What Life Has Made Me...

by Aashdoda
© March 2011

   "See, this is what life has made me!" I heard the heart wrenching soul cry out more venomous than the most deadly snake, "I hate it!  I hate it!"

   The sobs made it extremely difficult to hear what she was trying to say after this beautiful woman succumbed to her last declaration obviously hiding the words she felt but couldn't speak.  She hated herself.  Buried in an avalanche of tears and mountains of Kleenex neither even close to the elevation of her anger I noticed my heart simply had to take a step back.  I knew this pain all too well, the anger and rage, the hurt, the blurring of the line between victim and survivor, between conquered and being the conqueror.  

   The desperation between freedom and futility grew as I watched her though she never said another word.  The hope that there was hope in this life still stung me in a primal place within my being.  As I looked at her beautiful face contorted with powerful negative emotions I saw her beauty fade as though an artist simply repainted her.  Her pretty blue eyes were swollen and blood shot and her high classic cheek bones streaked with mascara seemed almost hollow.  Lines were etching themselves in her face as I watched her, deep crevices a person could get lost in.  As futility flooded them I hurt for her.  Yet what I saw wasn't ugly merely the process of the sculpture finding the radiant figure beneath the chiseled stone and dust chips.


  My thoughts were centered on her first words.  The word 'see' was a dramatic attention grabber that had hit me with a resounding chord I could not ignore.  The tone held my attention on a level I could not explain.  It was like being grabbed by a powerful hand around my throat shaking me to hear what was to be said.  The words, "This is what life has made me,"  started bouncing around inside of me.  The filth of the voice it echoed like a perfect mirror for terrified me.  That voice belonged to the man that got his purest pleasure in life from inflicting pain.  He tortured me into compliance by electrocuting me, raping and beating me within a millimeter of visible marks all the while whispering in my ear how hopeless it was to fight him.  Driving my mind and body to the very brink of shattering he'd sigh with delight then whispered that I now belonged to him.  The thing is at the time he was right I was helpless to fight him off, an adult while I was only 4 years old. This would continue until I was 17, but that's the rest of the story.


   "Not today!"  I started yelling inside my own mind using every explicative I could think of to kick his ass.  I saw myself punching at him in the dark and suddenly it was like my hand had connected.  I stopped as if to see if he'd get up.  There was no hint of his presence only my conscience showing me a choice to become him or rise above it and become whom I was intended to be.



   Suddenly his voice took on a life of its own whispering all the horrors he'd done to me and threatening to return as he so often had.  The programming had been triggered.  Something had changed in me.  I didn't care.  I was fighting back like I'd never been able to all these long years.  It was my turn to dish it out!  All the hell he'd put me through trying to program my mind to self-destruct if the secrets ever found the light of day, if I dared ever whisper the truth to another living soul, was over.  The blame belonged on him, squarely and unequivocally.  The strangest feeling came over me as I thought this but I was scared to feel just how good it felt.  I had just taken my power back.


   "With great power comes great responsibility."  I heard myself recall the man that taught me all about choice say those words so tenderly to me.   My power came with responsibility and it was up to me to figure out what I wanted and needed to do with it.


   I came to this group at a local Domestic Violence Center to see if the free group therapy could teach me something I didn't already know, to find some piece of anything helpful to apply to my life to make it work better.  This woman's pain was gold for me.  I never found out her name but I often think of her and hope someone helped her find the way back to wholeness.


   It was my turn to speak.  Being new was never my forte but also not difficult for me either.  Long before this I had vowed to myself the secrets in my life would never be silent killers again.  I gave a short synopsis of my story and reached out to thank this woman after the meeting but it was not to be.  Instead one of the leaders of the group took me aside and introduced herself as a police detective that was the director of Victim Services.  

    "Uh, oh!  A detective?  What did I do?", was all I could think.  I knew I carried a guilt I feared but her career choice made it feel worse.  I knew I hadn't done anything wrong but she had my attention.


  She had some questions for me which I answered still more focused on what had just happened than what I was being asked.  My uncle having been a police officer had taught me to comfortable with them but my life had taught me never to trust them.  More than one officer had bought and paid for me as a child.  Where she would land between comfort and trust I didn't as yet know.  I had so much on my mind at the moment to this day all I remember is how potent an hour that had been.


