Author introduction: Erin King — Never Give Up On Your Healing

The key to finding happiness is not to stop until you’ve found it.

Erin King is the author of How To Be Wise AF Guided Journal For Women: A 30-day guided workbook for empowerment, strength, and resilience through good old-fashioned common sense and optimism

I write a lot about love and happiness. How to get it and where to find it.

I write about problem-solving because I’ve figured out a few things in my fifty-plus years, and I want to share what’s worked.

I’m not a psychologist or a Ph.D. I’m a regular person with a lot of life experience.

I made my way from chronic depression and near suicide to mental health and happiness. My life is the result of a decades-long battle and living proof that if you don’t give up, things get better.

I work every day to make my experience actionable for others. To use what I’ve been through to help other people by sharing perspectives and strategies that helped me.

My aim is to always be cheerful and positive so others can embrace their healing journey in a less intimidating, less oppressive way.

Dealing with emotional issues can be draining, which is why people often avoid sensitive subjects.

I want to make it easier to address these things.

Writing on Medium started as an exercise in basic function. I wanted to get better at writing. But as I’m learning, writing opens you up in a way that you can’t fight, and the more you do it, the more honest you become.

I love writing light-hearted listicles, I feel good when I create them. They make healing lessons easier to digest. Even though I like to keep it cheerful, I still have to examine the lesson and the pain before I write any self-help. It’s that constant self-exploration that has been the most helpful surprise in all of this writing.

But leaving “the writer” behind to show more of myself has been an exercise in courage I had not anticipated.

Hiding behind a persona was how I survived my young life, I’m trying not to do that anymore.

It’s easy to slip into desperation, giving in to the feeling that giving up is the only option, but it only takes one little paradigm shift, one “aha” moment, to help you hang on and keep going.

Sometimes stumbling across the right article can lighten your load, if even for a few moments.

Just knowing that someone has been through the same thing as you and has come out the other side, can be comforting. This is why I write.

I grew up in a toxic, dysfunctional family. I was the black sheep destined to fail.

I spent my 20’s and my early 30’s struggling to cope.

Living a life that might have seemed cool and exciting, I was singing in a band and working in local hotspots to pay the bills, but in reality, I was a mess. Any talent I had was squandered by the alcohol-fuelled rage that drove me nearly to death.

I was diagnosed as bipolar when I was in high school. I was chronically depressed. I had PTSD from a trauma I suffered as a very young child. An ordeal that I didn’t even remember until I started having flashbacks as a result of therapy.

I spent years self-medicating with alcohol and whatever I could swallow down with it.

I am eternally grateful that the opioids of today weren’t available back then. I had the sense to stay away from heroin and cocaine that were ruining friends' and colleagues' lives, but I loved pills.

I took lots of them and never really paid attention to what they were.

Getting to where I am was a conscious decision and my happiness hasn’t come easy. It took every cent and every ounce of energy I had, to get here.

I remember the exact moment I decided that I’d do whatever it took to get happy.

I was in my early 20s, waking up one morning with a boyfriend that I knew wasn’t for me. In fact, I hated him. He was just another emotionally unavailable, socially deficient loser. I knew he’d never love me. I was wasting my time, and I was bitter.

I was 24, already a bitter old lady, and I knew it. I’d had a nervous breakdown in my second year of University and quit school. My parents had long given up, they washed their hands of me, and I was on my own.

I had a revelation at that moment, that I was becoming my grandmother. I even looked like her. She was a bitter weird woman who messed up her three children in countless ways.

To this day her legacy has reached through generations to children she’d never met. Her dysfunction has carried through my family but I was determined to stop it from ruining me.

She married my grandfather on the rebound from her true love, and she never let him forget it. She was bitter and mean, and I could feel myself becoming bitter, mean, and frustrated, just like her. I grew up hating her for the cruelty she exacted upon my mother, my sisters, and me. She never stopped reminding us that none of us were ever good enough for my father.

