CHOOSING TO BE who I am is also how and why I chose my life’s work.

I’ve never shied away from hard work. As I mentioned earlier, about the first thing I set out to do after my rescue was to get out there and get a job. For one thing, I needed to make a living, but I also wanted to focus on something outside myself that would bring me into contact with others and that might in some way make use of all I had been through and all I had learned. But everywhere I went looking for a job, I was told they couldn’t hire me because I was a celebrity. The word struck me as pretty ironic. I certainly wasn’t a celebrity in the way most people think of celebrity. It wasn’t like I attended gala events and showed up on the red carpet and got asked what designer dress I was wearing. But I also have to admit that I understood what employers were saying. In any job where I would come in contact with the public, I would find myself being asked to appear in selfies or to sign autographs. Not a lot would get done.

In time, of course, I found work, nontraditional work, and I found it because people felt I had something important to say and to give.

Simply put, my life’s work right now is to talk about subjects that, unfortunately, I know a lot about—namely, the kind of domestic violence and abuse, including sexual abuse, that goes on everywhere in the world. Through no fault of my own, I am an expert on these subjects, and if my expertise can help even a single person or change a single life for the better, that is all the fulfillment I need. I have a pretty full schedule of speaking engagements on these subjects, and I address all kinds of audiences: victims and survivors of violence and abuse, law enforcement officials, social services providers, doctors and nurses, people who run shelters, people who raise money, students and teachers. And as every reader of this book knows, I am also an author.

I have been making speeches and addressing these various audiences for several years now, yet I am nervous every time I get up and am about to begin speaking. The first time I ever got up in front of an audience to deliver a talk, I was so nervous that I didn’t think any sound would come out if I opened my mouth. I had to figure a way to calm myself. I took a deep breath, and I said to myself: Everything is going to be okay. It’s going to be just like talking to a best friend, or to a Hostess Twinkie wearing overalls. I don’t know where that image came from, but it seemed to work. Even so, speaking in public to an audience was a struggle at first. What helped was that I knew what I had to tell them, I knew that my purpose was to give them strength and courage, and I just told it like I knew it.

Even today, however, the nervousness never really goes away. I do find that if I can interact with people in the audience a bit before we start, if I can hear some of their stories, that motivates me to really focus on their concerns and precisely target what I need to say.

I know it is against what the experts advise to say this, and my PR team will probably tear their hair out when they read this, but I never prepare a speech ahead of time. I never write out a script. For one thing, I am more at ease when I speak from the heart rather than reading something. But mostly I know in my bones and my skin what I want to say to these audiences. I know the points I want to make, depending on the subject matter and the audience.

If I am addressing women who face domestic violence from husbands or boyfriends, my message to them is: “Don’t wait. If you wait, all you’re doing is very likely just extending the time that you and your children are being hurt. Your abuser will continue to try to control you—that’s what abusers do.”

Kids are a tougher audience. I want to be able to reach them, but I also fear that telling them what I went through may be damaging for them to hear. My first instinct is their well-being, not mine, so I always check with the adults in charge of the talk about how far to go with any audience of children or teenagers or even older. Often many of the kids in the audience have already been damaged by abusers, and I have to choose what I say very carefully.

For those kids I remind them that you never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have left. “When that happens,” I say, “giving up is not an option. Keep hoping.”

“There is life after darkness,” I tell them, “and there are endless possibilities once you reach the light.”

I also want these kids to keep in mind that, no matter what, they have control over who they are and what they will become. I tell a little bit of my own story, about people calling me “used goods” and saying no man would ever love or care for me, and that nobody would ever be a true friend to me. “Look at my life now,” I tell them. “I am valued by a loving husband and safely surrounded by a circle of wonderful friends—all because I changed my life. No one changed it for me. No one else can.”

“Yes, the scars are still there,” I tell them, “and they won’t go away, but now I look to the future.”

I can only hope that the kids and teenagers I talk to hear what I’m saying and take it to heart. But they can be hard to reach.

The toughest audience I ever had, though—an audience I could never imagine as Hostess Twinkies in overalls—was a prison audience of men convicted of having abused women, in some cases, to death. Some of these men were in for life, but not all of them. And my initial thought was to try to reach the younger men, those who would eventually get out of prison, men whose assaults had not ended in murder.

I sat there and spilled my guts to these guys as I tried to relate what it is like to be one of their victims. I pulled no punches as I told them what their violent behavior feels like on the receiving end, what it does to the body, the soul, the sense of self. I told them how their violence kills even when it doesn’t result in death. Half of them were weeping, the other half were praying in the back of the room as I went on. When I had finished, several of them said to me that my talk would change their lives and save them from ever committing violent assault again.

“Why did it take me to save you?” I asked. Why did it take a talk from a survivor of brutality to learn what brutality can do?

One of them answered for all. “Because we never really had somebody that actually sat down and had a conversation like this with us,” he said. “We have only ever heard from people who judged us and labeled us for what we did in our past.”

I hope that talk made a difference, but the responsibility and the ability to change still depends on each individual there. It was easy for them to say they were going to change, but words are lame unless real action follows, and I can only pray that my talk motivated action in at least some of them.

Someone once asked if I thought it might have made a difference if Ariel Castro had heard a talk like the one I gave that day. My answer was that I think he was too far gone. There are some people who are literally impossible to save. That’s why I wanted to reach the young men in the group. Maybe it wasn’t too late for them; maybe they were still able to change. I hope so.

I know that they too had suffered abuse. They too were damaged. But I reminded all the men that they still had a choice to get help to stop their pain; they could always choose a different route for dealing with their pain. Whatever had happened in their lives to make them violent criminals, they could choose to change their lives around. I know because I changed mine.

I KNOW that I will always be associated in some way with helping people avoid, escape, or be sheltered from abuse. When I think about how I can do this full time in the future, I think about starting a foundation through which I can found and maintain a transition shelter.

Transition moments are crucial intersections in the lives of women and children who suffer abuse. One of my models for how to think about transitions is the Purple Project, an Ohio-based organization that helps foster kids ease out of the system and into society successfully. It organizes a range of services that provide safety, teach life and work skills, and even help the kids find formal wear for a prom or other special occasions. I have been a speaker at Purple Project events, and its founder and director, the remarkable Latasha C. Watts, is a close friend and a member of my safe circle.

The combination of services Purple Project provides, covering practical goals as well as the things that young people care about, is what I find so compelling. I think of Purple Project as a model for the transition center I hope to call Lily’s Ray of Hope, a women’s shelter that I promise will never turn anyone away. If there is no room at all, Lily’s Ray of Hope will find a place for the woman, and we will get her there. No one will be sent away. Not ever.

That promise was born when I ran away from home the Thanksgiving after my son, Joey, was born. It was very cold out, but I was in such a hurry that I didn’t even have time to get my coat. I put Joey in my shirt, and we walked and walked until I finally found us a shelter. But it had no room and could offer us no other options.

We kept going. Another two miles. Nobody stopped to help us. Nobody even looked at us. I had no money even to make a phone call to Carol and Rose, and their house was way too far away to walk to. The weather was scary. I kept talking to Joey, kept promising him that “eventually,” we would arrive someplace. I was walking as fast as I could. I could hear him crying and I could tell he was very cold. I didn’t want to steal, but I took a blanket off someone’s porch and wrapped Joey in it as we walked. Several days later I returned that blanket.

I finally found a shelter—co-ed, with no privacy—that let us in for the night so long as we left first thing the next morning. I asked about transition assistance and was told, “You have to transition yourself.” That about killed me. If I could transition myself, I probably wouldn’t be walking coatless through the city looking for a bed for myself and my baby. Even today many shelters do not offer the kind of support services too many women and children need. They might refer you to some agency or other, but not everyone has money for a bus ride. Some are just too worn down to go another step.

Lily’s Ray of Hope will offer all those options right on site: counseling, education, basic health care, privacy—because boundaries are important. I see the center as something like an apartment complex with studio-like apartments, each woman in her own room, all the women able to cook their meals.

It will offer safety and compassion, welcome and support. I want it to help women work toward their goals, not to do it for them. I want to create a place where women can have their own safe circles of other women who understand.

