My Uncensored Life Story

 

My Dear Warrior,

Finding your voice and clearly expressing your boundaries is such a tremendously healing experience.

One of my previous Sunday Letters titled ‘Would You Rather be Well Behaved  or Whole?’ had a very cleansing effect on us all.

Through it, we could all feel our true selves more powerfully than ever before. It also gave us all the chance to see how similar we are to one another.

 

We are all stumbling through the same mist and darkness until we finally decide to claim our right to live in the sunlight. This has always been our birthright, but society is always conditioning us to be someone else. It tries to domesticate us like show poodles and turn us into predictable, simple, unfeeling, and meek versions of ourselves.

 

I have never received as overwhelming a response as I have for Would You Rather Be Well Behaved or Whole?. So many of you, including those who had written to me for the first time, wrote to me saying that because of my Sunday Letter you were finally able to connect with me and feel the message I wanted to convey. I have never felt such bold sincerity. We all bared our lives to each other.

 

I was so humbled by the power of freedom that our sincerity had unleashed.

I know that when we dare live our boldest, most powerfully honest selves, bared in front of the world, all those who would suppress us and frighten us become powerless. They are left to rot in their own void souls.

You’ve been sending me your stories ever since. And I’ve been reading them. I’ve been crying with you, cheering you on, embracing you in my mind, congratulating you from afar, and sending you strength and light. You’ve shown me the most intimate parts of your souls where all your past pains reside. I know you’ve had no choice but to hide them there, in the metaphorical attic of your being, in order to survive. You’ve allowed me to see the most wounded parts of yourselves. The parts that enabled so many of you to finally find your wings amidst your pain and start fighting for yourselves; the parts that steered some of you into the right direction; the parts that represent a point of refuge for those of you who are still gathering the strength to break free.

 

We don’t have to know all the details of our journey in advance. All we have to do is take it one step at a time. Knowing everything would be too overwhelming. We would become frightened and stop in our tracks. Going step-by-step is the way to go. Whether you are moving slowly or quickly doesn’t matter. You are moving and that’s all that matters.

Please know that we are not sharing our stories with one another to feel sorry for ourselves, mollycoddle each other, and act the victim. No! No and no!

 

We can share our stories because we have lived them and have survived them. We have SURVIVED! We have overcome so much shit! We are champions. We are winners! We are still here! We are still here – with our hearts wide open, full of acceptance, faith, and love – despite everything that has happened to us. And we have lived through so much!

We also share our stories so that we do not feel alone. Because these are OUR stories. Yes, our stories. They describe our struggles, our fights! We may have to fight our own battles alone, but we exist so that we can give each other strength and support. When one of us dares to bear her scars and live her life in bold, wholesome sincerity, she automatically shares her strength and her light with all of us.

 

For the first time in my life, I feel strong enough to share my story with you! Although you may know a few facts about me and some of my backstory, you do not know my true story yet. I’ve always shared only small, watered down, frightened fragments of it because I was trying to protect someone, or walk on eggshells in order not to rock the boat.

I’ve been protecting everyone but myself. 

Does that sound familiar to any of you?

By protecting others, I was actually hurting myself.

Think about how many times you may have done the same.

 

How many times have you hurt the person you were born to protect – yourself – in order to save someone else? How many times have you done this to yourself?

I am not living in my past, nor do I wish to bring it up needlessly. What I do want to do is own up to it. If I deny it, I am denying an integral part of myself.

My past has made me who I am today. I am who I am. And when I try to hide my past, only talk about it in whispers, water it down, and carefully adapt it to please others, I am diluting my present self. If I try to cover up my past and pretend that it doesn’t exist (something that my mother has mastered and is always trying to make me do through leading by example), I can never be alive in the now. If I did it, I would remain like a zombie hidden in mist. I would be living the only existing hell on planet Earth.

 

Instead, I choose paradise. And paradise, like the Garden of Eden, is found in nakedness and sincerity.