   While walking home strangely confident in the new strength inside of me, power that had always been mine I'd been convinced to never hold onto as though it was not intended for me to touch much less use as a little child, I was awash with thoughts and feelings and trying to sort the hour out to make sense of everything.  I kept thinking about what that woman had declared, "See, this is what life has made me!"


   I had been in sex-slavery since I was 4 years old.  The fact is man, specifically my own father had forced this life upon me.  Life had not made me anything at all.  Life was just life.  Mine sucked of course but the fact was I still had the right to chose what to make myself, a victim of my life's events or my own best friend that learns from the lessons of life no matter how harsh they had been in order to be whole.  Suddenly I realized I had never been a victim.  I had been victimized, tortured, lied to, had my mind bent with conditioning that was brutal brainwashing, and my heart had been shattered, my trust betrayed in all the worst ways.  None of it made me a victim!  

  No matter the cost what I chose was to thrive.  I remember the day I made that choice, long before life happened to turn so hard on me.  I also saw I never gave up.  I never went back to change that choice.  I persevered forward, my eyes fixed on healing.


   Life was my school, my past was my homework to learn from.  My present was a gift of life I gave myself out of respect.  One day I discovered there was so much more to it than just respect, the very value of sacredness I attach to life would be part of the driving forces within me to move toward and through the healing process.

   Life does nothing to me.  I live the life I have and I make it what I want it to be as best I can.  I could see that perspective is everything.  Within me I have the capacity to be more than I  ever dreamt I could be but to reach that, to attain it, I first have to realize my perspective and then bend like a reed in the wind if necessary to see things as they are.  Sometimes it means changing.  Sometimes that hurts.  In my experience healing is worth the temporary pain of change.


  My life will never be easy, that is a guarantee.  God never promised life would be easy, in fact He says it will be challenging.  He promised me He'd always be there and He has.  I will master whatever comes my way by learning all I can every time life grows difficult and I get down.  I hold onto the fact I know all things do get better even when it doesn't seem possible.


   Soon I was to discover that the detective I spoke to had a gift for me I could never have seen coming.  She took me aside a few weeks later, into a private room and asked me to answer her questions without asking her about them.  At the end she promised me she'd make it clear why this was important.


   Alone in a room being asked question after question by a police detective was unsettling at best.  As I answered her questions, how and where were you sold, what was the procedure, who's hands did the money go through, how was the meeting place arranged, how were both parties connected for the meeting, and when did this occur; I began to simply relax and give her what she wanted.  Then came the hard one, do I know the men that arranged this so meticulously?  I knodded that I did.

   It was when she started to ask me her next question she dropped her hands into her lap and starred at me with wide disbelief.  "My God!"  She exclaimed with a shock I couldn't expect.  "You are one of the kids?"


   "What kids?" was all I could think.


   "You are one of the kids we tried to save!"  

   She looked at me with such compassion I didn't know what to think.  "We had no way to break that child slavery ring without buying a child.  Every time we were close, minutes away from a bust they were gone."  Her dismay was heartbreaking but all I could hear was that someone all those years had been trying to save me.  "I never thought I'd ever meet one of you.  I had to know if you were one of them.  My God, you really are one of them!"


   I never expected the proof of my life to fall into my lap.  I'd long ago given up on the idea of needing to prove anything.  My life was what it was, for better or worse.  Here I am minding my own business and I'm given the proof my life was every bit as real as everyone around me at the time kept telling me it wasn't possible.


   I walked home knowing someone cared about me when I thought no one ever had.  I knew that walk home just because I think something doesn't mean I am aware of all the facts.  I wondered what else I thought had led me astray all those years.  Tonight however, I basked in the glory of knowing what it felt like to have people care that worked so hard to save me though they never knew my name until today.  It was such a wonderful feeling.


   If life ever made me anything it has been wiser, a bit worse for the wear, but far wiser than I knew I'd ever be.  This is why I am content with my choice to see life as it is, own my truths, deal with my pain and my issues, and embrace what's next to learn.