My life, so awesomely surreal at moments, has been a twisting maze of confusion and tragedy. I wish to tell my story, to put it down before this treasure chest of experience is tarnished with time. I have learned many lessons as I have stumbled through the wilds of life. And although the storms of life have tried to tear me down, pushed me to the ground, and made me want to beg for surrender, somehow I have gotten back to my feet and struggled forward. I am not sorry for my experiences nor do I want pity, what is important is the lessons that I have carried away from these personal tragedies. Hope and compassion have been my teachers, and I have heeded my lessons closely. In Short, This is my life, this is me a mini autobiography of sorts. I try not to get too graphic over my experiences, because I fear most of you wouldn’t believe me anyway and if I got into any more detail this would be a book LOL
But this is hard for me to write this, I feel very vulnerable in making this post but I have endured a hard road, which has taught me a lot, I want so much for folks to take something away from these lessons learned and the mistakes I’ve made. The most important of this, no matter what happens, you can and will survive.
My life has always been hopelessly complicated even my conception caused trouble. I am the product of young, foolish love and due to this, I endured a difficult early childhood. In my early years I was shuttled between my mother and my Grandparents. The years I lived with my biological mother were filled with mental, physical and sexual abuse. Thankfully, this ongoing nightmare ended when I was 7 years old and my Grandparents were finally able to legally adopt me.
Although, my Grandmama and Papa were warm and loving parents, I always carried the feeling of being unwanted because of my biological parents inattention. Following my early childhood trauma’s, I was quite a disturbed child, very hard to handle, socially inept, I struggled with the pain that seemed to eat me alive. Food became my counselor and I became extremely obese while in grade school. In fifth grade, I weighed 200lbs and was 5'2. Sara the Whale and Sara the Elephant were the nicknames my peers pinned on me and I lived in solitude and shame. Due to the social stresses I was enduring while at school, I did very poorly grade wise and was placed in special education classes.
Having no friends and with both of my grandparents working, I was often alone. I spent many hours lost within books and since the area I lived in was secluded; surrounded by mountains and beauty, I came to be friends with nature and spent many hours reveling in the wonders of the natural world. I became passionate for writing and began to spend many nights with the small desk lamp lighting a notebook, filling it’s pages with stories that existed only within my mind.
Then, At 13, my grandparents begun having marital problems and sent me to live with my father’s mother in Los Angeles. Talk about shell shocked, from a small town in Oregon with 750 residents to a city where there’s millions of people and I became familiar with a whole new concept, Racism. The first year I was there, the L.A. Riots occurred and the ugliest of man was seen. But my life was different there, I had a best friend, which made all the difference but still quite disturbed from all the sudden life changes, I drove my poor Grandma (nicknamed Gram) nearly mad, by stealing cigarettes from her and ditching school. During that period, I became obsessed with my outward appearance and developed anorexia. Exercising excessively, I stopped eating and became morbidly thin, yet when I looked at my image in the mirror, I still looked grotesquely fat. I became extremely tired and my hair began to fall out, when the day came that I woke up and was unable to climb out of bed, I came to my senses and began to eat. Shortly following this, I had my first bout of puppy love, which ended horribly cause the boy played me like a fiddle and ended up hurting me deeply. (Which the last time I saw him, I was throttling him through a truck window, because he’d told a girl I had given up my virginity to him when that was precisely WHY we broke up, I wouldn’t. The girl ended up kicking him out of her truck and leaving him there to walk home cause he’d lied to her. LOL)
When I entered High school, life became surreal. After a growth spurt, I’d grown to be 5'10 ½, being a big girl, somehow I became even more of a target for people. I cannot count how many fights I walked away from people just trying to fight me to gain status for kicking my rear and once was racially assaulted by a group of girls. But I was used to being harassed and I’d learned to just take it with a grain of salt and go cry it off later.
