Please welcome author Mathew Chase to the blog today. His powerful memoir Finding Home tells about his tumultuous life, while also providing some therapeutic relief. Today, he shares with us how much writing this book helped him. Thank you, Mathew, for doing this.
I found writing this story to be very therapeutic. It was interesting to me how I discovered there was still information to be learned from my past. Things that I felt I had dealt with and put away were looked at in a new light or from a new perspective. I knew for years that I wanted to write my story. Getting started was the hard part. After that everything seemed to just flow.
I often found myself thinking wow I did that, I survived and made it through. I can’t believe how young I was for having gone through that and been able to recognize the situation I was in. Looking back on it all now. I can see that it was all worth the ride, even the bad parts. We can’t truly appreciate the good without the bad, the sun without the rain. Life wouldn’t be a test if we had all the answers. Just proves to us that all any of us really need is a little bit of time to figure it out.
While safety and peace seem like they should be birthrights, some of us are born into situations that simply don't allow for these niceties. With a father who sold drugs and a mother who depended on them, the world felt anything but calm to author Mathew Chase.
Growing up in one of the toughest parts of Philadelphia, Mathew learned things in his first few years of life that most of us never have to learn, like how to survive hunger when there's no food in the house and no one there to notice . . . how not to cry or show fear while being beat with a shoe by a foster parent . . . how to mask any signs of vulnerability when passing the dealers and gangsters on the street . . . or how to fight when one or a bunch of kids jump you on your way home from school.
Somehow, Mathew knew he had a choice. He could conform to the status quo and become a victim of the mentality generated by this environment, or he could find a way to break free and build a different kind of life. Joining the U.S. military at age 18 as an exit route from what he'd known forever seemed like a promising solution, but it carried an exacting price tag of its own.
Mathew's childhood began to seem like it had been easy compared to the brutality of training and fighting in Iraq while witnessing the slaying of friends who had become like brothers. Would Mathew ever find home? Follow the author's journey through seemingly endless challenges and failures to understand how these selfsame circumstances mold him into a mature and courageous man. In Finding Home, pain and heartbreak are transformed to what they truly are - stepping stones to ultimate strength and personal freedom.
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Giveaway ends November 2nd, 2015 at 11:59 pm EST
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