Paradise is in the freedom of stating, loudly and boldly, that you have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. You’ve dared to listen to your intuition and you’ve eaten the apple. You’ve done it, so what?

Hell isn’t the result of eating the apple. Hell comes from feeling the shame of having done something wrong. It originates from surrendering your power and letting the outside world exploit it.

I’ve felt so much shame in my life. There was so much of it accumulated within my body, because I had been forced to suppress and punish myself so many times.

 

Well, now, I am no longer ashamed. I am also not afraid of hell. Because, honestly, there is no hell. There can be no hell.

If I never allow myself to feel my own pain, I will never be able to feel joy, beauty, and love.

The more pain I dare to feel, the wider I can open up to the feeling of love.

This is true for me, you, and all of us.

Being WHOLE means accepting ALL parts of me. With everything that once was, that is, and that will be.

I can only be whole, once I stop fearing anything, changing to please others, and sugar-coating my story. I can only be whole if I dare to be bare in my sincerity.

 

That is the only way I can remove those who are not good for me from my life and allow those right for me in. It’s the only way.

It’s time for me to take you to my dark, dusty, shadow-riddled attic. To the most wounded parts of me. Only after I dare to venture into my own darkness, into the very heart of its pitch blackness, and turn on the light from within, can I become WHOLE. Anything other than that would only lead me further away from my true essence.

Courage is entering into the darkness. Into the void. And shining from within.

Thank you for holding my hand. I am holding yours, too.

 

MY STORY

I was five years old when my mother started suffering from the worst kind of addiction to spirituality – trying to buy every possible ticket to paradise, enlightenment, and eternal youth. She was convinced that she was going to die cursed unless she ensured her salvation.

I spent the first years of my life in hospitals – due to having been born poisoned in the womb and born prematurely – and the majority of my childhood and adolescence in churches, temples, and at the feet of the world’s greatest gurus. I was a golden-haired little girl with a face sprinkled with freckles, who had drunk enough holy water to fill an ocean.

LEVITATION AND A DEVASTATING PROPHECY

Before I was even enrolled in primary school, I had attended a levitation class (an advanced siddhi course in yogi flying) taught by Maharishi Mahesh yogi, the father of transcendental meditation, in his castle in Seelisberg, Switzerland. The castle was bought by the Beatles and it was beautiful. It looked like it had come straight from a fairy tale, but it was suffering from the same condition as every other similar institution – it smelled of incense mixed with farts.

 

Its visitors weren’t used to the Indian, lentil and fibre based vegetarian food.

Before I came to Switzerland, I spent ten days alone with my pranayama master/nanny attending a cleansing watermelon fast in the Croatian nudist camp Funtana, so my body also wasn’t used to solid foods. The fast also included having to perform regular enemas.

Maharishi’s personal Yjotish specialists read my first astrological chart and told me several predictions for the future, but at the end of a two-hour session, I could only remember three things:

1. That I would soon have a terrible accident connected with fire.
2. That, right before my seventeenth birthday, the boy I loved most in the world, would cheat on me and thoroughly break my heart which wouldn’t heal for a very long time.
3. That I would write books and teach all over the world, primarily women

 

A few months later, on our way home from Medžugorje, a Bosnian village known for the numerous sightings of Mother Marry, I had a car accident. I remember feeling a powerful crash and by blood seeping down my head, face, and leg. Immediately upon impact, my mother told me that the accident had been my fault. I was being punished for having dared to leave the church, where we had been praying for hours, to get some water. I had angered God and now I had to deal with his wrath. It was all my fault.

 

THE HOSPITAL AND AN INFLAMMED LEG

The EMTs in Bosnia quickly sutured my wounds without anaesthetic and transported me back to Slovenia. I had to ride in the front seat of a shaking and jerking tow truck and kept falling in and out of consciousness, so upon my arrival, I had to be admitted to the University Medical Centre of Ljubljana immediately.

