TRIGGER WARNING! This story is not a pretty one, nor is it an easy one. There are mentions and descriptions of abuse, rape, suicide, and substance use. I will put resources at the bottom of the post if you need them, or know someone who may need them.

The Foundation of Resilience

I was born in Seattle, Washington, to a single mom in a middle-class family. I was always ahead of my peers in most things: fine motor skills, talking, walking, and growing. To be honest, I don't remember much before I turned four, but I was told I used to say really strange things that seemed like past life experiences. I was a clever child and always very in tune with other people’s energy. I had what I now know as Claircognizance. I would tell my family things that would turn out to be correct, and when they asked how I knew, I’d just reply, "My brain told me." Around eight months old, a family friend gave me a yellow bear named Bear, who became my best friend through it all (we will revisit Bear throughout).

After I turned four, I began learning so many things about life, people, my family, the world, and animals. I decided I wanted to help all the animals, but I was also drawn to horses. I bounced between wanting to be a veterinarian, a horse trainer, and a cheerleader, eventually landing on being a horse trainer by day and a cheerleader by night. It wasn't until I was five that I learned veterinarians can specialize in horses, which quickly replaced the horse trainer aspiration. I was also deeply interested in the natural world—nature, astrology, meteorology, human anatomy, and cooking. I still am, to be honest.

Until I was seven years old, I lived with my mom and her father (Papa) in a big house in a primarily white neighborhood. While living in Washington, I was exposed to all types of people, cultures, foods, and religious traditions; my mom did her best to educate me through diverse experiences. When she was working or spending time with friends, I was either with Papa, my mother’s mother (Mema), or my uncle and his family. Every other weekend, I would go to my father’s apartment to spend time with him. My mom wanted me to form my own opinions on him and give him a chance to be a dad.

When I was six years old, Mema became homeless and moved into Papa’s house for about a year (or more, I don’t remember), and that’s when my mental health started tanking. She had always been sweet with me, teaching me things. If she needed to go shopping for her mother (Grandma), I would go with them. Grandma had dementia, so she wasn’t fully present, but we would play, and at some point, she would often try to steal Bear from me. Through that experience, I learned she was not like the other adults I had been around, but she would listen to me when I talked to her. My mom had told me about the dementia, but I was still confused about why Mema was so strict with her. It wasn't until the year Mema moved in that I began to understand some things.

When I would do something bad or unacceptable, Mema would threaten me with spankings, which wasn’t out of the norm for me as a child. The thing that wasn’t “normal,” I suppose, was that I didn’t really care—though this wasn’t apparent until I was nine—so she got creative with my punishments. Thankfully, Papa would intervene with the unethical ones, like refusing to feed me, talk to me, or help me when I needed it. It wasn't until one night my mom went out with friends that I realized Mema was, at least in my eyes, "crazy." I don’t remember what I did, but I remember getting spanked, ignored, and then locked in my mother's room after being yelled at for what felt like forever. I remember crying, confused and scared that she was going to come back, but hearing her laughing and talking like none of that ever happened. That was the first time I wanted to die. I wanted to suffocate in the covers to teach her a lesson—that you can’t treat someone that way and act like nothing happened.

I obviously kept living, but the abuse unfortunately only got worse from there. Mema would tell me that I was hateful, my smile was ugly, and that I was an ugly girl. She insisted I would never be a veterinarian and should just do what she told me.

One night, she physically abused me. I again don’t remember exactly why, but I truly thought I was going to die. I was having a rough day (now I know why), and I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but she egged me on until I guess I did something wrong, and she made me cry. I was crying to the point that she made me sit in my room until dinner was ready, and when she saw I was still crying, she aggressively washed my face and made me get ready to eat.

Dinner was beef stew, one of my favorite meals Papa made. I was hyperventilating, drooling, snotty—a full-on ugly cry. I remember my face hurting when I came to sit at the table, and I just looked at my food, not feeling hungry at all. I somehow got Papa to agree to let me skip dinner, but Mema would have none of it. She told me I had to eat.