Another key model for Lily’s Ray of Hope is One Safe Place, the California-based organization that I first discovered in the Cayman Islands. They do it right. So does AVDA, Aid to Victims of Domestic Abuse, in Florida, another great organization. I’d like to take the best of what these and other organizations do and bring it to Cleveland.

Lily’s Ray of Hope will also, of course, offer art therapy classes in which women can express what they’re going through in painting, drawing, writing, or music. As they do so, they may be able to learn to trust again.

But the transition center is not my only goal for the future. I would also love to create a paint-and-sip that would give people a creative outlet for fun and a kind of escape from the stress of their lives, whatever that stress might be. At Lily’s Paint-and-Sip I would sometimes choose the paints and the subject. Other times the theme or assignment would be for people to paint whatever they want to paint. Classes for children would offer chips and healthy drinks. Classes for adults would offer snacks too, but only those adults who can prove they have a designated driver will be allowed alcohol.

For me, Lily’s Ray of Hope and Lily’s Paint-and-Sip are dreams for the future. But as you know by now, my dreams are always built with hope.

AS YOU’VE been reading throughout this book so far, getting to the point where I can even think about a future has been a process. It didn’t happen all at once. At first, in fact, I didn’t really think about dealing with what I had been through. I didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want people to know about it, and I was certainly not prepared to open up to others. Partly I was afraid of what people might think of me, but mostly I guessed how much it would hurt to lay bare the wounds of my life. So in the beginning, after I was rescued from Castro’s house, that was the last thing I wanted to do. I told myself that if the physical wounds healed, that would be enough.

But it wasn’t.

IT WAS BACK in Chapter 5 that I told how, at the trauma center in Tennessee, I first opened up about my childhood and my captivity on a person-to-person basis. The audience back then was small, to say the least, and it was made up of total strangers I was unlikely to see again. Yes, I had then written my story in a book, had gone on a book tour and talked to reporters and interviewers, had talked into microphones or to audiences of people I couldn’t see, and had answered multiple questions, but all of that, important as it was in lessening my pain, seemed anonymous to me. In a way I might have been talking to the air. At the trauma center, however, I spoke face to face with other trauma victims, people who could react and respond to what I was saying. And they did—although, as it turns out, their response was totally loving, like a warm embrace. But as I told you, I wasn’t comfortable even about doing that until I had been at the center for a while, until I had been with those people for a while and had gotten to know them somewhat. Even the equine therapy with Waylon didn’t especially inspire me to talk openly to other people about what I had gone through in my life. The value of Waylon was that whatever I said to him was between the two of us. Talking to him was like looking at my feelings in a mirror. So it wasn’t really until I heard one after another of the other people at the trauma center tell the stories of their own abuse that I felt I could tell mine. I understood what they had suffered because I recognized it, and I realized that they would understand my pain for the same reason: because they recognized it. They knew where I was coming from and what I had been through because they had been there as well. They wouldn’t judge me.

It was a huge help to me to see how much being able to open up the wounds of what I suffered in Castro’s house actually helped my healing process. But it took another four years, until 2017, before I was able to open up a wound that went way back in my life. The wound I opened up to others then, the wound I am opening up to all my readers here and now, is my soul injury.

There is actually a program called Soul Injury. It was started by a nurse and a bereavement counselor who had worked for a long time caring for military veterans, especially vets at the end of their lives. The two found that a great many of these veterans waited until just before death to finally reveal “what damaged their soul.” It kind of burst out of them on their deathbeds, and it was only then, and only by revealing these injuries, that the dying veterans were able to release the hold the injuries had on their lives.

It makes sense. A lot of veterans who have experienced some form of trauma try hard to put a lid on it when they get home from the war. Keeping the lid on tightly can work while they are in the prime of life, but as they near death, the unconscious mind grows stronger, and the memories won’t stay pushed down. The memories sort of explode out of these onetime soldiers, but by then it’s pretty late, and as for the peace the veteran may gain as a result, it’s really too late to enjoy its benefits. The founders of Soul Injury saw that waiting until just before death to break the hold of such wounds meant that these vets spent most of their adult lives in pain and unable to become all they could be or achieve all they wanted to achieve. The ongoing impact of their soul injury limited their lives. So the two founded the Soul Injury program to help turn that around.

