You Stole My Childhood But Not My Soul - Akiba Grace Zakai

Akiba shares, "Nothing could shield me from what seemed to be the inevitable.  My mother had turned over her parental rights to my grandmother, and my father was not around.  Who was I to tell?  I felt like a throw away and abandoned.  I grew up with a cloud of guilt, shame, feeling dirty; I felt like a fraud and anything else negative that I could throw into the pot of life.  For many years I tried to numb my mind and body with drugs and alcohol.  I stayed in abusive relationships because I thought that the abuse was my way of life.

I was hospitalized for a week in the year 2000 and that for me turned everything around.  I was at rock bottom.  I was not crazy.  All I needed was for someone to make me see that I counted in this world.  I needed to be validated.  The Doctors made me see that even though the molester and my grandmother had been dead for many years, I still allowed them to rule me from their graves.  On the third day there, I looked into my bedroom mirror and saw that I was a child of GOD.  That day I realized that I was not what had been my past."