I remembered eating the celery, carrots, and some of the meat, and I mostly had potatoes left in the bowl by the time she decided I wasn’t eating fast enough. She got a wooden spoon and threatened to hit me with it. I genuinely thought she was bluffing and continued eating at the same pace, remembering that as long as I finished my food, it’d be okay. But then she came back and started hitting me in my back, head, and arms.

Of course, I started crying again, but this time with big pieces of stewed potato in my mouth, and I began to choke. I remember not being able to breathe and fighting to clear my airway as she continued to hit me while I was choking. This went on until I finished my food.

I thought I was done, but then she wanted me to eat cottage cheese, which I didn’t like. She started hitting me again. Thankfully, my uncle came to get his mail at that time, and I told him what happened after she left the room to get him something for his daughters. He told me to just throw the cottage cheese away, and he told me to lie and say I finished it. That was the night I truly began to see just how awful she was.

I don’t remember anything else that happened between us until she somehow manipulated me into calling my Mom fat. I remember feeling betrayed because I didn’t see what she was doing from the beginning. She would do all kinds of things to tear me and my Mom apart, but it never worked.

The summer before I turned eight, my mom and I moved out of Papa’s house into a two-bedroom apartment about two and a half miles away. It was great, but I was still periodically acting out. Now I was having mood swings, painful cramping, and the depression and anxiety started plaguing me. My family just thought it was because of my period, but that didn’t come until I was ten.

I was still seeing my dad every other weekend, and at this point, he had started to teach me how to drive, what weed looks and smells like, and how to do basic computer repairs. He also taught me that he had a heart, but only for children who weren’t me. He would have kids over when I was there, and they would all walk all over me. When I would complain, he would just say, “You know they don’t have a father, so I’m going to be that for them just like I do with you.” But he was barely trying. He wanted to be the fun and cool dad, but never wanted to discipline. And when he didn’t get his way, he would have a full-blown meltdown, destroy things, and yell and scream at anyone nearby. It scared me because I was convinced it was all my fault, even when he said it wasn’t.

Also, around this time, he left me at his apartment (well, it was really his girlfriend’s apartment, which added complications) for over seven hours alone without telling me. It started off with him getting the mail, then poof, he was gone. The mail was gone, his car was gone, and the neighbors he would hang out with hadn’t seen him. I sat in the apartment crying for a while, panicked and too scared to use the house phone because it cost per minute. I decided to just keep it together until something changed.

His girlfriend came home tired from her long shift at the nursing home and was furious that he had left me home alone. She also said that if I needed to use her phone, I could (previously, those were my dad’s rules). It turned out he left to go to his friend's house, over 20 miles away, and thought I would be cool with it, even though I never knew he had left. My mom gave me the option to come home, but I decided to stay because I didn’t want to disappoint my dad. That incident landed me my first cell phone.

The next year, I was over at my dad's place for New Year's, and he took me to his friend’s house to set off fireworks. This friend lived on a Native American reservation, so we were able to basically do what we wanted. For whatever reason, they had a twenty-something guy with them this year; everyone was drunk and high, except me. This guy had a huge stash of fireworks from years past that had mostly gotten wet, so we couldn’t use all of them.

One of the fireworks was a broken bottle rocket, which we had saved out of fear of what it would do. After a while, we decided to light it for the hell of it to see what happened. It went crazy and almost hit my dad, and he stepped on me to get away. When I asked him about it, he said he thought he was going to die, and he was saving himself. He then went on to basically say that in a life-or-death situation, he would save himself every time.

I thought maybe I was hearing things, so I asked him the next morning, before he could start drinking again, to which he replied with the exact same answer. It was very shocking to me, and it took me time to process what he was saying. As an adult, I can see what he was saying, but damn... he could have just lied to me.

Because every time I went over there or saw him, he was usually drunk, and sometimes drunk and high. I knew what kind of danger drunk driving was, and I was terrified, especially since he would sometimes fall asleep while driving. I remember coming to the conclusion that he didn’t truly love me at all. As time went on, I realized that he was a liar. He would say he would be there and would never show up or be so late that he missed nearly the whole thing.

