Kelso grad self-publishes memoir of rise from rock-bottom
Saturday, July 19, 2008 11:30 PM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articlePublishing your own book has the whiff of ego about it. But when Royce Lawyer printed his humble, spiral-bound story, he put a photograph of himself on the cover, showing him when he weighed more than 500 pounds. Across the top of the photo is the title: “Stop and Look.”
That’s all he wants people to do.
Lawyer, who grew up in the local area and graduated from Kelso High School, decided to write about the day he planned to commit suicide, April Fool’s Day three years ago, at the age of 38.
It took him two years to record his memories of an abusive childhood and the journey that made him choose life, haul himself out of depression, see a therapist, lose 230 pounds, fall in love and get married.
From Nevada, where he now lives with his wife and her children, whom he recently adopted, Lawyer sent a copy of his 89-page memoir to The Daily News.
It isn’t “The Corrections” or “The Glass Castle,” just a straightforward coming to terms. No hype, no poetry, but with power that creeps up as you read Lawyer’s words.
At the apex of his addiction, he weighed 689 pounds.
“I was very disappointed with the way my life had turned out,” he writes. “At age 38, I did not see myself as a success. I was financially, mentally and physically destroyed. ... The walls of life had closed in so tightly that I felt I could not breathe.”
He plans his exit, eventually checking into a motel. “Like a bird released from a cage, this would be my day to fly.”
Lawyer reports on the whole, tedious day, his thoughts, the letters he wrote, what happened to interrupt his plan. He ends up at the hospital. “I remember talking to the doctor, starting out from where I needed to start.”
The picture on the next page shows everyboy: chubby, freckled, 11 years old, against one of those fake sunny scenes where kids’ portraits are staged.
With the readers, he starts where he needs to start: with a stepfather who believed that beating a boy physically and verbally would set him on the righteous path.
For stealing two candy bars, Lawyer sat in the same chair before and after school for 89 days. “My life shut down at that point,” he writes.
The stepfather continued to berate and beat the boy into his teens, calling him home from church youth groups because the garbage wasn’t taken out the right way. He was afraid to tell anyone at school, and his family and other relatives “would not stand up to say that it was not okay; that it was abuse. ... I was a side show, a freak. I was a joke. ... What was pounded into my flesh and my brain day after day, was that I was stupid and ignorant.”
Finally, after his mother was brutally beaten and her treasured sewing machine destroyed, Lawyer called the police. Nothing came of his report, he writes, but it signalled the end of the beatings.
He chronicles his search for a father figure, the jobs he got after high school, moving to Seattle and living in a Lutheran mission, a first marriage that failed, and events that led to the April day he decided to die.
Therapy broke the fall. Being heard, crying and understanding that he was not stupid began to make Lawyer realize “I was worth something.” The process that led Lawyer to write down his experience also helped him to understand why he started sneaking food as a child, how he connected brief moments of happiness with eating certain things, and how to use his pain to rebuild a life.
His stepfather agreed to meet with him and the therapist. And Lawyer learned how abuse has wired him to seek out the worst.
“If somebody says to you every single day that you are a success and are going to do great things, then that is what you are going to be living. If you have people telling you you are stupid, every day, that you are not good enough, then that’s what will come through in everything you do. ... I constantly put myself in positions with people that I knew would treat me badly because I knew how to exist that way.”
Through therapy, Lawyer ended a bad relationship. He started to lose weight. He prayed. He visualized the life he wanted. It freed him, and he met and married Jennifer. Lawyer began being the father to her children that he had never had himself.
The inside back cover has a photograph of Lawyer on his wedding day. He’s a big handsome guy standing under an arch of flowers with his bride. “My life had not ended, but was just beginning, with the hope of great things to come.”
To contact Royce Lawyer, e-mail him at roycelawyer@yahoo.com
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