"He loved you more than anything," I heard echoed at my dad's funeral. But even then, at nearly seven years old I could hear the 'asterisks' - the 'caveat' in that statement. He died in a car accident in Mexico - my dad and his friend both died, and they both were drinking and driving. The caveat was my dad's 'love for alcohol.' I lived all my life thinking he had chosen it over our family.

I lived with the fear that the echoes were lies. I feared that half of me was good and the half of me that was half him, was rotten - a lie.

I was one of the many reasonable seeming people that thought that my dad, like all addicts had something inherently wrong with him. Addiction was a moral question in the real world - no matter how much evidence showed it was at least a medical question. And that made me half inherently broken or morally messed up too.

When the tragic inevitability happens and our loved ones or even our favorite celebrities die, we share quotes and pictures saying we wish we could have prevented it. We say how we need to raise awareness about the issues of mental illness, and addiction. But as soon as the acuity of the tragedy passes, or if we are inconvenienced again by the those still living with these issues, we snap back to dismissing each other. We have collectively agreed to excuse ourselves and each other for perpetuating stigmas of mental illness and addiction and continuing the dehumanizing of people who are ultimately dealing with pain and trauma. My dad didn't have a 'love of alcohol' after all. It wasn't love, it was something I didn't understand until I experienced it myself.

Shame isolates us. Shame traumatizes us. And we naturally seek to numb it.

So what is this project really about? Because my personal stories are already covered in the contents of the book. No need to go more into that. This project is about giving an actual damn while we are still alive. This is an attempt at really changing how we see people with mental illness and people who struggle with addiction. In fact, this is about moving beyond the labels of "illness" and moving into the deeper awareness of our true being.

What others are saying:

"Reading it ["The Girl With the Winnie the Pooh Tattoo"], even twice, gave me the feel of entering a kind of dream-state myself - things coming and going before the eyes before I and really pinned them down.

There's a lot in your piece - mother and father and friend emerge as perturbing as they are occasionally reassuring - and the lost child in the middle.

It has all sorts of hidden power: all sorts of hidden sensations." Janice Galloway, award winning Scottish writer

"I think this [chapter, "We Built Castles in the Air"] is a bold, mature, insightful and highly successful piece of work. It positions itself adeptly at a place where memoir, fiction and non-fiction meet. It's highly readable and because of that we are conducted into details about a relationship which seem acceptable, because plainly stated, but quickly becomes monstrous in our eyes. Monstrous but fascinating. We're also conducted out of it again and it becomes complete, over, dealt with - a very satisfying narrative outcome." Kathleen Jamie, Scottish poet and professor at the University of Stirling

Other mentions: Eyes On Me (Chapter 2), was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Memoirs/Personal Essay category of the 85th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition.