Self Inspiration

This story may seem a little odd for most people but it's mine and I own it. So many people in this world are inspired by others but I wasn't that lucky. I was a poor girl who had no one to look up to. I didn't have a great mother figure, or a super hero or celebrity to look up to to gain any inspiration. You see, at the tender age of five, I had a mom who was abused by her boyfriend, who was afraid of him , and didn't have courage. He was on drugs and she was just afraid and broken. I watch him beat up, chock her until you would cough up blood and pass out. How could I be inspired by someone so broken? All I wanted was to live a normal child hood and be happy. My step dad wasn't just beating her up every chance that he got but he was mentally and physically abusing me too.

I was only five years old when he started coming into my room at night touching me or making me touch him. I never understood what was going on but I knew it wasn't right. I remember at the age of six , he hurt me really bad. The back of throat would hurt a lot because he would force me to do thing i didn't like. As time moved forward he would take things to the next level and start molesting me. I was molested from the age of five to eight almost every night and I had no one to save me. I remember going to school one day and telling my teacher. She told me she would get me help. I didn't know the help that I would receive would result in me getting beat, locked in closets and my mom telling me I wasn't her child anymore. She didn't want me.

My mom gave me away when I was nine years old because she said I was trying to take her boyfriend away from her. How could she say such a thing to a child? My new home was with my grandmother (dad's mom) because no one on my mom's side would take me in. I loved it there because I had a yard to play in , food to eat and good clothing to wear. I had someone to sit me down and not say I was dumb when I got something wrong. No one was harming me. However, I missed my mom even though she wasn't very protective and said a lot of bad things to me. I also wanted to know where my dad was. Did my dad not want me to?

I asked my grandmother about my dad and she told me that he was killed when I was a baby and didn't say much past that. As time went on, and the years passed by, I grew very angry and bitter. I wanted answers that I was never given and I did every and anything to get the attention of my mom. I was self harming and destructing at an alarming rate. My grandmother was so protective of me and didn't let me do anything so I joined every outdoor activity there was just so i would get away from home. One day at the age of 14 my cousin and I was walking home late one evening, and a guy held me at gun point and forced me in an abandoned apartment building and raped me. He told me if I said anything he would find me again and kill me. I never said a word.

Things kept getting worse for me . I had all the bad luck when it came to sex. Again at age 16 , I was gang raped. This time by people I thought was helping me. I was so afraid and decided to tell my grandmother because these are people that I saw all the time. She told me that I was lying and was probably being fast. That gang rape resulted in me being pregnant with my first child. At the age of 16, a junior in high school and pregnant with my first child.

As you can see, so far I had no one in my life to inspire me. By the age of 19 , I had two kids and by the age of 24 I had three. The relationships that I had been in were violent, abusive and draining. I had three kids watching me, two of them who were girls and I wanted to protect them from everything that i had been through. At that very moment, I choose to be a better me. I went back to school to earn my B.S. in Criminal Justice, I started drawing and painting when I was sad, and I started writing poetry.

I had to inspire myself to become a better person for my kids. I wanted to give them the type of love and mother that I needed. I also decided to take my power back. I was comfortable enough to share my pain with people and they would use it against me. I wrote a book called Bittersweet: Confessions, Secrets, and Poetry. In the book, I told my truth and gave advice to people who was afraid to speak out like I was. When the book got published, I no longer felt ashamed or bitter about my past. I wasn't going to be the victim anymore. Some people in the world don't have inspiration because all they see is darkness , but I was one of the lucky ones who found a way to be inspired by one one other than herself. I dug deep within and found the person that I wanted to be because there was no one in my life that I wanted to be or looked up to. I visualized my highest self and started showing up for her.