Sharing The Joy

by Lillian Csernica on December 2, 2023

I am delighted to announce that I’ve written 200 pages of my new nonfiction book, Keep Getting Up. If you’ve spent some time following my adventures here, you’ll know my life is complicated. It’s not easy getting through my days. I have gone on doing so, so my friends encouraged me to write a book about how I keep on keeping on. Resilience. That’s the magic word.

Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.

American Psychological Association

Plunging into National Novel Writing Month with a nonfiction project was a challenge. This is my ninth year, and in all the previous years I’ve written fiction. What’s more, this nonfiction would be about me, about my daily life and its impact on my mental health. I have a psychiatrist who prescribes the medications for my clinical depression and insomnia. I see a therapist once a week for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I rely heavily on their support to keep practicing the techniques that have brought me a long way toward resilience.

In order to create some structure for the book, I wrote out what could be termed a “trauma timeline,” a list of every single year of my life and any traumatic events that took place during it. For example, when I was eleven years old, my parents got divorced, which meant my mother and I moved to a new apartment. I had to go to a new school away from all the people I’d spent five years with in elementary school. My parents had no sense of self-restraint when it came to complaining about each other in front of me. That was a very rough year.

I am of an age now to have enough distance and perspective on life with my nuclear family. I can’t help laughing when I hear that term. More than once there was the emotional equivalent of a mushroom cloud rising above my house. My father was an alcoholic. My mother was a narcissist. My sister…. Well, the less said there the better. My brother is fine. Good career, wonderful daughter, a great guy. I’m the baby of the family, so the trickle down economics of passive aggression tended to hit me rather hard.

Telling my own story my own way is quite an adventure. Heaven only knows what insights await me as I go through the editing process!