Why Was I Chosen?

Children of all ages have always been seen as naïve and innocent, therefore underestimated. Depression: severe despondency and dejection, typically felt over a period of time and accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). This is the story of the time my emotions were denied and the toll this situation has taken on my future. The worst part of it is that my own father was the one who did not believe me. “It’s just a phase”, he said. “She’s too young to really be depressed”, he said. “She’ll get over it”, he said. “She’s probably just crying out for attention”. Some might say that my parents were meant to be or that they were the perfect married couple during their time together. These same expectations were determined by the public for the marriage of Jay-Z and Beyoncé Knowles. Evidently, even “perfect” marriages can fail.* Who would have known that one mindless act of betrayal would end things forever? It all started in the early 90’s: my dad was a NFL football star, while my mom was just getting used to the transition to an American life from that of a French-Canadian from Montreal. They both lived in Atlanta, Georgia at the time that they met; my mother swore she could never move away. My mother also thought that her marriage would never come to an end. Unfortunately, plans tend to change whether we like it or not. When my parents first got married, my dad was working two jobs while my mom stayed at home taking care of me after I was born. Less than a year after I was born in Atlanta, my dad decided that he wanted to start up his own business in the television production industry. My mom, being the supportive wife that she always was, completely went along with his decision without hesitation. Throughout this whole process, my mom came across a side of my dad’s personality that she had never noticed before, his tendency to make promises that he knew he could never keep, one of those promises being his vow of marriage to my mother. Shortly after I was born, my father explained to my mom how he thought it necessary to move to Los Angeles, California in order to start up his business. Los Angeles. The definition of the American Dream. Seeing my mother’s doubt about whether to leave her life in Atlanta, my dad promised her that this move would only be temporary and that they would be back living in Atlanta in no time. Boy, the lies people tell to get what they want. Sixteen years later, my dad has never fulfilled that promise. Having the little amount of money that my parents had at the time, and due to this last-minute situation, my parents’ only choice was to move into a cheap hotel until they got their life together. My dad would work early mornings and late nights while my mom, unhappy with her new life, took care of me, living in a Marriot hotel in a strange part of town. My mom would take me with her to the mall across the street from the Marriot where we lived. They say shopping is one of the many methods of drowning out sadness. My mom became the parallel to Isla Fisher in Confessions of a Shopaholic.** Now I know where I get it from. Eventually, my dad’s business began to prosper, later proving the theory that money does not buy happiness. There were plenty of people who came to know of my father as he became more and more successful. I would like to share one of these people in particular with you. Charlene Boudreaux. A young woman from hell who has been put on this Earth by the devil himself to ruin lives and to tear families apart. She has ruined my life. She has torn my family apart. Gold digger: a person who dates others purely to extract money from them, in particular a woman who strives to marry a wealthy man (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). As Charlene got closer to my dad, she began calling him daily and meeting up with him more often than usual. Because my dad had told my mom that he and Charlene had been working together and that she had just been giving him tips on “the business life” as she had been working in the industry as well, my mom was not concerned at first about their every-other-day meet-ups. What concerned my mom was when Charlene left a troubling message on my parents’ house phone. This was concerning to my mother because, when she had heard the message, Charlene had been referring to my dad as “honey” and “baby”. Any wife would be concerned with this! My mom decided to take initiative and call this mystery woman back to find out what her deal was. “No need to be concerned. I call everybody ‘honey’”, claimed Charlene. She ended this conversation with my mom with a snarky, “Bye doll!” You know a woman is two-faced when she calls you doll. I guess she figured that if she followed the way of the Kardashians, she too would prosper in wealth.*** Although Charlene assured my mom that there was nothing going on, my mom’s suspicions remained. As my dad began spending more time with Charlene, my mom had an increasing doubt about whether she was being lied to. The whitest of all lies will still come back around to haunt you. Of course, my mom found out, eventually, that my dad had been cheating on her with Charlene and, of course, my dad tried to pull the “It’s not what it looks like!” crap. My mom was furious and felt betrayed. She sacrificed her whole lifestyle to support his ideas and this is what he’s done to repay her? After a while, my mom and dad had been trying to work things out. My dad was in the process of ending things with Charlene and going back to my mom until, ironically, Charlene got pregnant. This conniving monster tricked my dad into getting her pregnant because she knew that he would do the right thing and marry her because he did not want to be known as that typical guy who gets a woman pregnant and then bails out to avoid the responsibility. What about me? Shouldn’t I have been his first priority? Why would my dad choose her over me? Then again, as Pastor Burpo asks in his novel Heaven Is For Real, why do people choose hell even though there is a heaven?