Introduction to:

I AM DAMAGED,

the Journal of Tony Price

A short while ago, I had the great fortune of reuniting with a dear old friend whose charming personality had eluded my own for nearly thirty years. Our “catching up” conversation included many topics, including all the common ones like, what are you doing now? What did you do before? How many kids do you have? AND the frighteningly popular, Yes, I too am divorced.  It was during this last subject that details surrounding both his and my marriages came out. Near the end of this conversational subject, he said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they would tell us they are damaged?” As to that question, I am here now saying, I am damaged.

I would like to think that I did not choose to be damaged, and I am most assuredly working to correct any damage I may still be carrying around so as not to hurt any other person. Just as sure as I am the author of this work, and just as sure as I am that every word in this book is true and accurate, I am equally sure that I am damaged and also certain that the damage came to me during the course of writing this work.

This was not meant to be a book. In fact, it was meant to be nothing more than a collection of papers forever gracing my bookcase, and only being discussed when some visitor asked, “What are these books?” to which the answer would always be, “Those are my journals,” and then, the subject changed. The words written in my journals were not supposed to amount to anything. I truly did not begin writing because I felt I was being damaged and I wanted a record, although they ended that way.

A long time ago, I started studying psychology. Not in any college, but on my own. Not necessarily the history of psychology or any formal aspects of it, but just the nuts and bolts that I could use immediately in my every day life. I was drawn to self help books. I love the Wayne Dyer quote, “if you want to stop smoking, stop putting cigarettes in your mouth.” Practical. And immediate. This was the psychology that I aspired to.

I did many things in my life while studying psychology, and some things I was really good at. Around 2006, I saw the video called The Secret, and I got an idea. It was time to take all I had learned and write my own book. My book would be a self help book that was different than most other self help books, in that I would take each element of what a person needed to be happy – really happy – and put all that into one short book. My outline gave me ten chapters, one of which was review, and I started writing in 2007.

I was studying the lives of famous historical figures and realized that each one, excepting of course my favorite person from history, kept a journal. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson all kept journals. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie all kept journals. I concluded that I would need to keep one too. So, I started keeping incredibly short notes with dates in 2007.

 

That’s when other parts of my life took a wild turn as well. I closed my computer shop, got rid of all my real estate investments, and  stayed home to take care of my young children. I had spent many hours taking care of them anyway; allowing them to come often and often with me to work, but now, I was just staying home.  Their mother, Anna, decided to take a job outside the house and off she went to be a flight attendant.

We moved into a smaller place that was easier to afford, and I worked on my self help book while she would fly around the country and sleep in hotels.  My work on the self help book included incredible amounts of research, particularly in the areas of domestic abuse, suicide, and murder.

After two years like this, all the while keeping my journals, a marriage counselor asked me why it was taking so long to finish my self help book. “Because it’s non fiction,” I replied, “if it was fiction, I could write it in a week.” Of course, this conversation was written into the journals.

After making that comment, I stopped writing the self help book (after having written six of the ten chapters) and I started writing some fiction. I ended up with a complete movie script in 3 days, but that is another story.

It has been two and a half years now since I stopped writing in my journals. It took me this long to be healthy enough mentally to produce what you have here. I chose to write the entire thing, the same way Ann Frank did with her journals, and the way her father chose to publish them intact. I would like to offer an apology now for the things I did, which I openly wrote about in my journals that in hindsight were bad choices. Turns out I have been damaged for a long time.

I needed to include my bad choices for you, so that you would know that I didn’t leave anything out, that I didn’t make anything up. For this book, all my journals are typed. The only editorial changes made are little things like replacing “&” with “and” or replacing “@” with the word “at.” When I wrote my journals, it was fresh in my mind. Each entry is dating correctly, and in a couple places, the correction of the date is included in the actual written words.

As you read this remember please, I am damaged. I cannot promise that you too, will not become damaged after reading this. I can tell you that now that I have finished preparing it for you, I am less damaged.

Good luck and happy reading!