As a fun little exercise, I thought that today I would briefly answer two questions. Who am I? And why do I write what I write?
My name is Deborah Pearson, I will be 44 at the end of this month. I was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to British parents who were out there to be missionaries. My father worked as a telecommunications engineer and My mother was trained as a Dressmaker, however, once the children came along she was a homemaker. My parents had four children, of which I am the youngest.
The year I turned two, my parents returned to the UK, because my grandmother on my mother’s side had Alzheimer’s disease. While I remember us visiting Grandma in the hospital over the years until she died in 1988 I do not count that as having met her. Of my four grandparents, I only knew my mother’s father.
A person’s life is formed mostly in the first seven years. My parents were members of the Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement and brought us up in that church.
The year I was five, my world was turned on its head, though I was too young to understand what was happening. In the UK, the year you turn five is when you first enter school, so my parents enrolled me in the first primary school I attended. Things at school were good. However, at the same time, I was going through a form of sexual abuse which I hid until I was in my mid-twenties when I sought out professional help. However, As these things do, it has left permanent scars.
At the age of six, after I was having trouble settling at school, my parents received permission to take me out of school and home school me. These years were important. It was during those years that my mother gave me my love of reading and other life skills.
At the age of nine, there were two major things that happened in my life. I developed a growth on my arm – called a granuloma. Thankfully, when it was removed it had calcified and I have had no problems with that since. The other thing was that I returned to the mainstream schooling system. However, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire so to speak. Returning to school is when the bullying from the other kids started. When I complained to my parents I was given the advice to just ignore the kids. I did this, but the bullying did not stop. Thankfully, for me, it was just words, but words hurt! Never underestimate the power that words can have over a person. It was not until I was in A-levels that the bullying escalated into physical acts, by which time I was able to say I don’t have to put up with this crap anymore and promptly left school in 1997.
After leaving School I went on to train as a Holistic Therapist, Work in McDonald’s, not finish my nursing training, Work as an admin assistant and do various other jobs as well.
In 2006 I was involved in a rather nasty car accident from which I sustained some rather nasty injuries. My left foot bones were completely dislocated and my right knee was an open fracture. For two weeks I was not allowed to weight bear on either foot. After two weeks I was allowed to use my right foot and not my left. When I finally got back to weight bearing on both feet, it was as though I had learn to walk again. Today, I am grateful to say that other than a couple of nasty scars I generally keep covered by tights, socks or trousers, I walk without a limp. However, I can no longer wear heels that are higher than an inch to and inch an a half – I miss those heels!
Recovery from the accident was slow and for years I would use a stick for support. However, I was recovering and as I did so new challenges came into my life, when in 2009 the first symptoms of Fibromyalgia began to make themselves known. Between 2009 and 2014 my health took a downward spiral. I had suffered from depression for most of my life, but added to that was now a growing list of health complaints including, Fibromyalgia, Raynaud’s Phenomena, Sinusitis and IBS. I will be forever grateful that at that time I was studying an Access to Healthcare course and as part of one of my projects, I discovered about gluten sensitivity. The symptoms fitted. I have never been tested for any sensitivities or allergies, but as I said the symptoms fitted. The migraines, the IBS, the Fibromyalgia pain, it all fitted. I had something that gave me hope something that I could do to fix my problems.
I had not thought about or looked at Diet and nutrition since I had completed my Holistic Therapies studies in 1999. However, with the discovery that my symptoms fitted gluten sensitivity, I was running back to to diet and nutrition, but not as I had been taught it in college. I began reading books by Robert Lustig, Gary Taubes, and others to see what was being said about Nutrition. I was looking at research papers to see what the research was bearing out and I found the Paleo diet. Anything was worth a try. Being disabled is no fun and the way the way I was heading I was heading towards being wheelchair bound very quickly! I was already walking on one to two walking sticks and scared to even take a bath without someone in the house in case I needed them to pull me out. Daily living was nightmare for me. So, with the knowledge of gluten sensitivity I modified the paleo diet in so much as I was addicted to my sodas and I needed the vitamins and minerals I would get from dairy. One meal a day I allowed myself a soda alongside my meals. I was not sure if it would work. After all, the doctors tests were all coming up ‘normal’.
It worked! Boy did it work! My health improved overnight! I have walked unaided since 2014. I have been medication free (except for that for diabetes, which I will come onto) since January 2014. Overnight, I no longer needed the walking sticks, within a month my depression and brain fog had lifted and I have gone on to feel healthier and better ever since. Every day I feel stronger and I’m able to do more! Now that does not mean that I have unlimited energy supplies or am free from health challenges. Unfortunately at the end of 2015 I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and despite eating strictly and removing as much ultra-processed foods from my diet as possible, my diabetes has gotten worse, which means that I am now on medication for that.