Then, at ten, I decided I was done with it, and I didn’t want to see him anymore. I was tired of taking care of him, tired of being left alone with rude kids, and tired of feeling like an afterthought.

A bit before that time, the verbal abuse from Mema was fully developed, and that was very heavy on me while I was evaluating my relationships with others. I remember her calling my Papa and interrupting me from homework to tell me I needed to do what she said. It was the first time I stood up to her, and it felt liberating. She got so mad and started screaming at me, and I just hung up and gave the phone to my Papa and carried on with my day. When my Mom came to pick me up after work, she told me that Mema said I was an evil little child and needed to be punished, but when we got home, we celebrated with her then-boyfriend.

I still continued to act out like clockwork even after beginning my period. I had really rough menstrual cycles: heavy flows, extremely painful cramping, mood swings, depression, and anxiety. I’m also fairly certain I’m on the spectrum for ADD/ADHD. My hormones were raging as I worked through puberty. I felt I needed to hide my feelings, thoughts, and experiences from my Mom because she was so busy trying to provide for me and handle her own business. Through this process, I learned to talk to myself, Bear, and how to write poetry to express myself. I didn’t go to friends’ houses because I felt it would inconvenience my mom to meet their parents, and I didn’t play with her friend’s kids because they would often ignore me. I was basically always under her, so I knew what she dealt with each day.

When I was ten, my Mom started the process of trying to adopt a child, so we had foster kids come in and out. She ended up taking care of a brother and sister from the Crow tribe in Montana. During that experience, I realized that I didn’t like it when my Mom was occupied with other kids, and I began to really act out, but this time for attention. We only had them for six months, and it was an eye-opening experience for both of us.

Later that year, we lost Grandma, who passed away at 92, while Mema attempted CPR alone in the house. That loss really got to me, and while I was trying to grieve the first person I’d ever known to pass away, I had Mema in my ear talking about how I didn’t care about her and did nothing with her, and just a bunch of other hurtful things.

Then two months later, I lost my dad’s mother, Grammy, to brain cancer. I was never close to her, but I was still upset. In that same week, a friend of the family passed away who had acted like a father to me in the church my mom and I attended. Four months later, my Papa’s mother passed away right after I ripped the ligaments in my left ankle and needed surgery. My depression only got worse with each death, and I was plunged into an infinite darkness. I attempted to join them twice during this time and failed each time.

At thirteen, we had a family meeting that the kids were finally able to attend, and it quickly turned into a "Jamelah is depressed and suicidal" meeting about 20 minutes in. It felt like a shaming circle as everyone felt bad, except for my Mema, who insisted that I should have told her so she wouldn’t have been so hard on me. But I was too afraid to tell anyone about it before then.

Shortly after that family meeting, my Mom got married to her now-husband, and we moved to Texas to his family’s land. I had to acclimate to a new school and a new culture. I mostly kept to myself and read books, which earned me the most studious award in the yearbook.

I continued to struggle with depression, but most of it was the same content, just presented differently. My dad still tried to talk to me and would often talk down to my mom and her husband, saying they kept me from him. This was not true; he was just upset that he had to pay child support, even though he hadn’t been paying it for the last three years. Literally, after my mom took him off of child support, he stopped calling.

I had tried to go to a doctor for my depression and various other symptoms, but she was quick to put me on pills. Each one was worse than the last until I tried fluoxetine (an SSRI), but even then, I wanted something better than medication. I didn’t try a therapist because when I was eight, I went to one, and the therapist told me I needed to do things her way or else I wouldn’t get better. So, I just kind of muscled through it like a sprained ankle.

At 18, I made enough money to change my last name from Gamble, my dad’s last name, to Luckett, my Grandmother’s maiden name. I was done with him and his bull-shit, and I didn’t want to be reminded of him every time I was addressed.