Then, at 15, my life again changed dramatically when my poor Gram finally had enough of my antics and sent me to live with my biological father. This was something I had dreamed of for so long as a child, but my dream quickly turned into a nightmare. Aside from numerous warped mind games, being slapped, punched, slammed into walls and screamed at became a way of life. To know such terror, I cannot fathom how someone can inflict such a horrid feeling onto other people. There were many conflicts but the worst stands out most vividly. I had disrespected him (one of the few times I’d had the guts to mouth off to him) We were outside when the conflict began, he drug me into the house by my hair flipped me over the couch, sat on my chest and began punching my face.
This was a dark time in my life, we moved from Los Angeles to a small town in central California and again I was secluded but this time with my father. I tried to steer clear of my father as well as I could, I got my first official job at McDonalds and spent many hours hiking in the cattle country which lay behind our house. At 16, I met a boy and fell in love, in my unhappiness I needed someone to hold onto and I had found him.
That summer, I came back to visit my Grandparents in Oregon whom I hadn’t seen since I was 13. It was a wonderful summer, with the familiar smell of the pines around us, as a family, we built on a new front porch onto the house. My Grandmama and I painted and my Papa and I nailed. They asked me to stay, but I was still in love with that boy and I declined my Grandparents offer, saying I wanted to try and patch things up with my father although I secretly wanted to rejoin my love. But, as things will go south, the day before I was scheduled to return, my love woke me up with a dreadful phone call, informing me that he’d “found someone else”
Heartbroken, the next day I gave my Papa a desperate goodbye hug and got back on the Greyhound that would take me back to my own private hell. It didn’t last long though, soon my love had been dumped and was again interested in me. Still madly in love with him, I forgave him and began to rebel strongly against my father.
Soon, to my relief, and without a severe beating, my father kicked me out. I began to live with anyone who would take me in, this time in my life I’m never too proud of because I took advantage of a lot of good hearted folks.
Falling into a deep depression, I dropped out of high school and eight days after my 17th birthday I sliced my wrist in an attempted suicide. Shortly after this, I ran out of places to stay and was forced to leave my love and use the Bus ticket my Grandparents had sent to help me get back to Oregon.
In Oregon, after trying to go to school for one day, I stupidly said that was it and permanently dropped out of highschool in my Junior year. I got a job and began saving money in an attempt to get back to California so I could be with the boy I loved.
Soon, however, my Grandmama and I had a falling out and since she was ready to kill me, I set out on my own to start a life at seventeen with $900 (most of my Papa’s Tax return)and a doctored birth certificate that would allow me to work without a work permit (I was still underage).
Well, foolishly, I proceeded to blow $300 dollars on hotels and fun stuff and then was dumb enough to have the other $600 stolen from me. God was looking over me though because I was able to recover the $600, find a room to rent from a guy and land a job as an assistant manager in a deli.
My love had remained faithful though and we proceeded to drive his parents nuts with him rebelling which quickly got him kicked out as well. This lead to me flaking on my job and getting fired, and giving up the room I had rented. I again but this time with my boyfriend, we began living with anyone who would take us, after about six months we ran out of places and found ourselves homeless.
Making our way back to Oregon, my boyfriend and I lived in a two-man tent for 3 months during the summer and, then in the back of a truck for 4 months as winter fell upon us. Cooking with a little one burner propane camping stove and eating food from the food drive, we wouldn’t make it through the winter. So, with no other options in sight, we enrolled in a government program called Job Corps which was designed for low income kids where they can go to live, learn a trade, finish their schooling and get a fresh start on life.
Yet another surreal experience, I lived in a dorm with 25 other girls, there were a total of 250 students, 50 females and 200 males all between the ages of 16-24 and we were all like this little tight nit community apart from the outside world, but to remain in the program, it is Zero Tolerance, no drinking, no drugs, no fighting or you were immediately kicked out. During this point in my life I was very immature and in Job Corps is where I did most of my growing up. I chose welding as my trade and went and got my GED.
