My Story

June 12th, 2003 || 3:30a.m.

“I love you, I love you…I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…” These words shutter me awake. Processing the entirety of this, impossible. My mom’s face tells me enough. My instincts and body are reacting before my brain has had time to process. I feel my heart begin to race. My Mom and Dad walk away from the family room couch where I had fallen asleep the night before. I hear the front door of my childhood home close abruptly behind them.

Barely awake, confused, clock blinking 3:35a.m. I hear something in the room.

I sit up as my heart starts to thump harder.

Two large, dark shadows present themselves from the corner of the room. As the towering figures walk closer, the flickering light from a nearby lamp presented me with what would soon become the most traumatic 13-months of my life.

My parents hired two strangers to come take me from my our home. This was their solution for an impossibly depressed, admittedly difficult, 15 year old kid.

Taken,

Handcuffed, put on a plane, strip searched, blindfolded and put in a car, dropped off in the wilderness. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning…

9 weeks in the Uintah Mountains, followed by 12 months in a, ‘Therapeutic,’ Boarding School.

I’m back now…but in many ways I’m not. I thought if I waited a certain amount of years it would just go away. Some ways this just happened yesterday, and in some ways it was another lifetime ago.

I’m only here because I made a promise while I was there. I would DO something to help the victims of this hell I went though…. The Trouble Teen Industry.

Well, I’m not ready to face the shit I went through myself, but I can’t stand by and do nothing anymore for the others that are suffering through this. So here is, a perhaps feeble attempt, to share a piece of myself in hopes it can provide some light for so many that are currently suffering alone in the dark.

Our stories might be very different, but the fact that we have all been through something is what should bring us together.

I was taken, but now it’s time to take my life back, please join me in doing the same,

You’re worth it…

I’m working hard to create a community where all of us can come together, and share.

Always remember to ask for help when you need it , you are never as lonely as your mind will make you believe…

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Come Connect…