As I have shared before, my whole family has struggled with living with chronic lyme disease. This blog is going to be about my daughter Jenna, who I think may have had the hardest time out of all of us growing up sick with lyme.
We didn't know Jenna had lyme until she was a senior in high school. I use to take her to the doctor constantly with physical complaints, but no real answers were ever found. She also struggled with psychiatric symptoms, before school it displayed itself as emotional instability and separation anxiety. Once she hit 1st grade my highly intelligent child began to struggle with reading, things spiraled down hill from there. Her school age years were spent seeing psychiatrist and psychologists for school refusal. Whenever I brought up physical symptoms they were always attributed to anxiety. It was such a difficult time for all of us.
To this day, Jenna doesn't understand how strong she is. Despite her struggles, she graduated from high-school with honors. She won competitions. She earned her 2nd Degree black belt and was an extremely talented martial artist. Most importantly, she has an imagination like I've never seen. A psychologist told her when she was 13 that he could see her as an author. She hung onto that idea, and began writing. Now, seven years later, she has finished and published her first book. I'm so proud of her. What I'm most proud of is how honest she wants to be about herself and her life. So I will now share with you what she has to say in her own words:
"I wrote because I had nothing else to do while I was sick with lyme and having sever panic attacks several times a day. I couldn't leave the house because of the anxiety, I couldn't go out with my friends or even go to school half the time. I wrote because it was my own world, away from everything I really didn't want to do. I wrote characters that were strong willed, and snarky, and could stand up to anything because that's who I wanted to be. Because in the real world where I was plagued with anxiety, lyme disease and depression, being bullied and tormented for all these issues I had, it was so much easier make up a different world where I could be someone else and where I was in control. In the real world I had no control and that caused and still causes me a lot of anxiety from all the uncertainty. In my life of chaos, writing was a way for me to have some solid ground. When I couldn't leave the house, my characters went on grand adventures. When I couldn't stand up to my bullies, my characters beat their enemies into the ground or handled their issues with awesome snarky comebacks. Writing was how I coped.
I dream of one day having my books become famous, to be in real interviews where people ask me in-depth about my books and are amazed with what I have created. Did I ever think it would actually happen? No. So I can't tell you I pushed through all the torment, and sickness, and the hardship, and held on to my dream that I would someday achieve all my dreams, because I didn't. In fact, I gave up on writing many many times. I must have started a hundred books and given up half way through. I hated writing more often than not, because even if I had my characters be strong and smart and go on adventures, I still wasn't. And living through them suddenly only made it worse for me. It rubbed it in more that I still couldn't do these things. New World Mechanism is the first book I have ever finished in entirety, and it has actually been published! It still baffles me. Though, now I am faced with a new challenge, my book is a series, and if people like it, they will want to know the rest. This is so much pressure on me and takes something I did for fun, to escape the real world, and turns it into work for the real world. The pressure I feel for my books is both inspirational and horrible, So, Im not going to tell you that writing for me is a heavently release and escape, because it wasnt at first. It was selfish and a way for me to hide. I'm not going to tell you I sit on a beach all day, drinking ice tea, and writing away like its nothing, because I dont. I sit in my studio apartment, at my disaster of a desk - filled with ripped up pages of book ideas- and cry and glare at my computer 90% of the time. And then there is that 10% that I actually have inspiration and enjoy the writing process. Its not easy, for me to write, and it never was. But I guess that's how dreams work."Puchase a Kindle Version of this book
Or a PaperBack Copy
https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Mechanism-J-L-Bell/dp/1535187034/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1468521945&sr=8-2&keywords=new+world+mechanism
