Until You Have Been There...: Know When to Move On, Know When to Embrace the Light

Until You Have Been There

Annabel Standish is an emotionally lazy thirty something who watches from the darkness in which she lives and blindly accepts as others make 'selfish' decisions about her personal life.

As those decisions start to penetrate her dark domain that is sustained by her recreational drug and chaotic alcohol use, she finally decides to leave London and go back to her mother in Florida for a much needed rejuvenation before she continues with the grind of her life.

Ann's trip is nothing like she anticipated. Instead, for most of her visit she endures one nightmare after another as her and her mother get stuck at permanent loggerheads.

But more importantly the renewal that Ann sought did not come in the way she expected. It came through a spiritual eviction from that dark place in which she lived for most of her life and for the first time she is made to acknowledge how her relationship with her mother and others has influenced the destructive person that she had become.

By the end of her stay, Ann's relationship with her mother is repaired in the process and as she leaves the darkness behind she returns to London with the single aim of dissolving her Civil Partnership so she can move on with her life. The ensuing drama leads her to the light at the end of the tunnel where she realizes that a productive and contented life requires investments not only in ourselves as spiritual beings but also in the positive development of others.

K. Leslie Davis