Free To Dream

Resilience Building Block: Control and Contribution

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? ”

— Mary Oliver

When I tell my story, I often share about the time when I was 13 years old and my mother left me with my 8-year-old brother to fend for ourselves for three months. You may even remember me mentioning it here in this workbook. She handed me $20 and a book of food stamps before she left. It was that summer that I became involved with an older boy in the neighborhood who preyed on my vulnerability and eventually became my pimp.

This is the story that I tell about my mother. Again and again. But my mother was so much more than a soundbite in my story.

There were so many seasons of her, so many versions of her.

She believed in the importance of imagination and playing in dirt. She liked floppy ears and silly faces. Fairies and frogs and polka-dotted mushrooms. The child in her remained quite accessible on her good days.

She sat on porches, admiring the moon and its many faces, puffing on Benson and Hedges or American Spirits, depending on the decade.

She took us on night hikes and road trips. She taught us to fight for justice and told us it backfired when we were old enough to stand up to her.

She encouraged us to use our voices and to tell the truth. She supported me, even when I began using my voice to tell the hard parts of our truth.

She rescued broken-winged sparrows and crows. And sometimes she tried to do this with people too.

She wrote poems about the selves she wanted to be and the selves she wanted to let go of. Poems about generations. Poems about us.

She made mugwort tea and turquoise jewelry. She made lasagna and cake with cream-cheese frosting for our birthdays.

She also made mistakes. Because, as I came to realize, she wasn’t just a mom— she was a person too. Doing the best she could with what she had, just like the rest of us.

And she always, always told me I could change the world.

Eventually, I believed her.

At the age of 22, my newfound faith inspired me to believe that I was, indeed, created with a purpose. This realization watered the seed my mother had planted deep in my heart. One night, standing in a table dance booth at the strip club with a man gazing at all of me—a man whose name I will never know—it hit me…

“If I was created with a purpose, surely this can’t be it.”

This revelation became the catalyst for change in my life. It was many years before I began to see the purpose for my life take shape. But that night, in an LA strip club, my journey of pursuing purpose began.

The most miraculous part is, those things that I thought would hold me back or disqualify me from a life of purpose have become the very things that have propelled me into my purpose. In 2003, five years after leaving the abusive and exploitative relationship with my pimp, I found myself parked across the street from the strip club where I used to work. I wondered about my old coworkers. Had they moved on to other clubs, or other lives, or were they still there?

I remembered that life: the suffocating feeling of being trapped with no end in sight; wanting the money, needing it, but wishing there were some other legal way to get it. The constant pressure to smile and pretend you want nothing more than to fulfill every wish and fantasy of a stranger, when all you really want to do is lie around your apartment in sweatpants, watching mafia movies like Goodfellas and Casino – imagining you could live some other life.

I remembered, and all I could do was pray. And it was right there in my green Honda Civic that the vision of Treasures was birthed—a dream to provide outreach and support to women who have experienced exploitation and trafficking. Every day, I get to see the pain from my past used to inspire others to heal and grow and move towards thriving lives.

I believe, with everything in me, you were created for a purpose. Maybe you believe that too and that seed of destiny inside of you has already been activated. Or maybe you are like so many of the women I sit with and you aren’t so sure. In either case, my desire is that these questions will stir hope, ignite vision, and inspire purpose in you.