The only thing I can remember from that time is doctors saying ‘She’s suffered severe blood loss. Her leg is inflamed.’ The inflammation was so severe that it was borderline turning into gangrene and I was in danger of losing my leg. The doctors contemplated amputating it in order to save my life.

 

They were so focused on saving my leg that they overlooked a shattered part of my sacrum and because I had to stay bedridden for a very long during my recovery, it never healed properly.

My mom would come to visit me with various missionaries, bioenergetics healers, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. They kept praying and bringing me beetroot juice. I remember feeling so ashamed afterwards, when the nurse would come into my room and give me an adult potty to help me pee and it came out red because of the beetroot.

My mom never came to see me alone. Being alone with me was never enough for her.

She never told my father or the rest of my family how severely injured I truly was. When you were being punished by God you didn’t deserve to be spoken of.

 

LIVING IN CLINICS

Instead of taking me to physical therapy, my mom took me to America to attend a long spiritual and nutritional expedition. I was seven and a half years old. Before we left I had actually managed to attend the first year of primary school for a few months, just long enough to be accepted among the pioneers. I remember a picture of Tito hanging on the wall and thinking he looked like Maharishi, because they both liked to wear gold.

In America we lived with the queen of chlorophyll and the inventor of green juices, Ann Wigmore, in the now world famous Hippocrates Health Institute. Our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners were comprised of nothing but sprouts and we had wheatgrass for dessert.

Then, we moved to the macrobiotic institute of Michio Kushi where we were surrounded by cancer patients in the final stages of their disease, and patients suffering from AIDS.

 

Every meal consisted of brown rice, some vegetables cooked and sliced in accordance with the yin and yang principle, and a pinch of roasted sesame. We had to chew every single bite of food a hundred times in order to activate our digestive enzymes. I spent most of my time at the clinic either crying because I missed the taste of real food so much, or hallucinating about all the food I wanted to eat and the fulfilling feeling it would leave behind in my tummy.

From the clinic of the dying, we then moved on to Montana to see the guru and leader of the I AM movement Elisabeth Clare Prophet. There, we would get up at the break of dawn to recite and repeat the mantras that summon the Ascended Masters. We spent hours upon hours repeating these sacred words in order to cleanse and widen our consciousness. Elisabeth also baptised me. We were actually allowed to eat ice cream in Montana. It didn’t contain any sugar or dairy products, it mainly consisted of frozen water with a bit of lemon, but it was ice cream nonetheless.

By the end of my adolescent years, I had been baptised six and blessed more than a hundred times. I had drunk urine in the company of the Avatars and eaten prana with Tao Masters. I had operated on tumours with a mystical surgeon, and practiced telepathy with shamans. I had also had exorcisms performed on me more times than I could count and had had holy knowledge ‘downloaded’ into my cleansed body along with the essence of God.

 

ABUSE AND GUILT

I was nine years old when I told my mom that her partner kept embracing and touching me in weird ways.

She looked at me and her eyes were as cold as ice. ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ was what she said to me, ‘You insist on strutting around the apartment in your underwear. You are trying to seduce him. You are trying to take him from me.’

When the person who is the most sacred to you, whom you love the most, and who is supposed to know what’s best for you, tells you that something is your fault, you believe them. You trust them and you believe that you truly are worthless.

 

That person continued to touch and abuse me for years to come.

