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Black Soul (The Forbidden Series Book 1) – Kindle edition by Odessa Gillespie Black. #FREE #AbsolutelyFree #books #writerscommunity #writersnetwork #amreading. Also available on #KU http://bit.ly/ForbiddenBook1
Genetically enhanced body guard, Dylan Alexander, is permanently bound to his client, but is programmed to never feel emotions toward her. In the eyes of his creator, a doctor at a private organization called The Institute, duty should drive a Sentinel and emotions fog the senses. When the Institute learns of Dylan’s passion for his client, Emilie Grace, they deem him defective and recycle him, but is love housed in the brain or in the soul? And if Dylan isn’t born of a human, does he have a soul? Will Dylan remember his love for his client in a new body? Find out in Object of my Protection. #SciFiRomance #PostApocalyptic #KindleUnlimited
I’ve never been so honored in all my life, other than when my husband proposed to me after 3 days of talking to me nonstop and when I birthed the children God blessed me with. I can’t say thank you enough to all the people who supported me during the harrowing time it took to write this.
Now You See Me is an autobiography of sorts. I changed character names to protect the privacy of some of the people who’ve played an important role in my life, but it’s all true. Every word. Every memory.
Dealing is healing.
That’s my new motto since the completion of this work. For years, I thought I’d dealt with and handled all the after effects of what happened to me as a child. When I got into the first molestation scene, I was fine, but as the next few piled up on me, I was weighted with so much hurt that it blurred my vision, darkened the brightness of my soul, and took a very negative toll on my relationship with my husband. For a few weeks, I literally had to stop writing, get medication for depression, fight suicidal thoughts, and learn how to forgive myself. I know the things that happened to me were not my fault, but somehow it all felt too coincidental. Eventually, I figured out that forgiving myself wasn’t what I needed to do. I had to forgive the people who scarred me and turn those marks into battle wounds.
I was a survivor. Not a victim. Nor had I lured any of the molesters to do the things they did. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. My father’s friends were all sexually deviant, though my father, himself, never, ever touched me or gave me an uncomfortable feeling. The men he spent time with… They were to blame. And they needed forgiveness, even if they had already passed on from this life.
This is where I started to actually deal with the pain, the nightmares, the fear of being touched by a man, especially the one who’d waited for me for all that time while I was internally battling those demons. My husband. He’s been the most stable, loyal, loving, Godly man I could have been blessed with. He proposed to me after 3 days of knowing one another, then told me he’d love me enough for the both of us, until I was able to return the affection. Wow.
What a man.
So, if you can, I’d love for you to preorder NOW YOU SEE ME, and review it. It was a product of blood, sweat, and tears. My whole soul was crushed then healed during the process of creating it. Thank all so much. I can never repay you for your compassion, prayers, and support.
I’m a bad person.
There’s nothing I’ve ever done in my life that’s good enough to get me into Heaven.
That makes me bad. Jesus died on the cross to make sure that bad people like me were able to enter the gates of Heaven. I’m so thankful for that and all the other blessings he’s bestowed upon me. I can never say thank you enough.
Honestly, I’m a good person. I tithe. I don’t do drugs or drink alcohol. I do what I can for others around me. But all that isn’t enough. I have to build a relationship with Jesus. That’s what truly matters. So many people think that they can do good things to get them further with God, but that isn’t true. Having a one-on-one with God/Jesus is the only way. If there ever was something we could have done to get us into Heaven, God wouldn’t have had to send his Son to Earth and offer him up in exchange for our sins. It’s a simple, profound, and wonderful thing.
So, if anyone of you feel as though you need to try to be good enough before you ask Jesus into your heart, don’t worry. You’ll never be good enough, so there’s no time like the present. Say this prayer:
DEAR HEAVENLY FATHER,
I KNOW THAT I AM A SINNER. I BELIEVE YOU SENT YOUR SON TO DIE ON THE CROSS FOR MY SINS. I ASK JESUS TO COME INTO MY HEART SO THAT I CAN BE FREED OF THESE SINS AND BE MADE A NEW CREATION, BE MADE WHOLE AGAIN. I KNOW YOU LOVE ME MORE THAN ANYONE ON THIS EARTH AND THAT YOU WANT ME TO JOIN YOU IN YOUR KINGDOM, SO PLEASE ACCEPT ME IN.
