This is my stop during the book blitz for Your crossroads. Your choice. by EJ Apicello. This book blitz is organized by Lola’s Blog Tours. The book blitz runs from 3 till 9 July. See the tour schedule here.
Your crossroads. Your choice.
By EJ Apicello
Genre: Non-fiction/ Self Help
Release Date: June 2017
Blurb
Welcome to my diary, my journey, as I tripped and crawled through the darkest time in my life- when I witnessed people that I held incredibly close to me shatter my very existence with their words and actions. The things within this book spine are extremely raw and exceptionally real.
You and I are going to get very close, the details in this book, although oddly general, are incredibly specific. Yes, I realize what I just said and as you read my words you will see what I mean. As you silently gasp and mentally bitch slap me, please be kind because my story is just that – my story. It is not any more or less special than yours. In fact the only difference between our stories are the choices we made at each of the crossroads in our lives.
For most of my life the choices I made were not based on my happiness but on everyone else’s. This book describes what I have experienced in my journey to finding my happiness and hopefully never letting it go. Sadly, it took me thirty six years to find the strength I need to detoxify my life and self view and find someone who is worthy of my awesomeness. Thirty six years to shatter the negative foundation I had built shatter the ultimate representative I created to hide behind and begin the process of building a new foundation. Only this foundation will be built on strength, confidence and above all, happiness.
So take a minute or thirty and sit with my story for a while. You never know what you might find out.
Find Your crossroads. Your choice. on Goodreads
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About the Author
Welcome to my real, crazy, emotional, probably too honest journey. I am an everyday girl in this everyday world trying to keep my head above water and within the pages of this book you will learn about the things that have broken me down and the steps I am taking to build back up.
You will see, my new friends, that this story is written in a unique, general, conversational voice, which was my choice. I want you to be able to picture yourself in my shoes, relate my trials and tribulations to yours and see that you too can find your happiness. Even if you don’t realize this yet, every single one of us possesses things inside of ourselves that we didn’t know were there.
It took my life taking a crazy right turn and dumping me at the lowest possible point before I could see the strength within myself. We are not defined by what we do, we are defined by the choices we make.
I decided when I put pen to paper that I want my choices to start defining me as strong, confident, secure and above all else, happy. So, who am I? How about I tell you who I was – a self loathing shell of myself who put everyone else’s happiness before my own. Herein lies my story to find that happiness and all of the ups and downs along the way. See who I was and who I am trying to become and maybe, somewhere in there, you will find out a little about yourself too.
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*********EXCERPT********
Chapter : Introduction
Quasi Logic Behind Totally Illogical Thoughts
I challenge anyone to argue with the following oh so utterly simplistic, almost ridiculously too easy to be real, ,truth. Here it is people – be ready for your mind to be blown! Every choice has an opposite choice. And these choices come with a crossroads. A crossroads you are in control of. So, go ahead, try and come up with a reason to argue that I speak isn’t the absolute truth, I’ll wait. Come back when you realize you can’t think of a single one. Please don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I enjoy being right, I just know it’s hard to argue with such an insanely logical and straightforward truth. You see my readers, my new friends, it will hurt less if you accept this to be so. Everything in our world has two opposing choices that sit at our own personal crossroads, forcing us to choose to embrace either the right or the wrong, the easy or the hard, the light or the dark. Throughout this book, you will see how I am working through this arduous journey with you by my side, priding myself on being a woman of logic and facts, bbut also let’s be clear, I also believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy and unicorns!
What can I say, it gives me intense pleasure to know that while you read this book you are going to be kept on the edge of your seat! There will be sexy steamy bits, utterly hopeless bits, raw emotional bits, hilariously funny bits and pathetic whiny bits. But I promise, if you stick with me, at the end of it all, there will be mostly strong, empowered, utterlyconfident bits. But who knows, right? This is honestly an introduction to my journey of selfdiscoverynot directed simply at you but to me as well. Welcome aboard my crazy train, I hope you enjoy the ride! -0
Please recognize as you stumble through my jumbled musings and scattered thoughts that where I sit typing this, even on the last of the last of the last re-writes, I am starting at the same place in my journey as you are right at this very moment. The beginning, and I’m not sure what will happen at the end. This thought makes me both nervous and excited. Is my life going to stay the same or will it take a completely different path, one that is still unbeknownst even to me? What a novel idea (wink wink) that you will be right there to experience my HOLY SHIT moments as I experience them.
