While being born into a family that abused and became addicted to drugs and alcohol through my blood line (my mom) and afflicted with the bipolar genetic code from my spirit line (my dad), I beat the odds because my purpose had been revealed to me by having the experiences of both worlds! I discovered after finding out that my grandfather died after taking his last drink on the toilet bowl in the year I was born. Subsequently, I never met him. My Mom died of alcoholism and my two uncles and aunt passed from drugs and alcohol. My path led me to a crack house in Chicago. Before getting ready to take a hit myself, the phone rings for me. Frustrated from having been interrupted, and trying to decipher why someone would be calling me here, I answer and I am offered a job at one of the biggest and most respected drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities in Illinois. Mind you I didn't want to apply for a job their, but the receptionist insisted that I apply; even filled out the application through asking me the questions and I gave them the phone number to the crack house because I was with the owner of the house's son. He was being assessed when the receptionist began asking me the questions off the application. I did not want to give them my address or number because I was married to and living a double life with, who is now my ex-wife and she would have called Betty Ford clinic if I so much as came into the house with a 40 ounce of beer! After blowing out the smoke while coughing and choking up, I answered yes because now I needed a job. When I took the owner of the house's son to the facility I was just visiting and getting high at the house. When the call came in, I was practically living there! I informed them that I was from out of town and needed to return home to take care of family business. This was a ploy to stave off time to clean out my system of the cocaine I had been ingesting into my system for quite some time up until that point. I successfully cleaned up and got the job. This is where and how I received the education to stay stopped and help others achieve sobriety. After going through a rites of passage that originated in Ghana, West Africa, (Sankofa), I learned that we are brought into the world at right timing to participate in the solving of the problem(s) that are impacting your family, your community or the world at large at the precise time that you are born! Drugs and alcohol was so prevalent in mine that not only did my Family Patriarch drink himself to death, my mother, aunt and uncles did the same, not to mention my father's brother. Me and my Mom's smoked weed together since I was fourteen up until she died seven years later and my Dad gave me a gram of cocaine for my eighteenth birthday while being a freshman in college! I also learned that cocaine produces the same chemical in the brain, dopamine, that causes someone to experience bipolar like or manic depressive like symptoms. That and the fact that you could get the same euphoric feeling and release the same chemical in the brain, when you run or work out represented the knowledge that I needed to absorb to successfully recover and assist others with treating their behavior by changing their lifestyle. My life is on purpose and I am instinctively following my path which has been ordained by the Most High before my spirit experienced life in this physical encasing. My calling is to be that change agent in my line and lineage, that brings recovery from drugs and alcohol to my generation so that the ones that follow me will not have to suffer the consequences that subscribes to the use, abuse, addiction or sale of drugs and alcohol. I defeated the odds because I have been sober for close to seven years now and free from all psychotropic and or neuroleptic drugs for almost the same length of time. If I were to listen to the doctors that diagnosed me or my family and friends that love me, I would be still be taking the medication prescribed and living in the basement apartment of the house my father and sister purchased almost twenty years ago! There are more dots to be connected, but up to now, my dots are revealing to me, my life story and has me questioning more, not so much what I am supposed to do or become, but what is much more important to me, is determining who I already was. We were brought here with an attribute and a purpose; a set of circumstances that stemmed from the spirit trapped in our souls. The more we do to realize our purpose, lifts us up higher to GOD's mansion in the sky which we ultimately emanate from.

Born a stutterer, I spent 40 years hiding in life's tiny hidden jobs where I didn't need to speak, avoiding being made fun of even as an adult. Instead, at 42 I transformed myself, got brave, realized I could stutter and it didn't matter! I went to college, got a bachelor's degree, went on to get a master's degree at 49 and on to travel rural Indiana teaching people with all sorts of disabilities how to use computer assisted technology. I now speak before groups as large as 200 with very little fear! Shades of George VI - who'd have thought a shy girl from Detroit could be so powerful!