Girls Like Us Page 27

  A wise friend of mine, Brad, once tells me in a late-night telephone conversation that it is the job of most founders to learn to embody the mission and philosophy of their own organization. I don’t really get what he means and ask him to explain, feeling like I might not want to hear the answer.

  “At GEMS, your guiding philosophy is all about seeing girls as beautiful, precious, about empowering them to see that in themselves.” I’m starting to see where this is headed and I’m a little uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, so . . . ?”

  “Well, you really don’t see what other people see in you. You’re still trying so hard to prove something, to overcome something, still haunted by whatever people have told you in the past, by what people have done, that you can’t accept how beautiful and special you are. It doesn’t matter what you accomplish, it’s never enough. You see and believe it for all the girls. You just don’t believe, not really, not deep down, about yourself.” He’s hit a nerve. I’m not sure what to say but his words stick with me for a long time and I do my best to work on this new idea—valuing myself like I value the girls, accepting myself like I accept them, not blaming myself, integrating my experiences, being happy with who I’ve become. It’s a process, a long one that I’ll mess up at multiple opportunities, until slowly I begin to find a little balance, a little peace of my own.

  In my thirties, I reach a stage where I decide that given my family history, I don’t want to drink anymore, not even a little bit. Not even if I think I can “handle it.” I ask a friend who’s sober if he misses drinking and he tells me, “Yeah, sometimes. But I feel closer to being whole.” I write his words on a Post-it note and work to embrace this notion of wholeness, taking sobriety seriously and working on some of the things I’ve worked so hard to hide over the years. I’m watching Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew one night, one of my few reality TV guilty pleasures, when they show a group of children who’ve been affected by their alcoholic and substance-abusing parents. The children speak frankly and painfully about their longings for a real family, their confusion at coming second to a drink or a high, and their fervent wish for things to be OK with Mommy. They’re just babies, I think, as tears stream down my face. They shouldn’t have to go through this much pain at that age. And that’s when I realize their ages, twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and I see myself. For the first time, I have real compassion for myself, for the childhood that I didn’t get to have. It’s the same compassion that I’ve been able to give the girls for years, always seeing them as children and young people who deserved so much better. I cry a lot that night for the ten-year-old, the twelve-year-old, the fourteen-year-old Rachel, and for the years that got lost, and yet after the tears, I can feel it. I’m a little closer to being whole.

  Over time, I realize that beginning with meeting the girls at Rikers, to understanding trauma, to addressing the control of pimps and the harm done by johns, to dealing with the stigma of being a “survivor,” to changing public perception, to creating a new type of leadership, it has been about my own journey and my own healing as much as it’s been about the girls, the issue, the movement. I wonder if this makes me a selfish person, and then realize that this kind of thinking is probably a little counterproductive to the whole idea of loving myself. Yet while GEMS may have originally been my way to work through my own pain, over the years it has become its own entity. It’s not just about me anymore; it’s become a community of girls and women, of supporters and allies, an organization that has affected systems and changed lives.

  SUMMER 2008, NEW YORK CITY

  There’s great consternation conveyed through text messages from my staff. THE T-SHIRTS HAVE NOT ARRIVED!!!! We’d designed hot pink (GEMS colors) fitted tees with a huge Girls Are Not for Sale sign on the back. As I drive down the West Side Highway, working myself into a lather about the unreliability of T-shirt vendors and feeling like the day is doomed, I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that today we are celebrating the passage of the Safe Harbor Act. After over four years of an emotional roller coaster of advocacy, we have actually won. We’re making history, changing state law; girls will be protected, not punished. I decide that in the grand scheme of things, T-shirts may not be the most critical thing. Yet as I round the corner to City Hall Park, all I can see is a sea of hot pink. The T-shirts evidently have arrived. I take it as a sign that all will be well with the day.

  The weather is beautiful, and the girls are having a blast. It seems everyone’s brought a camera, and they are taking countless pictures, posing, directing each other like Jay Manuel on America’s Next Top Model. “No, move closer. Do one with your hands on your hips.”

  “Tiff, you turn around so I can see the writing on the back. No, the other way. The back.” Dramatic sigh. “Jen, you face the front. Now stand next to each other.”

  Seeing them excited reminds me what we’re doing here. I breathe deeply again and decide to relax and enjoy the day.