THANK YOU,
A NEW CHILD OF GOD
Our Heavenly Father paid the price for all of us before our Earthly parents planned our existence. Jesus built a bridge to Heaven with only two pieces of wood…. The Cross.
What a loving God!
Listening to a preacher speak on Mercy on 106.9 helped me so much, yesterday.
My husband and I reach out to people and animals in our neighborhood and outlying areas, and there are times we get bit for it. The wounds are still fresh, and at times hurt so bad, they urge me to stop helping, stop giving of myself. And lately, I feel bitter.
The story this particular preacher shared went like this (to the best of my recollection): A very young nurse who helped bedridden patients took care of a lady who’d had an aneurysm that left her completely helpless. To protect her identity, we’ll call the patient Sarah. She never showed emotions, was unable to move her limbs, and was dependent on the care of the staff at the young nurse’s hospital.
The young nurse was distraught many days, due to the condition of the patients and how hopeless her job seemed to be, but she continued to care for the patients with love and tenderness.
A seasoned nurse on one of her shifts instructed her to distance herself and not become too emotionally involved. Especially with Sarah. Sarah’s life expectancy had already been exceeded, so investing anything in her would be an emotional pitfall for the young nurse, according to the seasoned nurse.
The young nurse just couldn’t find it in her heart to stop caring for her patients as she always had. It just seemed wrong to treat them as a number, so she spent hours with Sarah, talking to her, singing to her, and treating her with exceeding kindness.
On Thanksgiving day that year, the young nurse entered Sarah’s room and said, “Sarah, do you know what a wonderful day it is? It’s Thanksgiving. I want you to know how Thankful I am for you.”
For the first time since she’d been admitted, Sarah’s whole body twitched. The young nurse was alarmed at first, but when she inspected Sarah’s face, tears streamed down Sarah’s cheeks, the first documented emotion any of the staff had ever witnessed from her.
Three days later, Sarah passed on to be with the Lord.
The young nurse learned that the time, devotion, love, and respect she treated her patients with was not a wasted investment. Sarah helped her to see that God’s love was and is greater than any thing. And the young nurse continues to share his love, to this day.
This particular sermon taught me that when I give, God’s love should be evident. A true spirit of a giving heart sacrifices. If I’m not sacrificing something of myself, then I’m not doing God’s will. I’ve learned over the last few years, that no good deeds are done without reward. The reward may come years later, and may never be seen by me in my lifetime. All I can hope for is that someone see’s God’s love in me and chooses to give his or her life to him fully.
Thank you, Jesus, for the situations that cause me pain, struggle, and sacrifice. Through these trials, I come closer to you. For the world hated you, but you won in the end. In you, I am strong, fulfilled, and joyous!
So, I was doing laundry this morning. While loading towels into the washer, I giggled when I came across a towel that reminded me of Matt’s sketch about “monsters under the bed with crunchy towels.” I use comedy to get me by, so this particular towel caused a thought to run through my sexual-abuse-survivor mind: “This smells like old man balls. And I’m an expert. Better add some vinegar.”
“Just checking to see if you’re my audience,” Matt would say. Same here.
Matt said if you’re an artist, to keep doing what you’re doing. As an author, I consider myself an artist. I paint pictures with words. Did you know if you research and write a well-constructed book about something, the general consensus says you’re an expert? Between my experiences as a child and my research, I wrote a book called Now You See Me detailing the darkest secrets of my troubled past. That makes me an expert in my own life and how I best dealt with the abuse. In it, I used comedy to help smooth over the roughest scenes, so I can totally relate to a standup comedian. Comedy makes light of all the darkness in the world, and in my opinion, Matt Rife is THE BEST at this. In His epic Netflix special, Natural Selection, a deal he’s been trying to land forever it seems like (it’s about time, Netflix. SMH), Ugly internet trolls had him on a rant of hilarity at its finest. Apparently, there’s not much he can say on social media without a whole troll tribe calling him out. And if you know Matt, or are a stalker fan like me (JK, but not really), you know that was a BIG mistake. Huge.
This performance was one of the best I’ve ever seen. With his enthralling storytelling that made you forget for a second that you were watching a comedian, he drew you in, then slammed you out of your seat onto the floor laughing. The best kind of comedy.