When I graduated from high school, I went to college in Wisconsin and fell in love with the northwoods and Lake Superior. I made new friends, and everything seemed fine for a year. Unfortunately, the main group of friends I had ended up being extremely toxic to me and did not sympathize with me at all. I frequently isolated around my period, afraid I would become the monster I usually did, which often got me in trouble when I was at home. They thought I was a happy, hyper, outgoing, and generous person when, in reality, it was a new mask I learned to wear. And when the mask came off, they would brush me off. It got to the point they were taking some random guy’s side over mine in a situation that they were not present for. That was my breaking point, and I had to remove myself from them. I ended up finding new friends and making some long-term bonds I still nurture today.

I had started going to therapy shortly after I realized I really needed help, and that’s when I was diagnosed with PreMenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) and put back on fluoxetine. A year later, I started hanging out with my now ex, and our relationship began. We ended up long-distance for a bit because of the pandemic, and I had a rewarding job as a farmhand at a dairy farm. It was great until the farmer began verbally abusing me, basically reminding me of my dad. He would yell at me for things I didn’t do, expect me to show up every day like he did, and he betrayed my trust multiple times. I ended up quitting on the spot after my ex decided to quit because his pay was suddenly docked with no explanation.

Everything seemed all good at first with my ex, but then he started to gaslight, argue, manipulate, and bully me after about eight months, and right in the middle of the pandemic. I should have left as soon as he told me I wasn’t allowed to talk to one of my friends, but I stayed, hoping it would get better. It did for a bit, then we moved back to his parents’ home in New Mexico, and everything got significantly worse.

It got so bad that I ended up planning to leave after he destroyed my Bear twice and forced me to fix them while throwing my sewing supplies everywhere. I ended up puting Bear in a bag for 3 years and didn’t get them fixed until this year. He would tell me I was making him look bad to his family and was just truly being horrible. He wouldn’t let me sleep until I had satisfied his demands, and he did things to me that can be classified as rape. He even tried to separate me from my mom after encouraging me to open up to her about things. He would eat all of my food before I got to have any, and he would blame me for his cannabis consumption, even though I barely touched his stuff.

I waited until he was out of town before I left, because I had tried to leave before, but he would argue with me for hours until I just wanted to go to sleep. His mom even helped me get most of my stuff out of their house and storage so he couldn’t destroy my things as he liked to do so often. I ended up having my mom drive 14 hours to come get me and my stuff, and we drove back to Texas, where I didn’t want to go because of multiple things that happened when I did live there.

The Catalyst for Change

After all of that, I truly thought I wouldn’t make it or even find it in my heart to love again because of the repeated abuse. I had moments where I thought I was worthless, useless, and mere trash. But I came to realize that I am none of those things. I had several people in my life who would uplift me and express to me how important and worthy I was. I didn’t believe it at first, but over time, I became receptive to their words.

It wasn’t until shortly after the move back to Texas that I truly realized my worth. I was worthy of people who love and support me. I was worthy of a better life, worthy of following my dreams, and worthy of living for me.

The catalyst for change was simple: I took a chance and chose myself, and I do not regret it one bit.

I started by redefining my spirituality, consciously reconnecting with people I hadn’t seen due to the draining relationship I had just left, and began doing things I enjoyed, like starting school again. I pulled away from Mema after a failed attempt to reconcile, set firm boundaries with my ex, and most importantly, I set boundaries with myself.

This newfound self-advocacy led me to start A Mindful Adventure, begin content creation, and step into my divine purpose. I refined my long-term goals and decided I wanted to help owners, breeders, and farmers have better relationships with their companions and animals through physical and mental therapy.

The thing that truly sustained this shift was a profound belief that I had many things I had yet to do. Each time I had tried to take my own life, I would always hear, “Don’t do it! Please don’t do it! You are needed.” I knew there was a greater force that wanted me to stay here, that needed me to be here. This knowing is still what keeps me from desiring death—the certainty that I am needed, chosen even, for something massive.

Out of all that trauma, I’m most scared of dying with regrets, and I was tired of being treated like trash by the people I thought I could trust. That final, shitty relationship was the last push I needed to catalyze my sense of self-worth. I had to get walked all over until I grew a backbone and rose from the depths of my darkness. I had to realize that I was not responsible for others’ thoughts, feelings, actions, and emotions, and thus, those were the things I had control over in my own life. I began to wake up excited, realizing that I can only be in control of myself, not anyone else.

