The introduction to my story....

I'm very excited about this new adventure I've embarked upon! This adventure which allows me to remain somewhat anonymous yet share my story with others who might find themselves in the same predicament; the predicament of being stuck at a fork in the road of your life.
At this point I'm very confused. It's difficult to sort out my feelings. I know i feel loss and i know i feel a yearning for the past, for my youth and those qualities that made me special. I feel like all that is long gone. Even though I am only 31 I feel as though it was another life and another person. For those that knew me it would almost seem impossible that i would end up this way??!! I don't know. Life takes you through many detours i guess... but let me paint you a picture of the girl I was.

Let's go back 6 years ago.... No, let's go back even further for just a bit so you can REALLY understand who i am. I was born to young, immigrant parents. My mother was born in Mexico and my father was born in Cuba. My immediate family was small (uncommon for latin families) as I only had one older brother. My parents were extreme opposites. My mother was a shy,introverted realist and my father was an optimist, a dreamer and a non-conformist. It's funny because I've always felt like I have very contradicting traits; my parents are the reason why. I share my father's passion for life, his sense of adventure and optimism yet there is part of me that is fragile and introverted. The only thing my parents had in common was that they both had romantic souls. We lived a very romantic lifestyle, sort of bohemianlike. I almost wanna say my parents were kind of hippies only they were too stylish to be hippies...lol. We didn't have a lot of structure. There wasn't a lot of order but there was a lot of love and laughter. Music was a huge part of our household. Music was constantly playing in the background. Our household was very lives consisted of music, poetry, politics and friends. Another big part of our lives were the characters in it. They are icing on the cake to the story of my life. It was mostly my father's cousins who had fled Cuba and whom my father took under his wings from the moment they came to the U.S. They lived next door to us yet at times it felt like they lived WITH us because of the amount of time they spent around our dinner table, cigarette in one hand and expresso in the other telling jokes, discussing politics and lost love all while melancholic spanish music played in the background. I was a very precocious child, that's the reason i was able to take all of it in and be influenced by it. I didn't stand a chance! How could i NOT grow up in love with love with all that romanticism around?!!
So there it is. That is the essence of me. I am an old soul with a passion for life, love and knowledge. To say that i am a passionate person would be putting it mildly. I have that reckless passion and senstitivity that artists do. I'm sure there are a lot of you out there that know what I'm talking about. Many of you may have an artistic soul without considering yourself an "artist"... but unfortunately with passion and sensitivity there is also the down side of pain and depression. That's just the way it is. It's almost impossible to have one without the other.

So now that you have an idea of who I am i will begin to explain to you how i got to where i am today.