My interesting life: I'm not dead yet

Wrote in Response to Brian Head Welch's comment about Chester Bennington's suicide.  Written in emotion.  Please excuse mistakes.  By Rebecca Basley My heart is very heavy today. Not only am I mourning the loss of a very talented musician who lost his life to a horrible “disease” called depression that caused him to take his own life. I also have had to witness the backlash. The backlash of people who feel they have a right to judge him and his decisions and to see how this attack is affecting people, especially young people who like Chester and like myself, live with mental illness. First off, not all of us experience mental illness the same way. Just because your fight with mental illness never resulted in your desire to take your life doesn’t mean that this is the same for everyone else. For whatever reason, you had the wherewithal to fight off the tendency toward suicide does NOT give you the right to judge someone who has. According to the CD...

The very first thing I have to say is being a mom is the best job I ever had. Being the mom of an artist makes it that much sweeter and alot more fun.   This is my fun look at my life as an mom of an artist.  I've not only noticed this in my daughter but in some of her artist friends as well.  Here are 10 interesting things I have found along the way: 1.  Scattered brained much? My daughter and her artistic friends are so busy creating in their heads that other stuff gets lost in the shuffle. I am an expert at frantic phone calls because she forgot to bring this or that. 1a.  There is never a pocketbook big enough. It's amazing what finds it's way in my purse. At any given time I have extra pencils, Erasers (3 different types) her pens and for awhile I carried around a huge rolls of duct tape. If she could fit a an extra sketch book in there... 2.  Zoning When she is in the 'zone', a nuclear war head can strike next to them and they will not noti...

Honestly when I initially heard all this power of positive thinking jazz I thought it was bullshit. In fact, my friend in high school used to talk to me all the time about "PMA" a (positive mental attitude) and even though she was one of the most friendly and easy going friends I had.. even though she had challenged like most teenagers that girl had a peaceful air about her..( that made her seem like a partial alien to me at times) and when she set her mind to a goal no matter what it was she accomplished it.  Yet I still scoffed and made fun of her PMA. Fast forward to last year, well no, it all started with spending the day and then going to a party but an awesome man and his family (David P Smith). There was such a good vibe around him and later at the party with all of his friends that (even though it took me awhile and I fought it) began my daughter and my journey to accept the power of positive thinking. We made friends at his party who have become very important to u...

I'm actually pretty open about my life as an inmate wife.  My husband still is my best friend and my daughter's hero. We married in 2003 after living together for 2 years. My husband went to prison in 2006 and we have been an inmate family since then.  We are ten years in and have 30 years to go but we always hope that he won't have to serve the whole thing.  What he did is really not important to this blog.  I'm not ashamed of it but that is his story and by rights he should be the one to talk about it. I am posting this as the wife of an inmate and in this post, so I'm going to go over the basics of how to support a family of an inmate. Now why would you want to know this?   Lets start with the statistics: The United States contains 4 percent of the prison population as well as 22% of the global prison population. According to study done in 2014, "...more than 2.7  million  children have a parent who is incarcerated in the United...

So what is interesting?  As a general answer, I would say everything.  There is so much to learn, think about, explore, reflect, and simply be in life that it hardly seems fair the short time we are on this earth in this existence to experience all that is interesting.  That is why my motto is " I'm not dead yet!"  I have learned to give "never" the finger in many ways but as with everyone I am a complex   coming to this way of thinking didn't happen overnight and I followed any interesting path to get here. I joke that it all started when I was being created.  I joke there was a panel of gods and goddesses for differing pantheons gathered to grant each new spirit a wish and from that wish, they decided which ones they favored.  While most newly developed spirits asked for things like love, happiness, peace, wisdom, wealth, power the tricksters sat there bored and half listening to what most said and perhaps choosing a few they wanted to mess with. W...