The last line he spoke referred to someone jabbing him for only doing crowd work, then it hit me that not once had he interacted with his audience the way he normally does, which is beyond brilliant, if you ask me. And if you’re reading this, then you did. 🙂
Matt Rife is the most talented comedian in the history of comic relief. He can either give a long, clutch-your-gut-because-you-laughed-so-hard performance or he can work any human on the planet if they’ve had the luxury of being in his audience. With finesse, and a good bit of sexy, he creates an onslaught of unforgettable hilarity that just makes your day better. I know of no one else who can do it like Mr. Rife. He truly is an artist.
Backstory time: My first time watching him, I took my phone to the bathroom with me and was in a very dark place. I’d just had to do the unthinkable: put my mom in a rest home due to the severity of her dementia. I’d been caregiving 24/7 for five years, and I had nothing left to offer the world, as far as I could see. Although I loved her to no end, dealing with her demented guerilla warfare for five years left me hollow. With dementia patients, you have to carry out award winning acting to keep the patient calm. After doing this for so long, my identity was lost to me. Without her there, I couldn’t find the box in my mind where I’d had to stuff my true self away to keep her happy. To add to my depression, her first few days in, I’d been getting constant calls from the nursing staff and my sister that she wouldn’t keep clothes on and was running up and down the halls in her birthday suit. Her goal, according to her, was to get to the kitchen, lie down in the floor, and let the cooks prepare her to serve as the next meal to the population of the rest home. It wasn’t funny at the time, but I won’t be mad if you laugh, now.
Back to the reason I was in the bathroom with my phone and my first Matt Rife experience. So, I’m sitting in steaming tub of water crying, and something speaks to me, “Watch that Matt guy your daughter was telling you about.” In a moment of clarity, I search out his TikTok and allow the videos to play. I went from tears rolling down my cheeks from a place of desperation to tears of laughter. Thank you, for that, Matt. I’m in your debt.
Matt, if you ever get to read this, I’d be honored to be in your crowd. And if we meet up online, we can go troll-tramping together, because I’m sure there will be some comments left here about my off-color, not politically correct way of using humor to traverse my darkest days and then writing it down for the world to see. I’m ready. Bring it. 🙂
Much love.
Author Odessa Gillespie Black
On February 22, 2021, I tested positive for Covid-19, at which time I had to go to the court house and try to fight being evicted from my home, in Cherryville, NC. My husband, my daughter and myself were all sick and despite the moratorium, I was still evicted. When I took my positive test results and slapped them on the counter, the people behind the little plastic windows were appalled.
As if I wasn’t supposed to be there.
As if I had any other choice.
I could barely walk, and I still was made to fight. Even though the laws of our land had put forth something that was supposed to protect me. But obviously the court system didn’t care. They said there was nothing they could do.
To beat it all, we’d been up-to-date on our rent until he threatened eviction papers. We told him the home my mother had was dilapidated and that we wouldn’t have enough time or finances to fix it so that we could leave his property, but he didn’t care. We were asked to vacate the premises because he wanted to sell the home. At that time, we told him we would have to take all the money we had to make Mama’s home liveable because the bedrooms had no floors. Below is just one of them.
We began to use the rent we’d been paying him to fix the house.
He then had the sheriff’s office deliver eviction papers that stated we we’re being evicted because my mom had, had to come live with us (due to the condition of her home and she’s an Alzheimer’s patient) and that we were behind on rent.
Yes. We were evicted.
So the moratorium was not followed and we spread Covid into the courthouse by showing up for court which didn’t follow the moratorium. I think I should sue somebody, I’m just not sure where to start.
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In February 2021, my oldest daughter, flipped my best friend’s Ford Expedition and was ejected from the front windshield. Ceara will tell you not to text and drive. She has a permanent, not-so-visible-anymore scar as a reminder, but she uses it as a public service announcement. It was unfortunate that it happened in so many ways, but it led us to many blessings.
In March, just one week after the accident, a friend of ours contacted us and told us about this amazing supplement that could be ingested as well as broke open from the capsule and spread over Ceara’s wound while it was in the healing mode. In two weeks, the second picture above shows the results. So, I began taking that particular supplement myself, along with two others that helped with inflammation and natural energy production. In a week, my body felt as though it was brand new, and Ceara’s face looked like this:
Now, I’ve tried every type of product in the book. Every beauty product. Every shampoo. Every cream. Every tool. You name it. I’ve tried it. I’ve also dumped them in the trash.
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Honestly, it’s been more than a year, but this last year, the losses hit me.
