I could give you a life story of abuse, I could start form the earliest ages of verbal abuse… stories of sitting at the dinner table at what was suppose to be the family time, trembling, shaking with fear. Stories of pure fear, hiding from the attacks that was always below boiling point.
When I was 13 I got the chance to shift where I was living at, and I moved from one parent to another, I thought safety had finally found me, but it didn't. Work was a requirement in the new household. I started working at McDonalds's. The owner knew of the working requirement and soon began molesting me. I worked there for 4 years. Once your used to keeping secrets, its really hard to start telling the truth.
I knew I needed to graduate, that without that little piece of paper life was going to be very hard for me. I endured, but not without costs. I started being sexually active, to the point I didn't care who or why I was sleeping with someone. It was just that fix to get me through the morning, someone that would ease the pain that was consuming me.
I really tried to be this person everyone thought I should have been, but I just couldn't keep it together. One truth would turn into a hundred lies. I moved out of the house as soon as I turned 18, I keep in touch with my family or at least tried to. After a point, I had to choose; be the person they wanted me to be, and end up dead. Or I could live.
I chose to live.
Four Month after my 21st birthday I packed a suite case with clothes and 50.00 and I left. I bought a plane ticket and I flew to Las Vegas. I spoke to one friend 3 months after I left and I spoke to a family member 2 years later.
Its hard when you leave, you do things you never ever thought you would do. You sell your body and you sell your soul. You survive through any means. Legal or not. I wish I could tell you it will be different but rarely is it. You meet people who become your world, your friends who become your chosen family,
You live. You live in the only means that you know. You live with the people around you, and lines of right and wrong become blurred. Everything is all consuming and you fear very little, the risks that you take are greater and greater until they bring you to a point of complete darkness.
My point of complete darkness was a few years after I arrived in Vegas. It was a live or die choice, I was turning a trick that went very bad, and left me raped and beaten. My body dumped out the street in a part of town called the naked city. When I finally was able to get to a phone to call my friends for help, it was all a bit to much for them. Their night of partying, selling, and spinning their webs could just not be bothered. I knew I was alone.
There comes a point when your living on the streets and on your own, that asking for help is not the hardest thing but accepting it. I had to relearn lots of things, how to act, how to dress, how to live in the daylight, how to go to school, and how to live in a world that for so long I had not been a part of.
Life moves on, today I have moved again this time from Las Vegas to Sydney Australia, I finally learned that Vegas was where I had run away to but it was not where I had to stay.
I wish I could tell you that once leaving home all the bad things will stop. I can't promise those words, but I can say if you make it though the path, through the hell around you, and you learn to when help is offered you will never be as alone or as afraid as you were. The strength and the courage that develops inside of you will endure above all else. You will survive as life goes on.
0 comments:
Post a Comment