Biography of Genie Gosnell

Genie Gosnell, talented author and artist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She resides with Larry, her husband of thirty-five years and their two spoiled cocker spaniels, Mollie and Sadie. They have one son, Keith. Writing has been one of her passions since the age of seven when she wrote her first short story. She is an avid animal lover and she expresses that through her artistic portraits of dogs. Her artwork also includes portraits of people, and beautiful canvas oil paintings.

The reason I wrote this book is not because I believe that my life is so fascinating or special, or that I am the only one who has had losses and struggles with life's realities. I wrote this for self-satisfaction, self-healing, self-therapy and a personal goal.

I have had a secret desire to do this for a very long time but have never gotten beyond a page or two, but perhaps this is the time for me to pursue my desire.

I hope that my story will help someone else who has felt the feelings I have felt. The feeling of helplessness, emptiness, fearfulness, the deep sadness and the dark thoughts that come from depression and felt as though they were the only one with these feelings and emotions. I am here to say that you are not alone.

I believe that there are an overwhelming number of women out there who have felt this way at some point in their life. And some that feel this way at this very moment. I say women because I believe that women take on much more responsibility when things go wrong than we need to.

Women have the ability or perhaps misfortune is a better word, to be able to forgive everyone else except herself for all that does not go perfectly smooth in her life or in the life of her family. We always give the benefit of the doubt to everyone else. We see only what we want to see and hear only what we want to hear. We would rather accept than challenge, this way we don't hurt or upset anyone else.

My hope for this book is to let the depressed, male or female, know that only someone who has been in that dark place can completely understand the darkness, loneliness, the loss of self, and the loss of mind and spirit. I have been there and experienced all of these feelings and thoughts.

The one thing I have learned from these experiences is that we cannot depend on anyone else to fix us or rescue us from all of our pain and make everything okay again. Only we can do that, and we do it alone.

Therapy and medication is an important part of recovery, but the truth is that we got into depression alone, we stayed in depression alone and we have to get out of depression alone. We can get through it. It can happen if we put as much energy into getting well as we did suffering in depression. Depression is an exhausting state of mind.

We must try to remember that when we are suffering this way everyone in the family suffers also, each in a different way. I hope to help the people who live with and love a depressed person. I know how difficult we can be to live with. How helpless it must feel, how it must hurt to see the one you love suffer in such silence and there is nothing you can do or say that seems to help. Depression is a very mysterious and difficult illness to understand. We do not, or least I did not, expect anyone to understand it because I could not and still do not completely understand it myself.

This project took a lot of mental energy, and a lot of tears. Reliving painful experiences over and over again and facing things that were hard to face. But it is worth all of that and more because I have learned so much from the good times and the bad times in my life. It has made me the person I am, and today I can say that being me is enough.