Father-in-law, May 2017, my daddy in August 2017, Grandmother October 2018, around 13 family and friends, all gone. Passed away. It all happened so fast, it was a blur. And–it might sound crazy to add these as losses, but any animal lover knows my agony–my two chihuahuas of 7 and 16 years gone in 2019. On top of all this, when my father passed, my mother’s health took a turn for the worse and she had to move in with me. She has Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Most days, I find myself hiding from the reality of it all. Being a writer didn’t even help. It used to be my out. My place to go when the rest of the world was crazy. The worst of it all was that I couldn’t hug my Daddy and feel better instantly like I always used to.
I’ve always heard that you’re not a real writer if you don’t write a little every day. Taking a break for the year of 2019 didn’t make me any less real. It just made me less visible to the world.
Darkness surrounded me from every corner, and writing felt like a task. I didn’t even feel like writing down my feelings. A lot of the time, the emotions were so back and forth, bi-polar if you will, that I couldn’t get a handle on them long enough to write about them. And with my mom, I had to, and still have to, pretend I’m happy so that she doesn’t reflect my mood back at me. Alzheimer’s patients normally react that way. If I’m upset, she’s upset. If I’m happy, she’s happy, etc. So, all in all, I’m not even sure what I’m feeling, most days. Sometimes I believe the lie in the role I’m playing; other times it weighs down on me so much that I can’t breathe.
Today, something happened to me.
Something different than the same humdrum days that seem to run together.
I realized that punishing myself for failing at being a real writer was ridiculous. I hadn’t failed. I’d just taken a much needed break and put things first that needed to be first. Like my mom and my mental health.
Today, I feel better. Like a weight has been lifted off me. I can now move forward without the guilt and not feel as though I’ve been lax. Sometimes, we must take time. Our writing would take the brunt of our emotions and not be as good as it would have been if we’d have been more focused. It shouldn’t feel like a job, an obligation. It should continue to be our out. Our place to go when the world is too much.
Strangers kidnapping children used to be a parent’s deepest fear. Since the 1980’s and beyond, we’ve heard every horror story imaginable detailing horrible abductions of children. Normally those story didn’t yield a very positive outcome, either. Now, as parents, we’ve learned to keep closer tabs on our children when strangers are present, but did you know people closer to you can harm your children just as much as the ones who are more out of reach? I’m living proof this is true.
As a little girl, I was sexually abused by seven different people. They were all males from ages 15 and up. Five of them were either family or family friends, and two were strangers. That being said, five people closest to my mother and father were pedophiles. And they never knew. There were no clues or large signs over their heads stating their intentions or past histories. It was difficult to figure out if a person had their children’s best interest at heart then, and it’s still true today.
As parents and grandparents, all we can do to ensure our children’s safety is be selective about with whom our children spend alone time and be especially picky about their surroundings.
I’ve detailed the sensitive nature of my past and how I have grown as a person having been a sexual abuse survivor in my book Now You SEE Me. If you’d like to check it out, please know that I tried to handle the story with as much sensitivity as possible when talking about such subjects. It’s definitely an eye-opener, so be prepared to be changed when you flip the last page.
As a little girl, we lived in destitute conditions because they couldn’t stop buying. Now, I’m all grown up and we’re having to go through a four bedroom, 3 bath house searching out our valuables: pictures, documents, and a few family heirlooms. The rest has been ruined by rat and canine feces.
When we find pictures of how the house used to look, we cry, my sister and I. It was a soft yellow, with huge windows covered by expensive awnings and a huge yard with big trees two little girls could climb and see the rest of the world from a very different view. Then, when the buying started, we didn’t realize that it was the start of something awful. Something that would grow bigger than anything we could ever imagine. And we sure didn’t think we’d have to do without underwear, socks, and clean clothing because there was no way to decipher where any of those essentials had been buried beneath trash, cock roaches, and animal feces.
We had seven adult dogs, and three litters of puppies. That added up to 41. They played outside because the doors were left open all day and night, but they came in to do mother nature’s business. At night, cockroaches scurried over the floors. My sister and I used to play a deadly game with them. Deadly for them, fun for us. We’d turn off the lights for a few minutes, and when we’d flip it back on, there wouldn’t be a square foot on the floor that didn’t have at least 20-30. They’d scatter and we’d go to stompin’. We’d giggle as we tramped all over them, then count who’d pulverized the most. I almost always won.