I vowed right there to never stop fighting until I figured out how to save myself and find a way to be happy. It was a very long, grueling road. I invested time, energy, and money into myself and it was well worth it.

I have a life I could never have dreamed of, I have a loving husband and a wonderful daughter. In my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d even live past 30, never mind find happiness and peace.

My marriage has been through stresses that would crush most relationships. I won’t list them because I write about them often. But we’ve come out of everything stronger and better and there are reasons. There is no magic formula for happiness, but there are concrete actions you can take if you want a better life.

It took years of dedicated work to get to where I am, and I want to share what I’ve learned.

We used to have elders to guide us, we listened when people with experience spoke. We tried to learn from the knowledge of others to better ourselves and evolve as societies and people. That chain of wisdom has been broken, it’s time to rebuild it one link at a time.

I write to be one of those links.

I especially want to share my conviction that everybody deserves happiness, everyone can find it, and everyone can have it.

If you are willing to do the work, you can have any life you want. I’m not talking about being rich or famous, I’m talking about having the inner life you want. One filled with peace, love, and contentment.

I’ve spent years writing songs, writing letters, writing for myself. Most recently, I rebooted my writing habit when a friend needed a staff writer for a local tourism magazine. I did it as a favor to help her get going, but it rekindled my love of writing.

I’ve just finished writing a parenting book that I’m editing and rewriting part of at the time of this article. It’s based on the eight-plus years of experience I have running a home daycare using my Montessori training, I thought I’d use the Medium platform to do some skill development while I get some further research done.

I wanted to get my writing chops up to scratch, but I knew that without an audience, I’d lose my motivation.

Once a performer, always a performer, I guess.

Somehow the parenting articles lead to some relationship articles, and when two of them went viral, I was hooked.

I consider my marriage to be the single greatest achievement in my life. Considering the toxic mess I came from, I never believed anyone could love me, I never even wanted to try, so the fact that I am in a healthy (not perfect) marriage is something that I end up writing about often.

Sometimes I still have to pinch myself to make sure it’s all real.

I’ve learned that in a marriage, we need to let go of some expectations and hold fast to others and what we have been taught is not always based on reality. I share stories about my marriage and how I met my husband because we often second guess ourselves in this area and settle for less than we deserve.

Love is one subject that people often view through the lens of their most broken parts, being able to see more objectively helps us make better choices.

As I’ve kept my daily writing habit up, I’ve realized that I needed to be more transparent. I needed to be more vulnerable if I was going to grow as a person and a writer. So I’ve branched off and tried my hand at some more in-depth personal stories.

The responses to those articles have been humbling and inspiring. It seems that we are all sharing the universal human experience trying to answer the same question. How do I find happiness and love in an imperfect world, as a damaged person with other flawed people?

I think we are all looking to answer that as we strive to cope with everyday pain and disillusionment.

We are all continually looking for the silver lining in our cloud, and why shouldn’t we? If every cloud has that lining, then we are all deserving of it. It is our birthright, every single one of us.

I am still in awe of the amount of joy and contentment I find in my own unremarkable life, and I believe anyone can have what I have, in their own way.

I’m hoping to use my writing to help anyone looking for peace. I’m not a doctor or specialist, I’m someone who has lived through the pain and come out the other side. If my stories can help anyone hang on longer and try a little harder, then my struggles haven’t been in vain.

I write to help you. I write to cheer you up. I write to let you know that you’re not alone. I write to convince you that life can be beautiful for you. Yes, YOU.

Thanks so much for reading!

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✨Start your own common sense revolution with How To Be Wise AF Guided Journal For Women: A 30-day guided workbook for empowerment, strength, and resilience through good old-fashioned common sense and optimism

Read one short chapter every day and answer the writing prompt designed to reframe your experiences in a positive, helpful light. Delve into your past, the good, the bad, and the ugly to revisit and rewrite old narratives turning past struggles into future strength.

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