“Talking” to you like this is going to force me to have thoughts, feelings and emotions that I haven’t allowed myself to experience before. This will be like breaking through the fourth wall just like they did during the movie Deadpool, which, by the way, is the best movie I have ever seen. It was like the movie was talking to my SOUL! I digress though, and I must get back to focusing on the introduction, for this is my welcome to you, as if you are right here with me urging me on, especially when I feel like I can’t go any further.
I will admit this, I am being slightly selfish I’m using you for some personal gain. Why would I admit this upfront? Well, because I think it’s important to be honest with myself and you, my new confidants, so that we have a clear understanding of what is to come. Be honest with yourselves too, you picked up this book for a reason. There is something you are hoping to gain from reading through my journey, sharing my experiences and being able to reflect on them as if they were your own. Which is exactly what I would like you to do by the way. Put yourself into my shoes through my words. I purposely kept this book very generic, partially because I am trying to fly under the radar until I am so famous it doesn’t matter anymore, and partially because I want you to use this book as a sounding boards for your own emotions thoughts and feelings. And please remember that is a good thing, it is one of the two biggest reasons that I wrote all of this nonsense down and worked so hard to get it into your hands, your conscious, your world.
I am going to introduce you to the many faces that I wear, or should I say wore, throughout most of my life. You will also be here to discover the parts of the new me that I am in the process of piecing together. With that being said, it is imperative this early in our budding relationship that I share with you the vast clarity I have found while writing this novel and you see the clarity of your choice while reading it. It took me up until the moment the first letter was placed on the page, over thirty-six years, to realize that in spite of the very logical, blackandwhite way of processing things that I so absolutely rely on, iit is time I accept that I too am layered in shades of grey, just like everyone else.
Ok, Maybe Only Two Shades of Grey
I have always had two opposing…shades, for lack of a better term…inside of me and I thought that my attempt at trying to balance them was working. And by balancing, I mean smothering one side so that the other was the only one seen by the world. I didn’t realize the amount of work, stress, anxiety and effort that I was wasting on stuffing down everything that actually was, for better or worse, part of my true self. I chose early on to place the pleasure and happiness of everyone else above my own and it was killing me.
Sit and think about this for a moment I spent my life putting others happiness over mine. ,go ahead, you can put the book down, I’ll wait for you to come back when you realize how ridiculous that was. Put yourself into your past and go through the decisions you have made, the experiences you have had at each of your own crossroads. Did you put your happiness or the happiness of others first when you made your decisions? If your happiness was secondary, why? What reason did you sell yourself that sounded like it made sense at the time? You will notice several underlying themes throughout my story and keeping your happiness as the priority above all else is one of the most important. The weight of the entire world on your shoulders is crushing and thinking you can carry it alone is ridiculously unrealistic. As one person, we cannot be expected to fix everything and even more importantly we cannot be expected to follow every rule, to always be perfect. It is not possible and if that is your number one goal in life, well then you are basically living a lesson in futility. Case in point, me. I spent my life being concerned with not bucking the system, trying not to push the envelope because although it is something that I seem to be naturally attuned to do despite how hard I tried to fight it, going against the flow takes confidence in your own opinions. I lacked this confidence which is why I repressed that urge to push the envelope even though I always had that innate desire to walk the line.
In retrospect, it would have been much easier to use all of my energy to will myself to become a wallflower or doormat letting people walk all over me, allowing everyone else decide what makes me happy rather than letting myself decide. The problem was, however hard I tried to be a wallflower, to only be the color beige, I found that it was incredibly BORING! I still had my own opinions and knew what I wanted but it all boiled down to a lack of confidence. I had no confidence in myself and therefore believed that my opinions and choices were automatically wrong. It took me until now, and even now I still falter, but I am starting to realize that each and every one of us is traveling this path together towardss the same unknown. There is not one single person on this Earth who knows what is going to happen in the future, or who knows every right decision that is to be made, yet I was wasting my time worrying about it. There is not one person on this Earth who is perfect and has all the answers yet I spent the better portion of my first thirty years believing that I had to be that person. If a mistake was made or something was too unknown for me to prepare for, it was unacceptable. Living this way was exhausting and selfdestructive and the process of writing my journey down, sharing it with you, is my salvation. A tool I am using to step out of my comfort zone and become the person that I want to be, the person that will make me happy.