But the two founders also understood that you didn’t need to have been in the military to experience a soul injury. Any kind of trauma can cause it. People who have suffered abuse or lost their health or lived in a war zone or survived a terrible disaster—not to mention the people who care for traumatized people—can all suffer damage to their souls.

The founders of the Soul Injury organization define a soul injury as a pain that “can subtly and not-so-subtly rob traumatized people of their vitality. The source of soul injury is unmourned grief and unforgiven guilt and shame over things we think we should or should not have done. Unmourned grief and unforgiven guilt can sabotage lives.”^* They do that by making the person feel tainted in some way—stained. Because there was no support or protection at the time of the original injury, the person feels totally disrupted and disconnected and not worth much of anything, and that becomes like a mark on that person. A blemish. Something that doesn’t rub off easily.

I know exactly what they mean. I know from very personal experience what unmourned grief and unforgiven guilt are all about, and I know how they sabotaged my life. Guilty and ashamed and disconnected and worthless—I’m familiar with those feelings… and with the fear they can put into you and the stain they can leave on you. By 2017 I realized that if I was to live life at all, I had to reveal what had damaged my soul and begin to deal with it—the sooner the better. If I kept on waiting, I might carry the weight of it all my life, and I did not want that. I did not want to be on my deathbed before I healed my soul injury. I had to heal it now.

I received an invitation to be a keynote speaker for a Soul Injury program in the spring of 2017. I should say co-­keynote speaker: I was paired with an Army veteran who had also been asked to share his story. We had been booked for two days, a Monday and a Tuesday in early June, to reach two different audiences. The events were held in funeral parlors in two towns not very far from Cleveland. Why in funeral parlors? Because a lot of funeral homes around the country are involved in Soul Injury outreach efforts to reach people who deal with grief and bereavement in their work—like the audiences I was invited to talk to.

I remember that the day before, Sunday, had been really hot—more like summer than spring for Cleveland—but Monday was a nice spring day, and I was feeling pretty good as Miguel drove me to Strongsville for the first day’s meeting.

The meeting was held in a great big room in the funeral home. Chandeliers and recessed lighting made it a bright place, and a patterned green-and-gold carpet covered the floor and made the room feel quiet and serene—just right for a funeral parlor, I thought. As the room kept filling up, more chairs were brought in, and by the time the program was ready to begin, there were so many people that they had run out of chairs and some people were standing against the walls. I had been told that the audience would consist of nurses, doctors, caseworkers, veterans, cops, therapists, and even the family members of some victims of trauma—all people who had some experience, direct or indirect, with soul injury.

First, there was a video meant to set the context of the program. It featured individuals who had held onto a remembered trauma very deeply and for a very long time until finally something in their heads clicked, and they were ready to open the wound. All of them said how much speaking aloud their soul injury had helped them. That sounded right to me. A soul injury makes dealing with life difficult, and beginning to heal the injury can immediately help put you back in life.

Maybe it was during the video or when the organizer of the event introduced my co-speaker and me and said we were there to tell our soul injuries, but at some point I got it into my head to mention my son. As you know, I don’t script my speeches ahead of time, and I really had no clear idea what I would be saying when my turn came. I just knew something would pop into my head. I had often mentioned Joey during speaking engagements—always very briefly, just a mention, and I figured that whatever I ended up talking about to this group, I could also mention Joey in my speech.

By now, however, I was eager to hear the veteran’s story of his soul injury, so I asked him to go first. He talked about Army training and then being sent overseas on active duty with his group—I don’t know to which area of conflict; I’m not sure he named a place, and I’m not sure it matters. He told about how he and the guys in his group all bonded very tightly—they were a band of brothers. Then one day they went out on patrol and came under attack, and every single member of the group was killed—except him. Helplessly he watched one after the other of his band of brothers die. But he did not die. He was alive, and that became guilt and shame and terrible inner pain for him.

As he spoke, the audience responded openly. Nobody held back. People cried. People yelled encouragement. When he talked about the very valuable therapy he had undergone—not my experience, as you know—people listened attentively. I was reminded then that many in the audience were themselves therapists and caregivers.

