Can You See Me? is a fast-paced and gritty story of a child born into a family dealing with alcoholism and mental illness. Alcoholism is not just about the addict—this is a story about collateral damage, young innocent lives affected by parental addiction, abandonment, neglect, and abuse. It is a child’s journey as she tries to make sense of the dysfunctional world around her. The child learns very early on to keep the secrets. She feels a sense of responsibility and thinks she causes the bad things to happen. She grows up without a sense of herself and gets lost in her parents’ illness. Years later, when her parents go through treatment, they get help, but she doesn’t. There wasn’t a place for her pain until one day she attends a two-day workshop on alcoholism, and she sees for the first time how her parents’ alcoholism and her father’s mental illness have affected her life and who she is. She learns to fight for herself after years of feeling invisible and feeling defective. Separated from her family, she is free to find herself. She begins to live for herself, creating, writing, and performing. She eventually finds love.
I received my first college degree in sociology-corrections, with a minor in psychology and Black studies. I worked in residential treatment for 6-to-12-year-old boys, then became a probation officer for adolescent offenders, eventually working with young adults at a state-run criminal facility as a chemical dependency specialist. I conducted trainings throughout the state of Minnesota on a variety of issues. Eventually, I was hired to start and run an alternative sentencing program through Hennepin County. In my free time, I wrote music, short stories, monologues, and eventually wrote a one-woman show with my music and monologues that dealt with addiction. I quit my alternative sentencing job and began performing for many years at treatment facilities, theaters, churches, and conferences. I loved performing so much I went back to college and studied music and playwriting. I wrote a play called Connections, about Korean adoption, and Maddie’s World, a story about a little girl starting life in a crack house.
