I am a writer, although I did not start writing until after my wife of forty years died in 2015. This does not count the papers I wrote for college. I did not start college until I was fifty-two, and at sixty, I had earned two undergraduate degrees and an MAED. Shortly after I graduated, my wife died. To deal with the pain of grief, I started writing.
I had been telling a guy that I knew about my life. He had asked what it was like to grow up as a closeted gay man in the Midwestern US. He also asked me, “If your life was a movie, who would play you?” I started writing about my life, yet it was a screenplay, only ending up as a novel.
My first book, “The Journey,” was self-published on Amazon/Kindle in 2016. It is chronically based on specific things in my life. It was not easy to read and even harder to write. I listed the types of abuse I had endured and at what time in my life they occurred. I followed this book with “In Search of…?” Going over the same timeline but searching for the lost person I had been forced to bury long ago.
I had never been to therapy until 2018. I had never dealt with the abuse, and I did not know how to deal with it. 2018 was an eventful time of discovery. I discovered I had been lied to in the military. I was told, in 1972, that I was not eligible to have VA benefits because I had a mental breakdown. I believed that lie for forty-six years. I had a brutal training sergeant who took pleasure in knocking the shit out of me whenever he felt like it. This was at the tail end of Vietnam. I was honorable discharged and left to deal with it.
I battle severe PTSD, MDD, Severe Social Anxiety, and chronic nightmares. I was finding out about all this after 2018. I am disabled, not only by Social Security but by the VA as well. I am unemployable.
It was after I started my MH therapy that I wrote the third book about my life and describing the hell I went through. There is a “Trigger Warning” on it. The book is titled, “Erased and Unwanted.” I am still dealing with issues on that subject. My last book about my life was dealing with being gay in a time when to be such was highly illegal. “A Midwestern Gay Boys Story: A Lifetime of Lies” is about growing up shortly after the “Lavender Scare” began in 1952. I was born in 1954. I was discovered to be gay in 1970 by my adoptive mother, and the beating I received damn near killed me.
Where does writing come into this? I have found by writing and getting it down on paper or the computer; I do not have to carry it buried deep inside me anymore. I am openly gay at seventy years young. My birthday may say I am “old,” yet I feel far from it.
The people who have ordered my book(s) and my posts here on Quora have helped many people by giving them a voice. They have helped start conversations with their doctors and family who never knew the truth. I have other books as well, yet these four are about my life, how I am healing from the damage abuse brought to my life, and how I am learning to overcome it.
I hope this helps to answer your question.
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