Loving The Life and Losing Me: Memoir of Toya Rose

She spent decades building the woman everyone saw. Recovery required her to find the woman underneath.From the streets of Chicago's West Side to luxury hotels, expensive clothes, money, addiction, and ultimately recovery, Loving the Life and Losing Me is the deeply personal memoir of Toya Rose-a woman who learned how to survive long before she learned how to live.As a young girl, Toya watched her mother struggle and became fascinated by a world that appeared to offer everything poverty could not: beauty, money, independence, attention, and power. The streets seemed to offer an escape. Instead, they slowly demanded an identity."Toya Rose" became her armor.Behind the flawless makeup, designer clothes and carefully constructed confidence was a woman becoming increasingly disconnected from herself. What began as survival evolved into a relentless pursuit of money, validation and escape. Eventually, drugs provided another kind of shield-one that promised temporary silence while quietly taking everything else.But this is not simply a story about prostitution or addiction.It is a story about identity, motherhood, shame, survival, forgiveness, faith and redemption.It is about a mother confronting what her choices had cost her son. A woman learning that sobriety alone could not restore what had been lost. A family discovering that addiction does not happen to one person-and that recovery does not belong to one person either.And ultimately, it is about learning something Toya had spent most of her life avoiding: how to live an ordinary life.Through treatment, difficult honesty, repaired relationships, healthy boundaries and faith, Toya begins dismantling the identity she created to survive. Recovery introduces her to something far more powerful than the woman the streets knew as Toya Rose.It introduces her to Toya.Co-authored with filmmaker and author Demetrius A. Matthews, who knew her as "Mama Toya," Loving the Life and Losing Me offers an intimate perspective on a woman whose life could easily have been reduced to labels while revealing the human being those labels could never fully describe.This memoir does not ask readers to excuse every decision.It asks them to understand the woman who made them.Raw, reflective and ultimately hopeful, Loving the Life and Losing Me is for anyone who has ever carried a secret, lived behind a mask, struggled with addiction, loved someone through addiction, questioned whether it was too late to change-or wondered whether the person they used to be was still somewhere inside them.