I was riveted to his story, and as it unfolded, something clicked in my head: Here and now, I thought. This meeting today would be the right setting and the right moment to really tell my soul injury. I think I knew at that moment that I didn’t have to be afraid or ashamed to reveal what I had tried so hard to bury as deeply as possible so very long ago. And I felt that if I did, I might finally bring into the light something that I still had kept in the dark.

The vet finished, and it was my turn. I stood up. And I began by admitting that although I often mentioned my son in talks I gave, I had never really told anyone before what I was about to tell them—and am now about to tell you. I had not written about it in Finding Me. I had not talked about it at the trauma center. I had not even fully shared it with Miguel. “The wound I’m going to open up,” I said, “is my soul injury.” I was quite nervous when I began to talk; the butterflies in my stomach were so bad that I felt a little like I might be sick, and I actually had to swallow it back a couple of times. I started again, and it was so difficult that, at first, the organizer had to help me along. I was talking about being unable to control my own life, and I was losing my own self-control as I was telling about it. I had to stop at certain points. But as I kept going I could sense that the people in the audience understood exactly what I was talking about. They saw exactly how I was hurting. I cried almost the whole way through my story, but as I kept going, I felt a weight beginning to lift. I felt a certain sense of relief.

After a while the story just poured out of me. Here is what I told the Soul Injury audience:

Very early on, I chose a bad road for my life. I can say that I chose this road because it was all I knew. I learned it—I learned everything—from people who were not healthy for my life, who were poisoning my life. I learned from being sexually abused. From being beaten by family members. From being told I was nothing. When you get told you’re nothing over and over and over, you start believing it.

But still, I am the one who made the choice. I am the one who followed a path down the bad road. I started drinking booze when I was ten years old. I started doing drugs when I was eleven. I did both as a way to suppress everything I was going through in my life. To numb my feelings.

I still kept trying to tell people what was going on in my life. I tried to get grownups—people in authority—to listen and understand. Nobody did. They told me I was lying. They accepted it when my mother and other family members denied what I was saying, when my mother would say, “I’m a good parent. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

But I felt that my family did do something wrong, and because I couldn’t stop it, I allowed them to hurt me to the point where I hurt myself. Three times I almost committed suicide. Each time I got close but couldn’t go through with it.

I was not yet eighteen years old when I found out I was pregnant. That was a turning point for me. If nobody was going to do anything to help me, I was going to have to do it myself. I knew there was a better way to live, and now that I had another life growing inside me, this seemed the time to try. So I locked myself in a room and determined that I was going to detox myself—get rid of all the alcohol and drugs I had been taking in. Get clean and sober.

This is how I would be different from my family. I would get off the bad road I was on, and I would break with my family and everything about them. I wanted my baby to have a better life. What I did not realize was that what I was deciding to do could actually hurt him.

I told myself that everything would be okay. I had a supply of bread and lots of water and I told myself, I’m going to do this and I’m going to fight for my child and nothing bad can happen. Nothing is going to stop me from doing this. Hurting the baby beginning to grow inside me or hurting myself was the furthest thing from my mind. But after two weeks of being in the room by myself, I was severely dehydrated. I was also weak from lack of food because everything that I ate I threw up. I had hot and cold flashes. My body was numb. I could barely walk. I had to more or less drag myself to a phone to call the doctor.

I said to the doctor, “I feel like I’m dying right now, and I am pregnant, so I am coming to the hospital!”

Honestly, I don’t remember how I got there, but when I did, the medical staff told me that if I had waited any longer, I could have lost both the baby and myself. They fixed me up, and then they sent me home, ordered me to rest, said I would need to drink plenty of water and eat plenty of food and take some vitamins to make sure the baby stayed healthy. They assured me it was all right, that the baby was “just a little seed” and would grow healthier over time.

But “home” didn’t provide the rest or the healthy food I needed. I was still being abused, still being beaten, still being told I was nothing. At twenty-four weeks I started bleeding and went to the hospital again. The first thing they asked me was if I was okay. “No,” I said. I was kind of frantic. I told them I was afraid that I had hurt myself and my little unborn child so much that I felt like I was going to lose him. I told them I was still being abused and hurt in terrible ways at home. I wanted them to know that, but from long experience I knew no one was listening.

