Through My Own Eyes

Behind the Book

Through My Own Eyes didn't begin as a book. It began during a period when author Michael A. Owens Jr. found himself thinking differently about his life and what might come next. Ideas and plans seemed to be coming faster than he could fully make sense of them, something he described at the time as operating at a high frequency. He began capturing those thoughts without any intention of becoming an author. What he thought might lead him toward something new instead began revealing something that had been there all along.

As he continued, he began to recognize how much of his life had been spent being so many people for so many people. Husband, father, grandfather, coach, leader, friend, the person others depended on. There was always something to do and someone to be, but very little time to consider himself apart from those roles. And as thoughts became reflections, and reflections began connecting experiences he had never thought to connect, a more difficult question emerged: What is my role in my current condition? What began with ideas about where life might go next had quietly become an examination of the life he had already lived.

Somewhere in that examination was a book he hadn't set out to write. About six months after the first words were written, Through My Own Eyes was published. Since then, readers have found pieces of themselves in a story that began with one man finally taking the time to look at his own life from his own perspective. Almost exactly one year after he began writing, Owens was named a Distinguished Author by the International Impact Book Awards, with Through My Own Eyes recognized for Outstanding Literary Achievement and for demonstrating what the organization described as "genuine, measurable impact on the readers and communities" it serves. A year earlier, there was no book. He hadn't even set out to write one. If there is anything he would change about the journey, it is perhaps the simplest thing of all: he would have started sooner. Still, he's thankful he finally did.