Apart from being abused at home, I was later also sexually assaulted by two other men. The first attack happened in the elevator in the block of flats where I lived. I was eleven years old. Unbeknownst to me, a boy sporting a bowl-cut haircut had followed me home from the Trnovo grocery store. I didn’t know that he had been walking behind me or how the attack had occurred, but eventually the police investigation revealed the true chain of events and they filled me in on them. He entered the elevator behind me and pressed the stop button when we were between the ground and first floor. He grabbed me, covered my mouth, lifted me up, and started unbuttoning my velvet pants. I remember kicking him as hard as I could. He was standing behind me, holding me up, so I tried to hit his groin with all my might. I still don’t know whether he let go of my mouth because of the pain or out of shock, but it doesn’t matter – he did it, and I finally had the chance to scream. And I did. I screamed with all the strength my belly and my diaphragm could muster. The elevator shook with the power of my scream. The sound echoed through the building. That did frighten him. He threw me to the ground, unblocked the doors, and bolted down the stairs as soon as the doors opened. On his way down, he slammed into one of my neighbours.

 

The elevator took me home to the sixth floor. I was shaking when I ran into my mom’s arms. When I told her what had happened, she simply said, ‘It’s your fault. Your energy called the attacker to you. Go wash yourself and then go pray.’

I can still remember the look I had on my face when I looked in the mirror that day. It had been my fault. Again. I was guilty of something. Again. Always. Always guilty. I didn’t know how I could wash the guilt off of me. I never screamed again. From that point on, problems with vocal chords and a failing voice became my constant companions.

 

A few minutes after I returned to the kitchen, there were screams heard from outside our apartment building. I instinctively knew what people would find when they followed them – a naked little girl, trapped in a bush full of docks.

My mom called the police for her. She didn’t call them for me.

The same boy with the bowl-shaped haircut assaulted two more girls before he was caught – he had even raped one of them. I was called to the police station several times in order to identify him in a line-up of suspects. They eventually found him, and he was imprisoned based on witness testimony.

 

MY MOTHER DIED

Sometime later, my mom became pregnant with a catholic priest and decided to convince the Pope, the Roman-Catholic Church, and the entire world to get rid of the vow of celibacy, and redeem Eve’s sins. She changed my name. I could no longer be Savina – a name given to me by my father; I was to be called Janina. She even made my teachers change my name in my mark book.

I was also forbidden from celebrating my birthday, New Year’s, or dress up for Halloween. If I was caught eating bread, I was beaten with a wooden spoon.

My mother spent her days crying and praying, while I was left with having to take care of her. I cooked her macrobiotic food before I went to school. As soon as I was done with my daily classes, I spent the afternoons selling tofu on her stand in front of the Maximarket Mall.

 

Our mornings and evenings were spent in the Franciscan Church in the centre of Ljubljana where we attended mass and confession. I remember walking to church on foot and trying to come up with new sins to tell to Pater Silvan. I didn’t like staying silent when he asked me about my wrongdoings.

Nine months later, when mother gave birth, her priest left the church. Our lives were supposed to turn into paradise after that, but became a living hell instead. Much like my mom had been collecting baptisms before, she was now obsessed with collecting wedding ceremonies. She wanted to get married in every existing religion to ensure a happy and eternal marriage.

 

One day I returned from school only to be greeted at the door by the lady who came to our house to help us with the ironing. She was trembling and pale as a sheet. She refused to let me into the house. When I asked her what was going on, she started crying. She told me that my mother was dead.

Dead?

I demanded to know what was going on. Through the tears streaming down her face, she told me that my mother had died and that her body was in Christ’s hands now.

I pushed her out of the way and ran into the apartment.

There, in the corner of our dining room, sitting on a chair, was my mother.

When she spoke, her voice was calmer than I had ever heard it. She told me she was no longer my mother. That my mother had died and that the person sitting in front of me was a new, holy woman.

She gave herself a new name.

 

(I can’t remember which name that was, because she had changed it five times up until that point. I still need to think about my answer when some public official asks me by my mother’s name.)

She even sent her family, my father, and her past friends, a telegraph in which she announced her death. She even had her obituary painted in the local paper. A friend of hers came to give us his condolences and collapsed from shock when a supposedly dead woman opened the door for him.