Ok, so personal life: I have dated only four guys in my life. All of them significantly older than I am and every relationship had its troubles. The fourth guy I dated is the one that I married. Unfortunately, after only five years of marriage, the relationship was unsalvagable and we separated in 2018 ending in divorce in 2020.
So how did I get into being a JAFF author?
During the early nineties we did not have a TV, but one of my older brothers was living up the road from where we lived and he did have one. So when in 1995 Pride and Prejudice was aired on the TV my mother had us go up and watch the episodes in his flat. It did not make much of an impression on me at the time. Most likely because not only was I forced to do so, but also because it was not the first episode of the series that they were watching. Yet, I clearly remember sitting on the floor and watching it. It was later on when I was eighteen and my mother bought VHS tapes that we sat down to watch it in its entirety that I caught the love of Jane Austen and began reading Miss Austen’s works. For the next twelve years I began reading various fanfictions that were out there. My mother would read the books, but she was someone who preferred the original. However, I continued to read fan fiction, yet the more I read the fanfictions the more I felt, not that I could write better, but that the writers were writing Darcy wrong. Darcy, I could understand. Much about his character is similar to my own. I began to feel guilty for being critical of other authors, after all, despite having written one or two stories while I was at school I was not an author. I had no aspirations to be one. Indeed, through my formative years I had wanted to be a nurse – so much so that I had chosen my GCSEs, and my A levels around that goal. Yet, I felt guilty.
So, it was guilt for criticising others that led me to sit down and write my own fan-fiction 2010. When I began the project, I was writing it for me, and I decided to write P&P from Darcy’s perspective. What made him the man he was. That book was likely my lightest. Yet, in chapters exploring his past, in went themes of bullying. Personal experience crept into the book. I found the courage to dip my toe in the fandom water, so to speak, when in 2016 I began putting the book on fan fiction.net. My book was loved, I took the plunge and I became a published author. Thus HOW IT ALL BEGAN was born. I had a blast. I found that I enjoyed writing. I also found something else.
I had found not only a passion in life, but a way in which I could help others. My dream of being a nurse had been born from that desire to help others in need. My books turn dark because my life is dark and messy. I do not dwell on the dark, I put in my books tools that I have found to help me in the hopes that if even one person reads the books they can find hope. They can find that while life is dark and its messy, you do not have to remain stuck in that dark and messy life. This is my desire, that while my characters, may be fictional and their situations fictional, the tools that I give my characters will be tools that my readers can take and improve their lives.
In HOW IT ALL BEGAN particularly in part 1 I throw in themes of bullying., something I experienced particularly badly in Middle School and High School.
In The Longbourn Conundrum I throw in theme of sexual and domestic abuse. I was never a victim of domestic abuse, thankfully, but all kinds of abuse of destructive to the to victim and while my experience of sexual abuse if compared to that or others could be deemed not so bad, I can look back and see how it destroyed my sense of self worth and created negative and destructive patterns in my life – patterns that I am struggling to break to this day! I was also diagnosed a few years ago with PTSD symptoms because of what I went through as a child.
While the top two books are the main two where I can directly say that life experience had played a major part in the stories. All of my books will have various nuggets thrown in.
One of my upcoming books that I am going to be releasing within the next year, is called The Darcy Nightmare. In that one I have put in a lot of my experiences with Fibromyalgia. Again while fictionalised, that book is personal experience, again with the intention of showing that no matter what others may think or whether they believe our condition is real, many do not, I hope to show that we can live full and meaningful lives despite the limitations that our condition places on our daily living. I desire once more to give hope to fellow sufferers out there.
It has been a difficult journey from a kid born into a conservative Christian household, sexually abused, bullied and going through all of it without support. To where I am today.
I know this comes at the bottom, but this far from being an insignificant after thought. I want to give a special shout out to someone. I have never met him, however, I have followed him and consumed his content ever since I came across his meditations back in 2016 and if he did not do such affordable giveaways, I would not be placed where I am today. I regard this man as a mentor, despite not knowing him personally as it is his work that has brought so much healing in my life and no matter how many times I listen, his techniques do work! So I want to say a huge thank you to Paul Santisi, without whose work, I would still be stuck in the same negative mindset and reinforcing the old patterns. THANK YOU PAUL for making such a difference in my life.