Early on in my stay at Job Corps, I had a very trying experience. There was a girl, who for her own reasons, didn’t like me and began playing pranks on me, I merely asked her to stop and took it, like I usually do, with a grain of salt and gritting my teeth. Then, I snapped one day after she had filled my bed with an assortment of food from the salad bar in the cafeteria, ya know the nice runny kind of food. So after taking it for so long, I went to the Job Corps staff and begged them to make her stop before there was a fight. The staff blew it way out of proportion and the girl got in a lot of trouble, a friend of hers then warned me that the girl had made a threat to my health, I told my longtime boyfriend and he went straight to the staff and she was immediately kicked out (If you threaten someone and there is cause for them to believe the person might act on the threat, they immediately terminated the person doing the threatening)
My life became a living hell, everyone aside from a few good friends, absolutely hated my guts and I was put through a dorm meeting where every girl I lived with got to tell me how much they hated me but in the end this turned out to be the best thing for me, it forced me to grow up and understand I had only myself to rely on. By then I had learned that I could be homeless, friendless, and an outcast, but I was still alive and I still had people who loved me. I applied to be a Peer Counselor and was rejected with the excuse that they had just already filled all the spots.
For months, I was an outcast but could do nothing about it except go on, be myself and hope that it would be enough. It was amazing though, within six months, I had become a Peer Counselor and made it into the Wolf Pack which represented that you were an honored member of the center, soon I was nominated the Designated Peer Counselor of the Dorm, and became a leader within the Dorm. But throughout my stay at Job Corps, my relationship with my boyfriend was deteriorating rapidly, we fought constantly, it seemed that as I grew up, he didn’t. After a lot of thought and the realization that his idea of love wasn’t the same as my own, I broke off our two and a half year relationship.
Then, one of the best things that has ever happened to me occurred. During my stay at Job Corps, I was always a night owl, staying up until the wee hours of the morning hanging out with the Night staff. There was one guy in particular, Jeff, that I had become really good friends with, he was a sweetheart, but there had never been anything more than friendship because he was a staff and I was a student and it was forbidden. But I had always noticed that when we were completely alone, there seemed to be an odd tension and we wouldn’t talk. Nearing the time of graduation from the program, I was alone with him helping him with something and he suddenly told me he had to talk to me. As we sat down across from each other, Jeff looked as though he was terrified. Taking a deep breath he told me that he cared about me, I didn’t quite grasp what he was saying to me and I told him that I cared about him too, fretting he quietly said that I didn’t understand, that he felt bad when my Ex was around. I was stunned, I had never really allowed myself to think of him in that way, but he had been such a wonderful, sweet friend that I decided to take the chance and we began exchanging notes, love letters of sorts.
Then, after graduating from Job Corps with honors, I moved in with him and I began the next stage in my life. For months I searched for a job as a welder but unfortunately I live in a “good ole boy” town and girls aren’t too warmly welcomed in the trade, so desperate, I applied at Denny’s and got a job as a Graveyard Waitress.
My Grandmama and I had made amends and had became very close again. Then my Papa was injured severely and left him permanently handicapped, it took four years of surgical procedures to just get him medically stable.
After a year of working at Denny’s, I decided to go to college to become a Paramedic. This was yet another significant stage within my life, where I gained much more confidence. Although in grade school, Jr High, and High school I did very poorly and was often thought not very smart, in college I maintained a 4.0 GPA for my first year, I loved learning about the human body and thoroughly enjoyed the Creative Writing Classes I took.
Then, shortly after I began college, my Grandmama went in to have open heart surgery for a heart defect she’d had since she was a child. For the next eight months she was very ill, never fully recovering from the surgery. The cause was that Dr’s had unknowingly given her staff infection then stupidly never detected it. After a long struggle for her life, I held my Grandmama hand when she finally died from the complications of the simple staff infection.