Later, I found out that the reason for her ‘death’ had been her husband. He had told her that he had had enough of playing the part of a holy family. We had been missionaries for a very long time and had spread the word of Christ, walking and smiling our way from one church to the other all the way from Slovenia to Switzerland. Now he had finally had enough. And he had been pretending to like it the entire time anyway.

 

CLEANSED THROUGH CHRIST

Soon, I had three brothers and a mother who prayed from dusk until dawn. She was going to such extremes that her husband once threw her Bible into a pot of water and cooked it. We were then forced to eat the soaked pages for lunch. As punishment for her actions.

One night, in a fit of rage, my mom threw all my clothes and possessions through the window. They fell directly onto the same spot where that molested girl had been found. My mom threw me out of her apartment. I managed to collect a few of my dresses and find a phone booth so I could call my father and ask him to come get me. That was the first time I had ever seen him cry. We hadn’t been allowed to see each other for five years.

(My mother only ever granted him visitation rights when she needed money. And every time, after I returned from him, my mom had to cleanse me with several hours of praying. She would tell me that I had sucked up so much of his energy that I had started to physically resemble him. Only after she had cleansed me with Christ, did I regain my true physiognomy in her eyes.)

 

I promised my father that I would live with him, but he was a complete stranger to me. My mom was the only family I truly knew. She kept sending me the most beautiful letters the entire time I was with my father, and she even turned up at my school to wait for me after class. She kept calling me and leaving me loving messages. She told me I was the only one she had left. That, without me, she had nothing. She kept promising that, this time, everything would be different. That our lives would be beautiful. I believed her and moved back. Until she then eventually threw me out, again. Or I left of my own accord because I just couldn’t take it anymore. The vicious cycle never stopped.

My mother’s story was always the same. She claimed that I was jealous of her and her happiness so I wanted to destroy her. She accused me of bringing my father’s negative energy into her house and tainting her aura with it. She was convinced that the whole world was against her and that everyone was jealous of her paradise. She truly believed that she was the only holy person on the planet and that the rest of us were hell bent on poisoning her with our negative energy.

THE BABY WHO COULDN’T RISE FROM THE DEAD

I was sixteen years old when a revered and famous spiritual leader from Korea, who demanded his followers get married in his church, announced his arrival in Slovenia. The wedding ceremony included the groom hitting the bride’s tailbone with a baseball bat in order to knock the Original Sin out of her. Yes, many women from all over the world ended up permanently paralysed and needing wheelchairs (a result of the damage to the nervous system sustained through a badly swung baseball bat), but hey, at least they were sin free.

My mom was ecstatic – if there was something that she desperately needed was a wedding ceremony that included the wiping out of the Original Sin. So when her husband refused to do it, her whole world collapsed around her. She started praying even more and hardly ever stopped crying. That was when my little brother, a ten-month-old infant, got diarrhoea and started withering away. My mom kept giving him carrot juice and praying over him. Three days later, I begged her, on my knees, to take him to the hospital. She took him there the next morning. Seven days later, he died there. Multi system organ failure.

My mother blamed me for his death. She had been trying for so long, for so many years, to cleanse me of the devil’s seed planted in me by my father but she had failed. I had been the one who told her to take him to the hospital where he took his final breaths. It had all been my fault. I had also yelled at her and infused my negative energy into the leek salad I had made. That was what had killed him.

 

Upon hearing these things, the most logical response would be to ignore them or realise that they are false accusations. But when you are constantly told the same things by a person who has been strategically digging a hole through which your true essence is seeping away into you, you believe it.

I was convinced that I was forever in my mother’s debt. I decided to dedicate my life to trying to alleviate the pain I had helped cause.

The doctors reported my mother to the police. She was accused of death by negligence, because the baby had been admitted into the hospital malnourished and withered.

 

For months after the death of my brother, I would walk pass billboards and newspaper headlines reading ‘DEATH DUE TO VEGANISM’ accompanied by photographs of a skinny dead baby on the way to school.

