I’ve done a lot of emotional healing over the past eight years. In the process, I barely made it to this point alive and breathing. The important thing is: that I’m still breathing. There have been several different psychiatrist and therapist over that span of years, as there have been medications. Some of those Mental Health Professionals have been worth their weight in gold, while others have no business trying to help anyone get through or around a trauma. I’ve always asked each one of them two questions before I was willing to share any part of what’s harboring in my soul.

1.) Have you ever suffered from depression or any other mental health issue?
2.) Have you ever thought about and/or tried to take your life?

A few told me they didn’t wish to share that with me, while others had. Needless to state, the few that wouldn’t answer my two questions — didn’t get the gig. Why did I want to know? Because, regardless of the diplomas hanging on their walls I knew if they were fortunate enough not to have had to face a mental health crisis, then no matter how many years they spent on getting those diplomas and how many case studies they had read and patients they counseled, they would never truly know what living in darkness was like and I had to be sure they understood that — that they didn’t personally know, but it didn’t mean I didn’t think they couldn’t help me. In fact, two Mental Health Professionals that had never known such darkness helped me greatly understand a lot about myself.

Over those years, I’ve shared some of it on Social Media as I have in my first and third books. There are those who have questioned why I would be so open and thought it was TMI (Too Much Information) and I’ve shared too much. But, that’s okay. Those that have thought as much can think that but I know in sharing, I’ve helped other people and that was the point. Being so open was never for wanting any one to feel sorry for me or for attention — it was to be a voice, especially for my mother whose voice, as her dreams, were silenced and destroyed by my father’s reign of terror. It’s because of what I witness her endure, and my own pain that I wanted to save the world. Of course, then my world was very small and it was my mother. That little boy’s desire to save the world has been wedged in my heart to this day.

When my fourth book “Under My Beautiful Flesh” finally makes it to print, it will be the last one I write that has anything to do with the four darkest years of my life beginning in January of 2009 or the dysfunction of my family or the violence and abuse I managed to live through as a child and how all of it has shadowed me and is one huge knot in my gut. With that stated, I know nothing that has happened to me hasn’t happened to other people — but again, it was to be a voice in the crowd.

If I’m on the earth long enough, I’m actually going back to a book project I started before I wrote my third book “Alabama Snow.” Ironically, it’s a love story spanning twenty-something years between two men. The irony is that I’m not by any means an authority on love but it’s a fiction write, so I figure I will just make it up as I go. There will be no details or truths to stick to, just fiction on what I think love is like for two people. “Under My Beautiful Flesh” however, will shock some people to the point they may see me in a different light — certainly one of varying intensities of how they may have once thought of me as a person to the degree their opinion of me will most likely be different when and if they make it to the last page.

I started writing so openly because I got to a point in my life — in my early thirties — that I couldn’t keep up the façade of a golden boy with a good childhood in my rear view mirror anymore and I couldn’t keep all the ugliness pushed deep down inside of me. It was coming up and out one way or another like a hardy dinner after a drinking binge of mixing wine, beer, and Diet Coke. Don’t do it — the mixture that is. Just trust me on this one. It’s not pretty.

All the pain and trauma from that childhood had begun eating me alive from the inside out. I started writing in hopes of getting all of it out of me. It became my first book, “In the Arms of Adam: a diary of men.” I never planned on that diary filled with anguish and sex and blood ever becoming a book. It was because of the encouragement of a dear friend, Susan — with whom I shared my writing. She told me, after getting over the shock I’d kept so many bad experiences secret, to keep writing because she believed by doing so it would help some people. It was also because of another friend, Charlie, who before he died from complications of AIDS, told me to let more people know the real Randy Chumbley. In fact, Charlie is the glue that holds my first book together. I no longer go by Randy anymore because of one of the things I learned about myself in therapy: Randy is that scared little boy who never got a chance to grow up but James-Randall is grown up or almost, and again he’s still breathing. I’m still figuring out if I want or need a hyphen between James and Randall.

During those four darkest years, friends had tried to counsel me, and in the process ended up saying the wrong things for the right reasons. The right reasons are they wanted me to get better and to find myself again. But, telling someone things like: get over it, buck up, don’t be so weak, find your courage, and move on are not. We are all affected by trauma in different ways that are unique to us as we process things and there is not a timeframe for the healing of those wounds — we mend differently as well and in our own time. Then there is the — “I know how you feel, but ...” No, they don’t know how someone feels until that someone’s heart is beating in their chest — then and only then will they, doctor or friend or family member truly and completely know that someone’s soul and what that someone has gotten over and left behind, and what stays with them and why. We all share analogous heartaches, but regardless of how similar they may be — they are idiosyncratic to each of us and they belong to no one else.”

The one valuable thing I have learned through the long process of finding myself again is: Sometimes it takes great courage just to breathe and nothing else. It’s okay to just breathe for a time until you can find it in yourself to get to a better place — a healthier place.