When one of them crawled into my ear and made a noise as if it were screeching inside my head, I no longer found them fun to play with. It took three days for it to die, all of which I’d complained, cried, and moaned to my mother to do something. She thought I was being overly dramatic. When she used tweezers to reach in and inspect my ear, she started pulling out bug parts. She cried and begged my forgiveness, as she cleaned my ear the best she could. She then took me to the ear doctor and had my ears professionally cleaned. That’s the last time I could hear properly out of my right ear. To this day, I’ve learned to read lips when people speak, but a lot of the times, I have to request for them to repeat themselves. It’s a constant reminder of the roach who stole my hearing and the life I had to survive as a child.
I’ve learned to forgive all Mama and Daddy’s shortcomings. I know they weren’t well, but now that we’re having to clean the house out to unearth floors that are rotting and have fallen through, good memories are intermingled with the bad. My sister and I found a gorgeous silver lining out of all the cloudy days, but sometimes those clouds threaten my current everyday life. I have to work hard at not having a cluttered home. It’s NOWHERE near as bad as theirs was, but my definition of clutter is a lot more strict than most. I hate anything in my home more than the bare essentials.
I’ll upload pictures of the house soon and tell you all what we’ve had to do in the rooms to get them even remotely bearable. I wrote a book to detail some of the more morbid details of my childhood. I’d like to warn you, though, it’s hard to stomach. It took me two months to edit it for trying not to vomit or slide into a deep dark pit of depression. Writing it was even harder than that. Most days, I cried the whole time I was writing. I thought I’d gotten over all that stuff, but apparently what’s buried deep hurts worse than surface wounds.
Now You See Me is my story. It’s simultaneously heart-wrenching and heart-warming. I hope you are changed for the better after reading it.
A few years ago, I wrote a post detailing the love story between my husband and me. We met, 3 days later we were engaged, and six weeks later, we were married. After a tumultuous year of marriage, Brant fell ill with mold poisoning. He was in a coma for a month and a half, during which time, I fell head over heels in love with him. I’d loved him as a person and respected him trying to provide for our family, but romantic love wasn’t in the equation. When he finally came out of it completely healed, he had to relearn how to use his hands, arms, and legs, and to do everything all over as if he were an infant. He was shocked to find me doting over him as if we’d been married for years. While I was writing a book about him, I felt the urge to tell it all. Allow everyone to see all of me.
At the age of five years, my immediate future was filled with sexual abuse. From the next two years, seven different men molested and raped me. When the abuse finally abated, my parents turned into hoarders. They kept everything. Within a year, the house was so full of Mama’s many purchases, you could barely move through the house, and much of the time you had to crawl over stuff. The yard was cluttered with Daddy’s cars, travel trailers, tires, tow dollies, carnival equipment, and every other sort of yard ornament forcing us to park on the side of the road. Inside the house, added to all the stuff, Daddy’s population of animals finally reached a count of 42. That was 8 full-grown dogs and 4 litters of puppies, all of which played outside and came inside to poop and pee.
With feces, urine, boxes, and loose items strung all over the house, having friends over was impossible, so I spent as much time away as I could. I had to stay home through the week, so my clothing absorbed the stench of the house. Kids at that age loved to bully and make fun of me. Life was a living hell in grade school.
Once I hit Junior High school, I’d learned how to, for the most part, mask the smell of my clothing and hair with perfume sprays and deodorant. Kids had almost grown out of being cruel, but there were a few stragglers who still found joy in seeing me crushed by their heinous remarks.
High school was easy sailing other than my embarrassment about my house when kids rode by or unexpectedly stopped in to see me. I’d have to shut the door to the house behind me and step outside to host guests. Years of animals depositing their urine and feces in and on the carpet made the carpet rot. The smell was so bad by then that it could be detected when one pulled onto the driveway and got out of their car.
After I was old enough to move out on my own, I didn’t look behind me when I left. I visited my Daddy often, but couldn’t stay long for the smell. Living there, I’d grown somewhat accustomed to the smell, but when I no longer resided there, the smell almost knocked me down and gagged me.
A more detailed account of my life exists in the paperback Now You See Me. If you’d like to read more and see how Jesus saved me in so many more ways than one, pick up a copy at Amazon.com or buy an ebook from any of the book retailers online. Thank you for your support.
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