**** My parents eventually got a divorce, creating the starting point for my future of troubles. “When you’re mom dies, you’ll have to call me mom.” What type of sick, twisted person says this to a young child? She knew I was vulnerable at the time and would believe anything that seemed true, just as any innocent child would. Charlene has always hated my mother and has focused her life on doing whatever she feels necessary to try and ruin her life. However, she soon realized that my mom genuinely does not care what Charlene says about her or what lies she has told to my mom’s old friends to try and turn them against her. Charlene would never settle for making peace with my mom, so she had to ruin her life instead. I was my mom’s life. She had to ruin me. Charlene is queen of manipulation. She knew that if she could succeed in making me love her and hate my mom, she would break my mom’s heart. “Your mom only spends time with you because she gets more money from your dad when you’re with her.” I was stupid. I believed it. I felt unloved. No matter how much I wanted to believe that this was not the case, I was a young child, a gullible young child who had this thought in the back of her mind every time she spent time with her mom. One year, during Christmas, Charlene’s family came to our house for a visit. I am pretty close with her niece because we are the same age. During one of the days she was here, I was telling her how much I hated going to my dad’s house because of the way Charlene treats me. When I came out of my room, Charlene was standing right outside of my bedroom door and she told me that she had heard everything I said to Camille. At that moment, I knew that she felt a sense of fear that I was so willing to talk to people about the way she treated me. She knew that it wasn’t long before I would tell my dad how I was feeling, so she played her usual mind games on me and told me that it would hurt my dad’s feelings if I told him that I hated coming to his house. Fortunately, as I grew older, Charlene’s mental tricks wore off and I soon realized that she was not to be trusted. Maybe this was a sign that she no longer had control over me or a sign of mental growth. Maybe I had proved Emily Dickinson’s statement that “After great pain, a formal feeling comes-“. However, the pain that came with her evil actions toward me have stuck with me and will stick with me forever. Everyone knows that it is a dangerous thing to criticize the appearance of an insecure teenage girl. Charlene knew this, but she did not care. “You’re getting fat Destinee.” “Get rid of that acne all over your face it looks disgusting Destinee.” “Put down that cupcake Destinee you know you have to watch what you eat these days.” Anorexia: an emotional disorder characterized by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). I was in 7th grade when I decided that food was my enemy. I just wanted someone to be proud of me. I wanted to feel loved. I wanted to know what it felt like to be happy with myself. I did not have friends. I was that girl who was too shy to speak or to make eye contact. That girl who spent the school lunch periods in the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to face the question, “Why aren’t you eating”. I was that girl who bursted into tears for no apparent reason. During the middle of my freshman year in high school, I looked at myself in the mirror and decided at that very moment that I was skinny enough. I rushed home to show Charlene that I had accomplished something. “Look Charlene, I did it! I’m finally skinny! Aren’t you proud?” I was desperate for praise like Biff Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman as he fails over and over again to make his father proud.***** She looked at me with disgust and turned to my dad and said, “Look, James. Look at your daughter. She’s too thin. She. Needs. Therapy.” Therapy. A 13-year-old girl in therapy. “I can’t do this”, something the voice in my head told me often. As I was being dragged down the endless hallway to the door of the therapist’s office, my heart started beating fast while my face grew red. I began to cry. We waited until it was time for my appointment and until I finally stopped crying. When it was my turn to go in, I sat on the couch and told her my name. Her name was Kat. She asked me questions. Lots of questions, but I could not find the voice to answer her. I had no voice. I sat there, staring down as I twiddled my thumbs feeling guilty because, with every second that I was not speaking, my dad’s money was going in the garbage. I was a waste of my dad’s money. That same day, when I got home, my dad sat me down and asked me what was wrong with me. I decided that this was my chance to get everything off my chest. I told him everything that Charlene had ever done to hurt me. When I was done, I actually felt better because I thought that by telling my dad what was going on, everything would be taken care of. I soon found out that was not the case. I was shut down. My dad defended her completely. It was like he did not even care what I had to say or that he had not heard a word of it. It was at that moment that I knew I could trust no one. Some believe when teens say they are depressed, they are merely looking for attention. I believe the ones who are truly depressed do not tell. The mind is a scary place. I am scared of my own mind. My mind is filled with nightmares. Why can’t I ever just dream? During my freshman year of high school, I began to have dark thoughts. Thoughts of death. I was not scared of death. To me, death meant freedom. I would do anything to be free. Death meant ridding myself of my days of coming home and crying alone. However, death also meant hell. “Dear God, please take my life away.” I remember this thought as if I had told it to myself just yesterday. During my sophomore year of high school, those thoughts became actions. I wrecked my body like it was of no worth, like it was my fault no one cared and that no one listened. I thought to myself, “Why do you always fail, Destinee?” With every tear came another cut, another bruise, another scratch that will never disappear. The scars on my body remain to this day as punishment, as a reminder that I am weak. “What happened to your arms Destinee?”, my friends would ask. “My cat has some pretty sharp claws”, I would lie with a smile. A smile, I figured, would hide my pain. If they saw me smile, they would assume I was happy. Why couldn’t anyone tell that I was not happy? One day, my dad bought a gun as protection for our household. This gun came with a dream. One night, while I slept, I had a dream that I was alone. Alone in my house that some may call a home. In my dream, I walked into my father’s room to the place where he hid this weapon. This weapon was my way to peace. I held the gun to my head and prayed, not a tear in my eyes, “Dear God, I am a failure. Please allow me to succeed.” During this dream, my peace was interrupted when my father came in the room, causing me to wake up. I’ve always thought it was funny how, the very next day, I had heard my father say he had gotten rid of his gun. Was I really even dreaming? It sure felt like I was. I am finished with my junior year of high school and, still, no one understands me. “Why are you so shy, Destinee? You never talk.” “Why do you always wear black? Aren’t you hot in that outfit?” “Why are you always so stand-offish? People are starting to think you’re rude.” I present myself based on how I feel inside. Dead. The thing is, I do not completely understand myself, and I do not believe that I ever will. Why am I so shy? I never talk. Why do I always wear black? Aren’t I hot in that outfit? Why am I always so standoffish? People are starting to think I’m rude. Why was I chosen for such a terrible life?