Adversity, personal injury, grief and loss can make you feel as though you have lost touch with yourself, but the truth is that adversity introduces us to our real selves. When you survive something awful, you have the opportunity to increase your personal power, strength of character, and ability to contribute to the greater good based on how you react to and rebound from the adversity.

My name is Marti MacGibbon, and I’m a human trafficking survivor.  In 1985, I was a standup comic with a scheduled appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  Despite my success, my recreational drug use spiraled into addiction, and I became entangled in the San Francisco drug scene.  This fact, and an abusive relationship I was desperate to escape from⎯made me vulnerable to traffickers. I was trafficked from San Francisco to Tokyo and found myself completely under the control of Japanese organized crime figures⎯threatened, brutalized, isolated, and absolutely terrified. I feared I would not survive the experience, but I am one of the lucky ones.

Kickass Personal Transformation is my term for the uplifting and energetic process that creates positive changes in life. KPT is progress, self-discovery, adaptability and optimism, and it always involves positive risk. The past month for me has been uber busy, working on the second annual Laff-aholics Comedy Benefit for Recovery, (Sept. 15th, 2012 at the IMA) and preparing for the upcoming release of my book, Never Give in to Fear: Laughing All the Way Up From Rock Bottom, on Oct. 8th, 2012. And during the past month I’ve been thinking a lot about calculated risk and positive vs. negative risk-taking.

Each day presents new opportunities to hone your stress management skills and increase optimism. That’s one way to look at it, anyway, and I prefer to focus on the positive. In my opinion, it takes a true badass to embrace optimism and employ enough mental discipline to continue to cling to that positive spin, rejecting any and all negative input.

A former SNL writer, Joe Bodolai, was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room by a cleaning crew. Police reported that a bottle of Gatorade mixed with antifreeze was found on a table in the room. The coroner's office has officially ruled it a suicide. The talented writer kept a blog called, "Say it Ain't so, Joe," where he posted his last entry on December 23rd. In a brief section entitled, "Things I Regret," he listed "My inability to conquer alcoholism," and "That I am no longer able to stand any more of life's pain."

Through the process of kickass recovery and relentless focus on happiness and healing, I've accomplished a personal transformation, created a new lifestyle and discovered my authentic self. Sixteen years ago I was a hardcore drug addict living in a rat-infested shack, unemployable, estranged from my family, filled with rage and self-loathing. My driver's license was suspended.

Hello Indianapolis,

 As a certified addiction treatment professional, a relapse prevention specialist and professional comedian, I appreciate the therapeutic benefits of laughter. One of our primary goals is to have the theater filled with laughing, happy people. We producers and comics are donating our services. In addition to encouraging people's attendance, we need businesses and individuals to purchase tickets that we can give to people in recovery houses and programs throughout the Indianapolis area.