I’ve been writing since I learned how to construct a sentence. One of my poems was published in school magazine when I was nine years old. It seemed like, in the millisecond, my happy childhood ended, as the verbal and physical abuse at home escalated. Coupled with being raped at 14 years old, I was emotionally silenced and sequestered by the secrets. I remember making a vow to myself—“No one must ever know.” Therefore, the written word became my saving-grace.

As I grew older, I attempted to show the world a well-adjusted, funny, and extraverted woman. It was only in my writing that my real voice could be heard. It dared to whisper a different story. Words befriended me, flowed from my soul, and spilled onto thousands of pages over the years. However, as if by tried by a jury with my warped sense of self as foreman, most of my pieces were sentenced to life in file folders neatly stacked in corrugated boxes and exiled to the backside of closets.

Resurrected Dreams, one of the stories in my memoir, I Say a Prayer For Me: One Woman’s Life of Faith and Triumph, best describes my relationship with the written word.

“Out came the sun and dried up all the rain. In my forties, writing found me again. It helped shatter the chains of my painful and shameful past. Words fed my starving spirit and soothed my aching life. In spite of the fact that I abandoned the words and left them to die by the side of the road, they waited for me at the crossroads of life to point the way, ‘Just believe!’ they insisted that we and you are one.’ The itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.”

As an exercise of my belief, I send my words out into the world.

© 2005 Stanice Anderson, Author and Inspirational Speaker, www.stanice.com