Even as a young child, creativity was a huge part of my life.  My cousins and I would make up skits to perform for the family. My friends and I would write out manuscripts at school, spending weeks developing the story for us to act out for no audience at all.  My brother and I had alter egos that we turned into when we realized that we had reached the end of my mother's exceptionally long fuse.  Ginger and Alan would spring into action as the angelic children that she needed then and let us off the hook for how naughty we had been. 

I didn't realize when I was growing up what an empath or a highly sensitive person is and certainly did not know how to manage my own energy and not take on everyone else's.  High school was particularly hard.  I struggled with insomnia and clinical depression.  I was hospitalized twice, the second time by choice as I was desperate to be "fixed".   It was during that second stay that I learned the power my mind has in creating my reality.  Feeling Good, the New Mood Therapy Book by Dr. David Burns quite literally changed my life.  Learning about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been my secret weapon in learning to reframe thoughts and allow a bad moment or a bad day to just be that and not snowball into more.  

I registered to go to fashion design school in Atlanta after completing high school a semester early, but when my mother was given months to live following a melanoma diagnosis, things changed.  My mother passing rocked my world and shifted the whole course of my life.  I ended up at UNCC a month after she died trying to figure things out.   I did love my sociology and creative writing classes but 25 years ago writing jobs seemed scarce and I was lost.

I took a few years to allow my grief and new freedom to influence some decisions that we will call "learning opportunities" and eventually ended up dropping out of UNCC and heading to ECPI to study IT.  Because I loved technology?  No.  But there seemed to be a million job opportunities. I was searching for stability that I felt like I lost.  I got hitched (and three years later divorced) and I took the job from my first (and only) interview when I finished school at ECPI and stayed there for 20 years. 

For the child that was the rebel of the family, I sure played it safe.