Everyone has a private battle to win—depression, fear, drugs, alcoholism, PTSD. The list goes on.

Mine involve sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse and mental abuse. They all can have the power to make the light go out of our lives and leave us in total darkness.

Trouble is something no one can escape. Everybody has it happen in their lives in some shape or form. Some people hide it way down deep inside themselves. For others, it calls to them, lures them and will lead them astray. We are all constructed differently; ain’t no two of us who think alike or act the same. Almost every one of us is fighting a demon, a very powerful one. Some of us have learned to live with it, and others have learned to control it. The demon has a name: anxiety, aka worry.

We must all exercise caution in today’s world. It is filled with so much trickery; it’s hard to know who to trust. All predators wear a mask that grins and lies. You never know by looking who is what: predator or prey?

There are always two sides—good and bad, right and wrong, heaven and hell, happy and sad, light and dark and God and Satan. Our lives are set forth on a journey from our beginning to our end. Time will pass and so will we.

Yesterday is a memory that once was today. Tomorrow is only a vision, nothing promised. Today is here now, and if you choose life then live it before it is gone and is known as your past.

There are so many decisions and circumstances that I regret still today. How could I have known that those decisions I was forced to make would still haunt me today? How did I not know that those soldiers meant me such evil? They all corrupted my life and made my life a living everyday hell. It was hard keeping such big secrets that you were threatened not to tell. I don’t even understand why I kept them for so long.

I used to think I was somewhat normal until they changed me. I have only a glimpse of a memory that reminds me of what I used to be like before that time when I was raped, after they took everything from me while, ironically, they left me with a lifetime of nightmares. They altered everything in my world in a blink of an eye. Their memories took up a full-time residency in my mind!