Fighting Demons

I somehow stumbled upon this book, I’m not even sure how or where I found it, to be honest. I sometimes will hear about a book, or see a description somewhere or someone mentions some book on a message board some place and I’ll order it, where it will sit amongst the piles of books sitting in queue around my house. And then, based upon my mood, I eventually get around to reading it, usually by then having long forgotten how the book came to be in my possession in the first place.

Anyway, I picked this book out of the pile a few days ago and I have to say that it immediately spoke to me (as many books do) but deeply, on an actual physical and psychological level, much as this book spoke to me on a spiritual level. You see, this story could easily have been a chronicle of my own life, or at least part of it anyway. Maybe not exactly or literally, and certainly I have not reached the levels of resolution (nor do I have the talents or the incredible insights and understanding) that the author has. Not yet at least, but her journey deeply moved me, it hit home for me on an intense gut level that I find hard to even describe. Even now, here late, late on a “school night” I find myself awake and weeping with the raw feelings that these writings have exposed in me. Awake with thoughts and ideas and frustrations and hopes and hurts and self-loathing as well as an anguish for the person I should have been and hope for the person that I could be, with my mind spinning with the regrets of lost opportunities, and feelings of worthlessness, unworthiness, uselessness and, yes, even the anger of the past & present and hopes for what could be in the future. Maybe.

You can say that people over-eat, or drink or take drugs or gamble or compulsively spend or whatever because of unhappiness or bad childhoods or abuse, but I think the reasons are far more complicated and myriad than those stale explanations. Unhappiness is just a trite and easy answer, a label or category that people want to slap on to explain something they really don’t understand. This chronicle is not all happy endings and pat answers and resolutions but a window into the deep and complex feelings of a person who went through the lows & highs of trying to conquer her demons.