What Do You Want to be When You Grow Up?

I was in a group the other day and that question was asked, “What did you want to be when you were a kid and what is stopping you from doing it now?” What we were talking about was the way our various traumas and addictions had impacted us in the past, but at the same time acknowledging that we could still do anything we set our minds to.

I was not the first person to go, and I listened to various answers. One had wanted to be a fire fighter. There was the kid who wanted to be a bull rider, until he had gotten thrown a couple of times and he decided it was not for him. The opiate addict that had wanted to be a doctor, but both his drug of choice and the felony he had for fraudulent attempt to obtain a narcotic held him back.

Then it came to me. I said that I wanted to be happy and normal. When I was asked what that meant, I explained a little of my past. I was molested starting at 4 for a couple of years by a baby sitter. My parents were constantly screaming at each other from the earliest I can remember until they split up my first week of 5^th grade. From there I went to live with my grandparents, and my grandfather was an abusive man who would beat me and keep me home for the week “to help out on the farm” so the bruising and cuts could heal up. I thought it was because he had found out how “disgusting” I was.

So, all I wanted was to be happy, safe and normal. I had obviously not been safe due to the physical, sexual and psychological abuse I underwent. I was not happy. Who could be happy with all the aforementioned going on? I had lost my faith, as I could not imagine a God of love allowing me to suffer as I did and I became an Agnostic. Finally, and the part that probably hurt the worse, was knowing I was not like everyone else. I was abnormal at best and felt like a freak on my worst days.

I would hear other kids talk about their moms and dads and what they had done together. My parents were not together. In fact, I was being raised by grandparents. Because I had been molested I felt disgusting, as I had once heard my mother talk about grown ups touching children and she had said they were disgusting and sick. I thought that she meant me. Finally, I knew that the other kids were not getting beat like I was because they were always at school.

The kids I went to school with almost always had smiles on their faces. Somehow I knew that there smiles were real. Mine was not. I was dead on the inside but I build walls to keep the pain inside and not let it show to everyone else. I was crying on the inside, and it came out in the form of anger and violence as early as the 5^th grade.

In the 5^th grade I was already seeing both a school counselor and a counselor outside of school for my behavioral issues. I never once spoke to them about the abuses, because I did not want them to judge me for them the way I felt everyone else did and I feared my grandpa and what he would do to my sister if I told.

Instead, I kept it all inside. That is where the outbursts came from. It is kind of like a pressure cooker, if that steam is not released somehow you create a bomb that will explode when you least expect it. Not only that, but I felt I could never let people know who I really was. I looked normal but did not feel normal. I felt like an unloved outcast, because that is how I was treated.

It is difficult to function well when the people that are supposed to love and protect you are the ones that do you the most harm. Instead, you learn not to trust, not to love and how to mask your feelings. You learn to adapt and become a chameleon so that you appear to fit in. The truth is, doing that causes you to lose your identity over time and you forget who you are.

Then we ended the group talking about where we were today. Today, I am very grateful. I have accomplished my goals. I am happy and safe, though far from normal and that is okay. I have found that I was built from the ground up by God to do what I do today. Today, I get to share my strength, experience and wisdom with people by sharing the hope found in both grace and recovery.