A beautiful surprise

The brokenness was healed or began to heal after I turned thirty. This self assured confident feeling of wholeness and self acceptance really took me by surprise. I had been a broken African American teenage girl with body image issues and people made fun of me about my looks, my skin color and other reasons. When I was in my 20s the major things that happened to me was at the age of 26 I graduated from Mercer and at the age of 27 I became involved with NAMI Mercer the same organization that gives me a place to volunteer and quality of life. This feeling of self acceptance was a feeling that was new to me. It came by surprise to me because as a child I was bullied badly and criticized. For a while it was just me and my mom and then when I was nine or ten years old my step dad Neil became my dad. I remember turning thirty and thinking” I like who I am”. That was a feeling I thought could not be right at first. All the bullying I encountered as a little girl even as a teenage girl and all the struggles in my 20s and now at thirty here I was liking myself and accepting myself and feeling really good about who I am! It’s still a process of continued self acceptance and independence and self reliance for me.