Hurt. Abused. Broken.

It all started when I was in the third grade. My dad had a better job offer in a small town in the middle of nowhere. He always worked late or just never came home. That’s when it all started. The long, dark, scary nights. I came home from my first day in third grade at my new school. I was already friends with everyone. That night, I was told by my father’s ex-wife that I was a bad girl and I didn’t deserve anything but the scraps from dinner. She had moved my room to the cold, dark, lonely basement. She tied the door shut with rope so that I couldn’t get out and the cellar door had bricks on it. She’d call me up after everyone finished their dinner (dad wasn’t home) and told me to clean up. I remember time passed and if I was hungry, I had to eat a cold can of peas. I was so skinny, the only way my body knew to protect me was to grow hair. I got sent to school with only an apple and a quarter for milk everyday. I went to school and begged my classmates for just a little bit of food.

Winter came around and I walked to school everyday, all of two blocks, no biggie. I couldn’t find my gloves that day and ended up getting frost bite. The school called home asking if someone could find my gloves for me, which my dad's ex-wife answered, because he was working. She had called my dad at work to lie and say that I told the school that she wouldn’t let me wear them. I remember coming home from school and seeing my dad and feeling at ease for less than a minute when I realized he looked furious with me. “Why is he mad at me, I didn’t do anything?” I asked myself. That’s when he told me about the phone call and what my stepmother, at the time, had said. I remember skinny, little third grade me getting body-slammed by, I don’t remember who, because it happened so fast and I lied there for so long in pain.

After that day, the school kept calling and calling and my dad's ex-wife’s oldest son told my dad and confirmed everything I said was happening was happening. I finally had the courage to fight back, after one full year of starvation (eating only scraps and anything frozen in the deep freezer in the basement), beatings because I was “bad,” tears, and sorrows. She came down to my room, started yelling at me, and I was going upstairs. She tried pulling me down and I turned around and pushed her down and locked her down there and called my dad. Soon my dad got divorce papers and while he was at work, she took my dog, birds, and everything in the house, besides the couch, and left little me just sitting there by myself waiting for someone to come home. When I saw my dad walk in, he told me to get clothes ready and clean up, that we were going out to eat and I can eat anything I want and that we were going camping afterwards. And at that moment, I knew what it felt like to be free and happy again. That’s when I learned to not let anyone treat me no less than I deserve. And that’s when I was diagnosed with PTSD and major depression disorder, but I couldn’t be happier, being 18 years old and looking back at that as the end of an old chapter and a start of a whole new one.