I’m sorry it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted. I had started to write a book back in 2012, but throughout the past ten years it was one thing after another that kept distracting or discouraging me. The other day I was looking through my folder of materials for the manuscript and I told myself that I absolutely, with no excuse whatsoever, needed to complete this project before the end of 2022. Ten years is just too long, and I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve allowed an entire decade to pass. It’s ridiculous! A whole decade has gone by!
Actually, it was the late 90s – early 2000s when I first had the idea to write a book. No, it was even further back than that. The first time I knew that I wanted to be a writer was when I was seven years old, reading the Little House on the Prairie series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The other inspiration for me as a child was my Aunt Margot who had begun her career as a writer some time in the early-mid 70s. On Sunday afternoons my father would bring my sisters and me to our grandparents’ house for our weekly visit, and there we would hear the sounds of my aunt’s typewriter, as she clicked away on the keys, holed up in her room, not to be disturbed. I figured she must’ve been writing something pretty important because she rarely came out to see us, and that’s when I knew that I, too, would write something important one day.
Although I kept several journals throughout my childhood years, it wasn’t until my early 30s that I began putting my thoughts together for a memoir. Up until that time, I had been pursuing a career as an actress and model in New York City, and the ego boost of performing for an audience trumped my dream of becoming a writer. I floundered around Manhattan in search of something cool and glitzy that I could grab hold of and show off to the world, not realizing that time was ticking away, and my life was passing by. But my refusal to quit the hamster wheel world of star chasing led me to some very dangerous situations, which to this day I am amazed I was able to escape. And yet, by the grace of God I did escape, and because of so many dark and twisted years, I now have the opportunity to turn all that adversity into something positive, weaving it into the story that I wanted to write as a child. I guess I just needed to live a little in order to have something to fill the pages. After all, what does a seven-year-old know about life?
The memoir I wanted to write years ago is finally coming to fruition, and if I’m lucky and blessed, I really will finish it before the end of 2022. Which means, if it goes the traditional publishing route, it will be published some time in 2023 or 2024. I’ve heard that it can take up to two years after a contract is signed to finally go to the publication phase. Seems like a long, long time, but I’ll just leave it in the Lord’s hands and let Him decide who the publisher will be and when the time is right. By the way, please pray for me that I end up with the right situation. There are a lot of crazies out there, and I’d just as soon self-publish the book rather than have it end up in the wrong hands. I feel anything that is centered around faith and God needs to be handled correctly and with the utmost care, using proper discernment.
Ouija Boards and UFOs
The whole strange journey started in 1969. But fast forward to the 1970s, I always felt that a cloud of doom hovered over us, our neighborhood, me, I wasn’t sure who or what it was hovering over, but it sure hovered. I wrote a brief explanation about it in this post. Also, when I was around nine years old, my mother bought me a Ouija board that I played with a few times before she threw it out in horror after hearing about the dangers connected with it. And my classmates and I did fake séances in the schoolyard, which always infuriated the teachers, who yelled at us to stop. Around that time I started getting excruciatingly painful headaches and convinced myself that I had a brain tumor or that I’d die of cancer. I was often fearful and anxious, still plagued by memories of the UFO I saw as a toddler, wondering if aliens had visited me from outer space. I was blessed to have the parents I had and the family that I could count on and trust in. But I was always convinced that something terrible was going to happen and that it would only be a matter of time before it did.
The Ouija bard thing was short-lived, and I never really did much with it. And the fake séances were just that—fake. I’ve already spoken with a couple of priests about those matters, neither of which fazed them because I was so young and innocent and didn’t know what I was doing. But a couple of other priests disagreed and felt that the Ouija board may have opened up some dark doors. I believe that Our Lady protects the innocent in ways we cannot understand. Still, it is unsettling to remember the era of the 70s, and it was as if this malaise hung over everything, all the time. There were distractions, of course, such as television shows I loved, like Little House on the Prairie, and things we did as a family, like picnics and summer vacations in the Adirondack Mountains. But many of my memories of that era, separate from the happy times with my family, are infused with anxiety and negativity.
When a priest came to my house in June of 2010 to say a Mass, he suggested that something sinister had taken place in my life in the late 70s. I have no idea how he could sense that, but he was pretty adamant about the fact that all the demonic activity in and around my house had its roots in the 1970s.
This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I grew up believing that I was *different* and that I possessed special abilities because I had been visited by alien beings who had given me magical powers. It happened in stages. In the 1970s I believed that I had been visited by superior beings who rode around on UFOs. Somewhere in my mid-thirties I began to believe that I had healing hands and special mystical gifts that surpassed the need for prayer. Not that I no longer believed in God, and not that I no longer prayed. That was never the case. But somehow the delusion of possessing magical powers put God on a level that was somewhere off to the side rather than front and center. It’s frightening how this sort of thing can take hold, one tiny step at a time.
That’s how the devil works—in stages, sometimes in slow, poisonous drips. The delusion begins under the guise of something pleasing, or fascinating, and sometimes even beautiful. Or, as in my case, it wasn’t anything positive, but rather something that completely terrified me. In 1969, before my third birthday, I was startled to see an off-white large glowing object in my parents’ yard at night. Though I wanted to tell them about the big light ball that glided along the top of the grass, the force that controlled it forbid me to discuss it with them. In spite of the close bond I shared with my parents, this glowing object gave me the distinct impression that it was in control of my life, and my parents couldn’t help me. I became fearful of the outdoors because the object was always out there, watching me, though no one else could see it.
1 thought on “Memoir”
Thnx!