Meet me and the Process

Hi, My name is Teeanna Isaac I'm twenty six, I'm a published author, and a marketing professional. I was born in San Antonio Texas and I'm the youngest of four siblings. My family moved to Los Angeles when I was five years old and we have been here ever since. I speak a lot about my childhood and my life itself in my book Why I Had To Lose.

I want this space to be a safe space to discuss topics like grief and self-help.

My goal or my WHY in this world is to help individuals that are faced with grief and how to use it for the betterment of self and the world around them.

My writing process for Why I Had To Lose was complicated, to say the least. Writing this book was probably the hardest thing I have ever done. It was having to open up wounds that I swore were healed years ago. It all started 9 years ago when my dad first passed away I found that writing down my emotions and what I was going through was actually therapeutic for me. My grandmother gifted me a beautiful diary with a jeweled cross on the cover and she wrote a note to me that read:

“Take faith in knowing God will see you through-love Grandma”

I was always big on journaling my everyday life before then so it was not anything new, I just focused my concepts on how to heal myself. I would write every day, and would always end with writing three things I was grateful for no matter if I had a great day or a horrible one.

I use my diary as a way to get out of myself to see where I was wrong in situations, or to learn how I truly feel about certain things that happen. I bought a new diary during the Pandemic and it has been my best friend.

Writing Why I Had To Lose was an idea I had maybe six years ago but kept putting to the side or saying that I was not ready to organize my thoughts.

In the midst of the Pandemic, I was able to sit with my thoughts often and found that I was facing a lot of the same mental health issues that I had faced 9 years prior. Last year I was forced to move from the home that my dad took his last breath in.

I found all my old diaries and read them back. It then hit me that I have all the words and the tools for someone that needs them. I just have to organize them and present them to the world. For the last year, I have been organizing my diaries and I have forced myself to sit with the pain. I have a full-time job so this was not easy and I did not look forward to the time I set aside every night to write because it was always full of tears. Some nights I would pour a glass of wine and just sit at my table crying and thinking how I can't wait to be done with this book. I would purposely play songs like Dance with My Father Again to get my mind back in that place, it was painful and it felt paralyzing. I would find that weeks would go by that I didn't write because I just didn't want to face it.

Writing this book opened up old wounds that I had with my family members and even friends that I thought had jaded me in some way. It also gave me forgiveness toward others, through the research phase I gained an understanding of how people deal with grief in multiple ways and to not judge someone for how they grieve or handle the grieving.

By the time I was done writing, I felt relief, I could breathe again, I held on to no grudges and I had started to heal the cracks within my own family. I haven't felt more at peace than I do now. I'm thankful for Why I Had To Lose because it has brought me closer to my family, it has taught me compassion, it brought me peace, and It will be helpful to someone else that is faced with loss.