My mother refused to hire an actual lawyer. Her defender was Jesus Christ. She had been lucky that I had convinced her to take my brother to the hospital. If I hadn’t, she would have been charged with murder.

She also decided to sue the doctors who had performed an autopsy on my dead brother without her consent, making it impossible for the baby to rise from the dead the same way Jesus Christ did. She was convinced that he had been killed so that his organs could be sold on the black market.

It took a long time for the trial to begin and another seven years for the judge to reach a verdict. She was given three years of probation. I was supposed to be a key witness, but I refused to testify. During the time of the trial, especially during the time when I kept receiving requests to appear in court, my mother was kinder to me than she had ever been in my entire life.

 

HELL

In the years following the death of my brother, taking care of my remaining two brothers became my priority. I would often sleep only three or four hours a night, because I had to do all my school work at night. Sometimes, my mom would wake me up in the middle of the night by pouring cold water over me. She then demanded I kneel and pray with her. This would go on for hours. I would pray. Alone. With my mother. Or in the company of different missionaries whom she would call on the phone. When one of them eventually grew tired of her, she would find another.

 

I wasn’t allowed to mourn my brother. My mother had lost a son while I had ‘only’ lost a brother, so I had no right to my grief.

My mother was rarely home. She kept travelling the world. One year, she visited Jerusalem twelve times! But she wasn’t going on holiday, she was doing hard work, God’s work. She was out there, praying, while I was left to take care of my family.

 

Living with her husband was worse than burning in Hell. If I ever told anyone what was going on, social workers would have taken my brothers away and have my mother committed to a psychiatric hospital. Her husband, who was also her legal guardian, kept threatening me. He would say that I was already eternally cursed for killing my brother and that I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I tore my family apart too. He never stopped terrorising me, so I didn’t dare speak to anyone. I remained silent.

Often, when my mother was away, I would put my brothers to sleep and then sneak out to sleep over at a friend’s house – all so I didn’t have to be alone with him.

 

I accompanied my mother to India to see Sai Baba. I went with her to Brazil. I followed her everywhere.

My health was constantly in a catastrophic, near critical condition. I had chronic pain in my leg and my sacrum. I had grown quickly during puberty, so the enormous scar on my leg kept throbbing, tugging, and hurting. I needed to undergo a second surgery to remove the dead tissue surrounding it. Afterwards, I only rested for a week because there was no one who could take over my duties and take care of the family.

 

A HOLY WOMAN FORGIVES

Maharishi’s prophecy about my boyfriend cheating on me came true. I had tried to avoid it or at least alleviate it through any means necessary, like waking up at four in the morning every day to see Sai Baba during my stay in India, and following every rule in the book, but to no avail. I even meditated the hopes of cleansing my ‘bad karma’ and preventing the impending prophecy from coming true. It didn’t work either. I had even told my boyfriend about it beforehand, and he had sworn never to cheat on me. But he did. Fate had triumphed over me once again.

 

I broke up with him, wanting to immediately end our budding relationship, but my mother didn’t agree. ‘A holy woman forgives,’ she told me after she invited him back into our house that very same day, despite my protests. The very same day!

‘I should be happy,’ I remember thinking to myself, trying to suppress my pain. The fact that someone wanted me despite the chaotic circumstances I was living in was a miracle in itself. And at least when my boyfriend was in our house my mother kept up the pretences of us being a happy family – much like she did in photographs and during mass.

 

Afterwards, I suffered another collapse of my immune system. My body could no longer protect me, so it started destroying itself. I had critically high fevers. My temperature was above 40°C. A possible diagnosis was chronic Tonsillitis.

As weird as it might sound, being feverish was actually like going on holiday for me. I was finally allowed to rest, but only as long as my temperature remained above 39°C. As soon as it dropped lower, I had to continue taking care of all my obligations. But 39°C and up meant that I could stop and rest. Yes, my physical body hurt, but my soul could finally catch its breath. When you are shaking, shivering, and falling in and out of consciousness, when the pain your physical body is in is nearly unbearable, you are finally able to forget about the suffering gnawing at your heart.

