Stories About Your Past

 

Tell me the story of your childhood?  Tell me the story of your past?  Weave me a picture of who you've been up until this moment today.  

Tell me about your relationship.  

Tell me about your struggles and the blood, sweat, and tears that it took to overcome them.  

Answer me a couple questions about these stories you are telling about your past:

• Do they empower you?
• Are you the victim or the victor?
• Do they give you the strength to get back up when you've been knocked down?

If they don't empower you, you need to rethink your story.  If you are a victim, you need to rewrite your story?  If they don't give you strength, you aren't seeing the real story from your past.

You are here today because you got back up.  

You choose if you are a victim.  Life doesn't happen TO you.  If you change your story, you can set it so life happens FOR you.

My biological mother had a boyfriend who began sexually abusing me when I was in 3rd grade.  My mother was drunk one night and asked me to stay up late.  At the time they had weird commercial that played at night.  One of them was asking if the viewer was a victim of sexual abuse.  My mother asked me if I had been abused and I answered honestly.

She gave me a quarter and told me to go call her boyfriend and tell him "he has better get his fucking ass over to our house right now."  This was a tricky thing because a) I was told I HAD to cuss at him and b) he was married so I had to call back until he answered the phone and not his wife and c) he would need to sneak out.

Long story short, they stayed together.  I wasn't allowed to do anything with the family though when he was there and had to stay sequestered. 

There is more to that story, but that's the high points.  I struggle and continue to work through feelings of not being enough and not being worthy of love.  I accept that and continue to learn and grow and become the best version of me despite my baggage.

Here's the thing, I could be a victim because of that story above or any number of other similar stories that I have.  I am not a victim.  I am a victor.  I have survived this and worse.  And I'm stronger.  I am empowered.  I love and give love freely.  I am so filled with compassion for so many going through situations like this.  

I write the stories of my past.  Here are the stories I tell myself.

I am strong.  I am brave.  I am power filled and powerful.  I am love.  I am loved.  I am filled with compassion.  I love those who have been abused and I hurt for the children the abusers once were.  Those abusers had their own stories.  They had their own dreams.  

I have lived through abuse of every kind.  And I am thriving.  I have lived through hunger and poverty.  And I am thriving.  I have been kicked down.  And I am standing.

Listen, if I have one thing I want you to hear out of everything I have ever said, it is this:

It is never too late to have a great childhood.