They just focused on the pregnancy. The medical staff told me that everything could be okay, that this was just a minor setback. “As long as you stay very comfortable,” they told me, “the pregnancy will be all right.” I think I spent a week in the hospital—at the time everything was pretty much a blur.

When I was released from the hospital they told me I should not climb stairs. But my bedroom was upstairs, and my family members—my mother, my uncle—had no interest in moving the rooms around. As usual, they didn’t want to do anything for me, so I had to do everything myself. I went upstairs and carried my mattress and my bed downstairs. Once again I thought how I was hurting myself to make my family comfortable, doing everything they wanted me to do instead of them doing something—anything—to help me.

It wasn’t long before I went back to the hospital, this time with cramping and a headache. My “uncle” was with me. “Are you drinking plenty of water?” I was asked. “Have you been climbing stairs? Exerting yourself physically?” He was sitting right there—my abuser. I couldn’t answer truthfully. I couldn’t say, “If I tell you the truth, I’ll get beaten when I get home.” I just told them I hurt. I hurt. I hurt.

Shortly after that, I started leaking amniotic fluid. I went to the hospital again, and again my uncle took me. This time I was told I needed complete pelvic rest and bed rest. The doctor, a man, said to me, “You’ve got to stop having sex.”

“Sure,” I said, “you tell the person that’s doing it to me.”

“What are you talking about?” the doctor asked me.

I told him. I said I was being forced to have sex, that in no way was it my choice.

He asked who was forcing me and how it was happening, and I thought back on all the times I had tried to tell “responsible adults” what was happening and said to him, “If I tell you, you’re not going to help me anyway.”

He walked out of the room and sent in a woman doctor, and I told her exactly the same thing: “For years I’ve been trying to tell you people that I’ve been abused. You shoved me away. You told me I was lying. You told me it wasn’t possible. Now I’m here again. I’m trying to tell you again without saying it. The person who is forcing me is sitting right over there, and you still haven’t done anything about it.”

You know what? Once again nothing happened. The hospital sent me home. I went home with my abuser. And as soon as we got through the door I was beaten again—for telling tales out of school, for talking about “the family” in front of others. As always, I was stuck. If I ran to Carol and Rose, some family member would just come and get me. And I had no source of income for myself. Any money I ever got—even for babysitting when I was a kid—they took from me.

I stayed. I felt I had no choice. I had broken with my family, had tried to escape the life I was born into, and I had lost. I felt everything a soul-injured person feels: shame, guilt, a loss of any sense of self, pain, heartache, hopelessness.

As I brought my story to a close, I could see and hear people in the audience crying. So I finished by telling them about the birth of my son. I wanted them to know that something very, very good—my son—had come out of all this. I told them about how I had to have a Caesarean section and that Joey emerged unresponsive. I told them about watching the nurses and doctor take my baby away, over to the side of the room, and about the tears of joy that came streaming down my face when I heard him scream. I was so happy he was alive! But I also let them know that others had raised my son.

“To this day,” I told the Soul Injury audience, “I feel grief because I never told anybody what I have just told you. I never said anything. I never wanted people to know because I was afraid of what they would think. Only today do I realize that I’m tired of what everybody else thinks and I need to get this off my chest before it hurts me any more than it already has.”

I sat down. The audience applauded.

It felt so good to have told about this injury. It felt good to have spoken this truth. I know that revealing it strengthened me, makes me more comfortable in my own skin and, I believe, more effective as an advocate for others with soul injuries, whoever they are and whatever their age. Do I wish I had done it before? There’s a right time for these things. Everybody heals in their own way. I had to wait until I was ready. The time and place were part of it. The veteran’s bravery in telling his story was inspirational. Everything came together. My heart, soul, and mind connected, and I could bring this story out of the darkness into the light.

The next day Miguel drove me to Parma, Ohio, where I told the story all over again to another Soul Injury audience. The weight of guilt and shame got even lighter.