Finding My Way Back to Me, Through YOU

For as long as I can remember I have always been an avid reader and a great writer. In middle school I used to sneak and read Harry Potter books under the covers when I was supposed to be sleep for school the next morning. In high school I took all honors and AP English courses and aced them with flying colors. Once I graduated I went to college to pursue a degree in English but dropped out my junior year. From there, I continued to read but writing quickly became a thing of the past.

In 2016, I started to get that writing itch again. After all I had already been through, I craved an opportunity to tell my story. So I began to write. I completed and published my very first book in the matter of 3-4 months. In the six months that followed, I wrote and published two more books. One month after that I announced my very own publishing company, Ambitious Ink Presents, and my first signed author. From there…things only started to go up…until eventually they went alllll the way down.

They say that life happens but what I can’t seem to understand is how something in life can happen and in the blink of an eye un-happen. One day I was this new up and coming author and publisher who also offered merchandise and services, like shirts and custom flyers. I was doing book signings and events left and right and, although I was not releasing much reading material, the authors signed under me were extremely consistent with releasing. We were topping the Amazon charts and making a name for ourselves from Boston to Philly.

But somewhere along the road “life happened” and I “lost my umph”. The releases started to dwindle. A few of the authors started to jump ship and venture off on their own. Readers stopped reading or even inquiring about the next release and before I knew it everything I worked so hard to build slowly started to fade to black.

I could blame the change in events on many different aspects. Around that time my husband, who was only my boyfriend at the time, and I started to get pretty serious and eventually I ended up pregnant with my youngest son. My daughter, who was a pre-teen at the time, was dealing with behavioral issues and driving me insane (literally). I was depressed about the major weight I had gain even before the pregnancy. There was a lot of conflict between one of the authors whom was signed to me and myself etc etc. Long story short, there was A LOT going on in my world.

But, looking back, I now realize that none of those things resulted in my “downfall” as an author and publisher. The problem was ME. I got so caught up on trying to be everything for everyone that there was nothing left for me at the end of the day. In return, my career suffered, my business suffered and more importantly I suffered tremendously and most times quietly. Here and there I would get up the energy to write a sequel to a previously published book, or promote and publish a book for the one author who stayed down with me but eventually even that stopped.

It’s been almost a year since I last released a project. It’s been six months since I worked on a project. And then recently I was asked to write a quick blog about a traumatic experience I had for my moms group “Bad Moms of Boston”. To my surprise, I really, really enjoyed the 15-20 minutes that it took me to write the entry. I pondered on the experience for the remainder of that day and by the end of the night I knew what I wanted, scratch that, needed to do.

So here I am. And here you are. Hopefully this blog will help you navigate the craziness that is called motherhood in some way shape or form. And hopefully somewhere along the line, while writing these entries, I will find Chyna L again.