This crazy thing called life.

   The period of time when a person is alive is defined as "life". Everyone gets one. Sometimes life is a spectacular, amazing, incredible journey, and sometimes life really fucking sucks and is the most difficult thing to try to hold on to. Some people float through life on the coattails of unicorns, dancing across rainbows, and some of us have to relearn to swim every morning, barely treading water and struggling to stay afloat. There are a lot of things that make life difficult - mental illness, money, education (or lack thereof), crime, substances, people themselves - and fortunately for many people, they will never experience any hardships and will simply fulfill the basic goal of living, working, creating a family (or not), retiring comfortably and dying peacefully when they are old and grey, surrounded by loved ones. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky. I am not creating this blog to garner pity or attention. I have been writing for years, and have filled journals with these words, and that has been cathartic, but I do a decent job of hiding my past from my present and I have decided I no longer care to hide anything about the things in my past that have formed the person that I am today. A dear friend told me recently that one of my most admirable qualities is my resilience, a quality which stems from survival. This is my story.