 

I regularly had to visit a clinic in Germany where I was treated with the help of medical equipment that was the predecessor of the modern bio resonance machine. But it had very little effect. My immune system collapsed again and, although it went against everything my mother believed in, I was actually allowed to take antibiotics. It wouldn’t have been great to have another one of her children die. Because I had been coerced into extreme diets (from raw vegan, to macrobiotic, frutarian, and whatever else you can possibly come up with) since my childhood, I developed devastating allergies to nearly anything I ingested. I suffered from chronic inflammations – tonsillitis, ovarian inflammations, urinary tract infections, inflammations in my bladder and kidneys, you name it. Doctors couldn’t decide what to operate on or which organ to remove in order to help me. I had to take 1500 milligrams of Ospen every day for a year as a preventative measure, and go on an intense ten- day treatment with antibiotics every month. Unfortunately, taking so many pills only destroyed my intestinal flora – the main centre of my immune system.

 

A SERIOUS ALLERGY TO SPIRITUALITY

I was 19 years old, but I felt as though I was a hundred. My body felt more dead than alive, and I had all but forgotten what it was like to live pain free. I was either writhing in pain because of my leg, shivering with a fever, or suffering from menstrual cramps. Everything hurt. It hurt when I peed. There was blood in my urine and my mouth was littered with ulcers. Traditional medicine had given up on me. My medical chart was thicker than an encyclopaedia. Alternative healers didn’t know what to do with me either. I had apparently developed a serious allergy to spirituality. So many people had put their hands on me in my life that I had finally had enough. I couldn’t stand anyone entering my personal space anymore.

 

One of the world famous spiritual healers had even sexually assaulted me during our session. I seemed to only get sicker after every new alternative therapy I was dragged to. My mother insisted that what was happening to me was merely ‘a cleansing’. Either that, or karma. She still forced me to attend reiki and sin cleansing sessions for past lives.

I knew I had to get out of the toxic environment I had found myself in, but I didn’t dare to. How could I leave if I was eternally indebted to my mother? She needed me. Without me, she didn’t have anyone to take care of her. To protect her. She had already been thrown out of the majority of religions and churches she had joined (she had even been carried out of one of them – chair included). I had always been the one to pick her up when she was down. She was my beloved mommy, and someone had to believe in her. Someone had to keep the hope that she would someday find what she was so desperately searching for alive. Someone had to maintain that she would find happiness eventually.

 

I was the only one to ever witness her when the fog cleared from her green eyes and she became my beloved mommy once again. I remember how her eyes would sparkle like emeralds in those moments. Those short periods of time with her were the most beautiful parts of my life. Unfortunately, as the years went by, her moments of lucidity became increasingly scarcer. First, they came around once every few months, later only once every few years.

Still, I kept waiting.

‘Perhaps, any moment now, my real mommy will come back to me,’ I had hoped.

Perhaps that was why, two months before my twentieth birthday, I decided to get married (to the boy from my prophecy). I did it to have an excuse to get away from her. To take my chance at turning over a new leaf and finally be safe and pure.

 

I still visited my brothers every day in order to cook for them and help them do their homework. I was still there for my mother whenever she needed me. She truly hit rock bottom after I left. Before she became an Olympic athlete in spirituality she had been an extremely successful business woman, and after my departure she had transferred all her money and her real-estate into a Nigerian fund. It turned out to be a scam and she lost everything.

Luckily, I didn’t lose anything because of her poor business decisions, because a day before her wedding, her husband-to-be had demanded she disown me. I had been required to sign a contract and everything.

I had to work in order to survive, pay for rent and my studies, and support my two brothers.

 

I, Savina, didn’t exist. There was no me.

 

(The end of part one.)