The Proof that Life Gets Better

When I chose myself above all else, I finally found who I truly was and who I knew I was going to be. With each setback, devastation, PMDD episode, negative person, and awful experience, I defined who I wanted to be. I began to dream about the future in a tangible way—I could see my future family, my home, my job, and my plans.

I began to unlock different gifts and talents I had locked away as a child out of fear. I took charge of my healing and decided to take my inner child by the hand and love her the way she should have been loved. I decided that even if it was hard to speak, I would do my best to express it. I decided to fully embrace the side of me I had locked deep down.

I am not a victim, though I could keep telling my story that way. I am not a horrible person, I am not evil, I am not wearing a mask anymore, and I have decided to pursue balance and wisdom over all else. These changes have rocked my inner world. My mindset has changed so drastically that the things I used to cry about, used to bother me, and used to defeat me no longer hold power over me. I am not perfect, but I’m improving day by day, moment by moment.

I have been through some things recently that would have brought the old me to my knees, but they didn’t. I don’t cry as often, I don’t hurt as often, and I can articulate my boundaries accordingly, even with PMDD. Each conflict and problem that arises doesn’t weigh on me like it would have in the past. I am different than who I was not even six months ago. My reactions are more mellow, I take the time to think, I’m learning from situations nearly in the moment, and I’m embracing all sides of me. I’m learning how to step out of survivor mode and into living and just being. I’m becoming whole within myself and pursuing the things that light me up, bring me joy, and feed my spirituality.

There is no one on this Earth who has gone through the exact same situation in the way that I did in my body and has become who I am today. But there are people on this Earth who have been through similar experiences and are now out of it, changing their lives and helping others by being who they are.

When you look at someone, I don't want you to see what they have or how they present themselves to the world, but rather what they went through to get there. Because those people face "demons" we may never experience in our lives. We must do what we can to learn from each other rather than judge; it is not our place to do so.

When we learn from others, our minds change, our thinking becomes different, and we begin to live more fulfilling lives. That mindset shift is what will bring you to your own future and destiny, whatever that may be. It’s important to recognize that this is a journey, not for the faint of heart, and that choosing yourself is the ultimate form of self-love. This adventure, this life, is the only one you get to experience as you, in this body, with this name, with this mind, and with these experiences. Don’t doubt or belittle yourself; you are worth it all. You are worthy of your dreams and goals, you are worthy of love, you are worthy of joy, you are worthy of a satisfying life, but you need to put in the work.

It is this work that will set you on your best life path so that you may reap all of your blessings as you align with them.

With that, our adventure for today comes to an end.

My goal is simply to be a vessel, sharing the lessons and insights from my own path in the hopes that they may serve as a guide on your own. If this message found you at just the right time and resonated with you, I consider our connection a profound success. Whether our paths cross just this once or intertwine beautifully, know that I am here as a comrade and a friend on this journey.

I truly hope you feel seen, supported, and hopeful as you continue on your way. You are welcome to share your thoughts in the comments below or reach out directly to me. If you feel called to support this work and its mission, you can find the donation page linked in the site's footer. I look forward to connecting with you on this magnificent adventure.

With Love and Light,

Jamelah Luckett

P.S.- If you need immediate resources, I have provided some below, please reach out for help, your life is precious, and I love you too much to lose you to the struggle.

If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse or mental health challenges, here are some resources that are helpful:

• The National Domestic Violence Hotline
• https://www.thehotline.org/ 
•  1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
• Loveisrespect
• https://www.loveisrespect.org/ 
• 1-866-331-9474
• The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)
• https://www.nami.org/
• 1-800-950-NAMI (6264)
• The Crisis Text Line
• Text HOME to 741741 from anywhere in the US, anytime, about any type of crisis.
• RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network)
• Call 800-656-HOPE (4673)

Link to Companion YouTube Video