Stories of Hope

Warning: mentions of self harm and other sensitive content. I’ll try to be vague on certain words. sorry if it triggers you, this is to make you feel like you’re not alone.

My mother was forced down and forced into intercourse with my father, who she was with for 16 years at the time when she got pregnant with me. SHE HATED ME FOR IT! she attempted to get an abortion, then failed. My father even attempted to throw my mother out a window, and luck was on my side as they failed to do so.

Growing was equally as miserable for me. my father was abusive to my mother, brother, and myself. I later in my life found that he was cheating on my mother too – as I have 3 siblings from different mothers that are the same age as myself. My own family thought I was a curse onto all of them, so I was treated like one growing up. I had no choice in the matter; as I didn’t have the means to escape. I was tortured, beaten, raped, abused, forced into having sex with drug dealers before I even hit 14 years old too. I was locked inside cages for 9 hours at a time and forced to watch my father rape them too.

Every day was miserable for me, I would get forced into BEGGING my father to do things to me – and he’d threaten to do them to my brothers if I didn’t. mom wasn’t any help, as she would overdose on various illegal drugs; and would rent me out to pedophile drug dealers to ensure she’d get her fix.

I attempted suicide 9 times during my life time, three of those times I was actually declared legally dead and put on life support. My dad would make betting rings with my mother and a friend of his on when I’d finally actually do it. He even raped me without protection and got me pregnant at 13 years old, of course he forced me to abort it. It’s not as easy as “get up and call the police.” because what people don’t understand is… to make us more dependent on him he got us into massive amounts of debt. in fact, my mother had to ask him to let us go to school to begin with!

But then it came to me….HOPE all because of one song.

This would be the one thing I would contribute to saving my life. see, when I was laying there half dead on the floor and hearing my brothers scream, I came to a realization as I tried to tune it out with a song I heard playing on the radio…. he may have power over me and them now, he can take away everything about me. he can make me a shell of my former self, he can break me and break me again. he can make me feel like I’m nothing, but the one thing he COULDN’T take is the power I had within myself to protect my brothers from him. I decided that throwing my pride away to protect them was worth it. I started begging him to do things to me instead, and I would sneak in books and such into our cages and keep learning to focus on something rather than the pain. Eventually, I became fluent in 3 languages, 4 if you count American Sign Language.

I focused completely on my future as well as my brothers’ futures too, and we formed different ways of coping with our pain. then it happened, we got these small laptops from our school that had video cameras. my parents didn’t know, but I made a Facebook and reached out to my uncle. he asked about why they didn’t talk to him much, and at first … he didn’t believe me because “your father goes to church every Sunday and works as an engineer, my sister is a nurse for Christ’s sake!” and he put him on a high horse. I made a plan to prove it to him, I had him Skype me. my parents didn’t notice the camera was on, and my uncle caught my mother shoving my hand onto a pan that was JUST taken out of the oven followed by my father branding me again.

He found out about the massive debt he put us in to make us dependent on him. Now, my uncle had enough of that. he’s active duty army you see, so he gets paid a lot of money. he saved up for 2 years and I took a dead end job of working as a cleaner. we planned EVERYTHING in secret, and he helped me pay off ALL of our debt so that I could get us out of there. but that’s not all. he didn’t want us to go homeless, so he even got us plane tickets to come move in with him after proving to us by a DNA test and showing us his military ID.

We moved out on February 13th 2020. each of us have been going to trauma counseling. We also now have to get medical check ups once a month in the least due to all the permanent damage we got through various torture methods. I developed schizophrenia, severe PTSD, DID, paranoia, and I also get random tremors in my body that occur from the muscles in my body getting used to all the torture methods I’ve gone through. It was a HUGE struggle to survive, I only did so because I had to grovel and beg….

My message to the one(s) reading this is… please don’t give up. you may not be able to see it, but there’s a reason you’re suffering now. you’re growing so much stronger the longer you force yourself to stay alive. those scars on your body? the fat on it? the bones you may see? that’s your body. you have only one life, and people that love and depend on you would be devastated to lose you. please don’t throw the fight for the sake of being tired. I tried that so many times, you’re not doing anyone a favor. allow yourself to cry and let it out. I don’t care how “manly” or how “strong” you are, everyone has the urge to cry. cry all you want, and if that means for a few hours or even a few days – just do it. part of making yourself strong is the ability to accept and let your past scars be left where they belong, in the past. You are cared for by at least ONE person, even if it’s yourself. you’re beautiful in your own way, trust me. You’re hurting now, but the pain you feel is something that’s going to eventually make you into a person that you would want see when you face the mirror. all the scars you have are from the war you fight daily to make sure it doesn’t all end. despite everything, there has been some form of reason that you’ve been keeping yourself alive. for me, it was my brothers. for you… maybe it’s the possibility of having a future with someone that keeps you up. maybe it’s your pets, maybe it’s because it’s something small like you have to attend an event – let whatever positive thing it is be the reason you don’t throw the fight in… you’ve suffered this long, haven’t you? surely you can suffer as long as it takes to get yourself to a space where you’d be happy in. you deserve to feel happy, you deserve all the love and the care you could possibly ask for. <3

-Atty.