Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
I've been reading a book by one of my favourite authors (Faceless by Martina Cole) this week and it got me to thinking about how easy it is to stray off track and how a simple mistake or bad judgment call can change the entire path of our life and those for generations to come.
While Martina Cole, pictured right, writes fiction, she writes about the very real and ugly underbelly of London's East End with its drug addicts, teenage mothers, pimps, gangsters and 'diamond geezers' all interlaced with bullying holier-than-thou mothers who are often the crux of the problem.
I refer to the East End of London because that's where Martina Cole's books are based but the truth is that similar stories can be told about just any major city in any country around the world.
The protagonist in this particular tale is a woman who has just been released from prison after spending 13 years for beating her two best friends to death in a drug-induced frenzy.
She has no memory of actually committing the crime but remembers waking up covered in blood with the weapon in her hand.
She was barely 20 years of age at the time with a five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son by two separate fathers (one she didn't really know and the other her pimp).
She had turned to drugs, at first just as a pick-me-up to help get through the day but then she had become so dependent on them that she would go to any lengths to buy more and more, ignoring her children and everything-else in the process.
After her conviction she lost the children and her family, that had never really been all that functional in the first place, disowned her and she was left to rot alone for the duration of her sentence.
On her release, she tries to start a new life for herself while trying to reconnect with her children only to discover that her daughter has followed in much the same path as herself (without the murder part of the story) and is involved with the same pimp and drug dealer that was the author of her own downfall. Her son, on the other hand, was adopted by a wealthy family and is well on his way to a happy and successful life.
I'm not going to tell you the rest of the story because you might well want to read it for yourself and more importantly, this isn't meant to be a book review, it's an opinion/commentary piece on life in general.
The plot of the story itself sounds more like a Hollywood movie and most of us can't imagine anything like it really going on in real life but the sad fact of it is that it does.
There are people all over the world that start off by making one bad decision only for it to have a knock-on effect until they find themselves in a life they never meant for themselves, looking into the mirror and not recognising the person looking back at them.
It can start as easily as a young woman getting involved with the wrong kind of man or a young man in debt looking for an easy way out but the consequences can be devastating and life-ruining.
In cases most of us are more able to relate to, it can be something as simple as living on our salaries from month to month without any thought of putting money aside for emergencies, thinking that nothing serious or bad will ever happen to us and before we know it, we've lost our job or have fallen seriously ill and there are no savings to cushion the blow.
Whatever the reason or circumstances the fact remains, it's all too easy to make a wrong turn and find ourselves the victims of our own misguided actions.
We stay so cocooned in our own lives that we never really think such tales of woe could really happen to us. There, but for the grace of God, go each and every one of us.