I felt as though my world was falling apart when I lost my Grandmama. During the funeral, I sobbed during my eulogy to her and spent the next week as a walking zombie. But I gathered my shattered emotions and went back to school the following week, but changed my major to Clinical Medical Assisting and Medical Transcriptions because I knew I could not handle watching people die all the time, an unfortunate job requirement when you’re a Paramedic. But the new subjects I picked, I wasn’t very passionate about, school became a huge strain and I hardly studied for the last year of my college education.
For the next few years it seemed I was continually trapped in this endless cycle of misery, during my grief and depression I was learning some horribly harsh lessons about myself and about my family, people I trusted were betraying me in the worst way possible. Every time I turned around it seemed something else crazy and surreal was happening and my life was wrought with pain.
I finally graduated from college, just over a year after my Grandmama died, with a 3.5 GPA and then allowed myself to fall headlong into the gaping maws of the depression I had barely been holding at bay. Jeff stuck by my side although it was a rough ride, I sought counseling, the Dr’s kept experimenting with different Anti-anxiety and Anti-depression medications that for some reason made me ten times more neurotic than I already was and none of them helped. Jeff thought I was losing it and there were many moments in which I even thought perhaps I was. At times I felt as though if just one more thing happened, I would just break and I shuttered continuously beneath the strain.
This depression was the hardest road I’d ever traveled, because I faced every single demon that haunted me. Haunted by the loss of my Grandmama, I retreated into my mind and explored my emotions, took a huge step back from my life and looked at it objectively. With this fierce battle, all the guilt and shame, pain and hurt, lies and betrayal showered me from every direction. Somehow, I found the strength to love myself enough to remove myself from negative relationships, to let go of things I couldn’t change, to truly understand the events that have transpired in my life, I faced all the pain head on and dealt with it, I removed those people from my life which were hurtful realizing that they were never going to change, including most of my family and my own mother, and if I were going to survive I had to move past them on the road of life. Although my life has been it’s own private hell, I wouldn’t change a moment of it, it’s cruel lessons have taught me so much. I have learned what kind of person NOT to be, it’s taught me love and compassion, I have learned to look at life in an objective manner, I’ve come to understand that family isn’t necessarily defined by blood, but by love. I have seen the best in man and the very worst but I have realized that it is only myself that allows them to hurt or affect me, if people don’t like my appearance they don’t have to look at me, if people don’t like me, then it’s there own problem.
Many days I thought my battle would never end, this depression and time of self discovery lasted over two years, then in January 2002, it suddenly hit me, we have choices in life and if I wanted to be happy, then I needed to just be happy. It was amazing, the depression evaporated as though it had never existed, the sun finally broke through my clouds and I felt so liberated! When I looked for the beautiful things in life, they were there, I realized that although I had lost many, many things, there were still many more beautiful things that I had been missing because I was stuck within the misery. I walked away from weathering the storm a stronger, more confident person and I know that my life will be much better from now on, just because I have the skills and wisdom to deal with life’s little curve balls.
Shortly following the death of my depression, I began organizing the USM Oregon Get-Together and made a plan for what I wanted to be doing with my life. My dream is to become a writer, my difficult life has given me a rare glimpse into the heart of mankind and I want to share what I have seen. To share a story with everyone that has thrived within my mind, fills my heart with such joy and to be able to do it for a living would be splendid. So, to give me time to work on my writing, I am starting a in-home photo-restoration business to help finically. Working towards this new goal, I have had many new wonderful things happen to me, I was able to bring together people from USM and watch the happiness in their faces as life-long memories were held. After six years, Jeff and I finally got married. I feel so very grateful to have found such a lovely person to spend my life with, we have one of those rare relationships filled with mutual respect, love and laughter. Finally, after years of torment, I feel at peace with the world around me.
So there’s my story. For me, these are the lessons that have taught me Wisdom, Love, Knowledge, and Understanding; these are the things that holds the key to Life. I know ahead there are many more lessons to be learned, many more hardships to endure, but I will survive, I always have and I always will. And ya know what? If I can, you can too. Here’s my advice to you: Never, no matter the darkest hour, give up, the sun will always break through.
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