Spirit of the Street

Spirit of the Street

I was fourteen then...  I had just left home.  I was a bright and sensitive child but my heart was breaking in each day that I lived with my parents.  I loved them both very much.  It pained me to see my father -  to live through his drunken outbursts - to have to stop talking or making noise of any sort after 5 in the evening - to hear him threaten to hurt me my brother or my mother - to hide when the threats became real - to watch each evening at dinner when he would choke on his food and my mother would stick her fingers down his throat to save him -  to pick him up when he fell...  I couldn’t stay to help my mother take care of him and join her in her prayer that things would change.  

We lived in a decent size mid-western state across the Mississippi river from St. Louis and over a town or two...  Before the age of 13, and while I questioned what in the world adults were all about, I found what I looked at as love and acceptance from adults other than my parents.   Before I even knew that I was in a dangerous situation, I had a needle in my arm... and at 14, I was now a spirit of the streets.  I had to learn to get by...  there was always a place to stay, there were lots of times when in order to get high with you - people would turn you on - and you could end up there for days at a time.  I finally found a group of people who lived in a very dangerous part of town.  I was given drugs at every opportunity and I,  in turn, did the laundry, the dishes, the housework and became the sole property of one of the men in the house.  He was extremely possessive, aggressive and angry.  I tried to go back home once but he caught me and beat me badly.  He told me he would kill me if I ever tried to go home again.  I believed him.  He brought me to a house where he locked me in a closet.  He left me their - drugged - especially when he would be gone for hours.  There were many instances of life/death in my life on a daily basis - gunfights; being left with gun-toting  glue sniffers as collateral for a drug deal, using needles that half of the party had already used.  I was physically traded to another man who kept me in a room with mattresses on the floor...  I was fed what we then called downers, tuinal & seconal, and sold sexually at their whim.  I have little memory of what happened in that house.  It is all an awful blur.

One thing I didn’t lose was a belief that there was something bigger than all of us out there and this Supreme Being had a watch over me.  I mean after all, I was still living and that was a miracle.  Enter into my life, a couple of angels.  They came to this house in the form of women who cared.  I begged them to get me out.  I knew I would die if I stayed any longer.  They took me out of that house that day and to a safe house.  At this house I finally slept a peaceful sleep.   By the third morning I woke up hungry and feeling like I had been hit by a truck - the bruises and cuts that had covered my body were beginning to heal and  fade.  I had taken the first step back (with a little help from some angels).

The week following  I called the nearest rehab counselor, someone I had gotten to know in the past several years.  I begged him to send me away, somewhere I could get better...  I went to one of the first live-in therapeutic houses in the US for people under 18.  I went through the program (from cleaning toilets to managing the food and money for the 14 person domicile).  It took six months... after then I trained to become a therapist there.  I never looked back...   

I centered my life from those days in therapy on that spirit inside.  That energy that brought me joy and peace within.  My life since those days has been a continual journey toward wholeness.  A life filled with many ups and downs but always a genuine belief that the bad stuff was an opportunity to find the good in life; to see people with compassion, forgiveness and understanding; to LOVE myself no matter what I was going through.  Today I work listening and coaching others to find the will to live and the divinity in each moment that we are alive.  I wouldn’t trade this gift of LOVE for my fellow humans Being for having had an easy life.  I would never trade it for the LOVE I have found in each and every day.  I have been blessed.

Diana Lovejoy (Pen Name)