my ability to love myself. Over the past two years, I have come face-to-face with many aspects of my life from my childhood, my teens, my first marriage, and the death of loved ones. Each situation had to be addressed. My way of working through them was by reliving them, by writing my way through them in poetry. My poems are interspersed within the relevant parts of my story, attempting to reveal how I thought of each situation as I looked back and tried to make sense of it. As I wrote, I recreated the time or the scene, often feeling as I did when I was in the middle of it. Living it again as an adult, being open to my shortcomings and the foibles of others, allowed me to forgive and let go. Reliving and writing each event also gave me control of the memory. As I wrote, I was reordering my memories and removing the emotional charge, the hair trigger that could set me off years, decades later. Once in a while when I’m reading a good book a passage will catch me, cut to the quick. It is the truth of what I read that has such power. Frederick Buechner, in his book Telling Secrets caught me one day as I sat reading in my airplane seat. One minute calm and sane, the next sobbing, awash with tears. He was saying that we are all born with an original, true self which gets lost as the world has its way with us. I really liked the sound of that. He went on to say that this true self, no matter how deeply it gets buried, is still who we really are at our core, and is always available to us. Many view this as our unconscious mind, or soul or spirit, which contains the wisdom of the ages, the answers we often search for, the knowledge to heal us, if only we would look for it. As I read, the truth that I was not living out of my true self sprang from the pages and filled me with sorrow, fear, and remorse and a resoluteness to figure it out, to find that luminous self of mine and become the woman I was put on earth to be. Telling our secrets, our stories, is a means of getting to some of our most deeply hidden thoughts, feelings, and memories. Writing about them is a way of working out past events or inner conflicts on a multi-dimensional level and often serves as a catharsis or cleansing as we gain insight into our selves. Your stories and your secrets are different from mine. Perhaps not as bad. Perhaps you have had lower lows and have deeper scars. What matters is having the desire, the willingness to put it all behind us. The healing starts when we pick up our pen. Writing is a way to claim our own voice. It can be an effective method of treatment for many ailments, both emotional and physical. Chemical and hormonal changes take place within our brain and our body when we write and have lasting positive affects. Current problems and past traumas that seem to have power over us are diffused and discharged through the act of writing. When we write, open our hearts and let them bleed on the page, we are freed of the demons that haunt us. They bubble up from the alembic, from deep in our unconscious minds, from our memories and our dreams, and as the ink dries on the paper, they become light, lose their hold on us and slowly drift away. Simply put, this book is about how I used writing, specifically poetry, as a means of healing with the goal of letting go and moving on. It is about digging down, exhuming that buried self, understanding and accepting the past. It is about forgiving myself and others, taking my spirit back, and getting on with my life. Perhaps you will find something between the covers of this book that resonates within you and moves you to write. Pain is what finally motivated me. Either way, I hope you enjoy my story. A few names have been changed to maintain the privacy of others. Read Less