  The program starts. It’s our third annual New York State End Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children Day. This year, the mood is giddy. Some of the girls kick off the event by taking the mic and talking about how proud they are that the bill has passed. Then Assemblyman William Scarborough, our original champion in the assembly, talks about his commitment to the issue, and how after years of driving by girls on Jamaica Avenue and Queens Boulevard and turning his head, he began to understand that they were children and they were victims. There’s a short round of speeches, lots of applause, and I find myself in tears.

  Normally I’d stay and eat lunch with the girls but I have to get to Brooklyn within the hour. With a couple of other staff members, I drive over to the Brooklyn Museum, where the event is to take place. We take our seats in the audience and wait anxiously through a series of interminably long speeches and a painful rendition of Mariah Carey’s “Hero” delivered off-key. Mercifully, the song finally finishes, and I know it’s the part that we’ve been waiting for. There’s Sequoia in a white cap and gown, looking totally radiant and stunningly beautiful. My heart swells. She walks up to the stage and I see her being hugged by a teacher; she’s clearly nervous. I send her mental blessings and try to impart confidence from my seat thirty feet away. The principal is talking about the school spirit. “And now,” she says, “someone who exemplifies that spirit, graduating senior and class valedictorian . . . Sequoia Thomas.” We’re on our feet, screaming, going nuts. Her cheering section is composed of GEMS staff; Cait and Alex, her Legal Aid lawyers; her mother, her sister, her therapist. People who’ve shared the journey with her. Sequoia sees us and seems unsure if she should be happy or mortified that we’re so vocal. To save her from further embarrassment, we sit down, although I’d rather listen to her whole speech on my feet, yelling woo-hoo at the top of my lungs. I listen to her describe herself as a lotus that has grown in mud and has evolved into something beautiful. I think about her in a hospital bed and about all the struggles she’s been through. Seeing her now on the stage in her cap and gown, I am overcome with pride and admiration for her courage and determination.

  We race back to Manhattan for the last leg of the day, getting stuck in Friday rush-hour traffic on the FDR. Running late, I jump out of the car and throw my flats on so I can run the three blocks from the parking garage to the Fordham University campus where we’re having a public presentation of our newly written white paper on survivor leadership, fittingly titled From Victim to Survivor, From Survivor to Leader. It is a youth-led research project on youth empowerment and leadership wherein the girls had been trained by a grad student to interview each other on their experiences. I’d had the task of weaving all their comments and themes together, and I’d stayed up for three nights in a row, drinking endless cups of tea and a bunch of Red Bulls, in order to get it finished. Reading what the girls thought about GEMS, about the ways we tried to support them, about the skills that they’d learned, the confidence and self-esteem that they’d gained, was revelatory. I knew that we’d helped girl
s over the years because I got to see the progress and growth in individual girls’ lives firsthand, but reading quotes like Some people know what proper love and care is, and I know because of GEMS and I get that every single time I come here, and I used to have no self-esteem at all. Like I want to look for a job but if the restaurant looked fancy I wouldn’t walk in there. GEMS gave me a lot of self-confidence. It also gave me the position to be a leader and I can help other girls feel the way I do now made it real in a whole other way. Although the girls had been given pseudonyms, it wasn’t hard for me to tell just who was who. Their personalities, their strengths, their interests came shining through, and I sat crying as I read page after page. It wasn’t just that they were glad they’d come to GEMS or that we’d been helpful to them in various ways, it was the fact that the very things I’d envisioned and worked to create—a community that was safe and nonjudgmental, a space where survivors could gain strength from each other, programming that felt empowering, that taught them that their voices were important, that they didn’t have to be ashamed—was all here, in line after line of the girls’ own comments.

  Tonight, five of the girls are presenting the paper to a roomful of over two hundred people. I know that the deputy commissioner of probation, the assistant commissioner of child welfare, and people from the mayor’s office are all here, a miracle in itself. We’re all nervous but we huddle for a minute, pumping each other up, saying a heartfelt prayer, gripping hands tightly.

  The panel begins and the girls each take a theme to present on, reading from the white paper, then using their own experiences to illuminate each section. I’m bursting with pride, watching them handle the questions from the audience with poise and thoughtful responses. When one seems stuck, the others jump in to help. I watch them whisper to each other, pass the mic back and forth. “You should take this one, Jasmine.” “Why don’t you share about going to Albany, Kristina?”

  As I watch these smart, self-assured, confident, strong young women, I think of the day I met each one of them; the experiences that we’ve been through; the tears, the frustrations, the leavings and the coming-backs; the practicing for the GEDs; the sharing in group; the late-night car rides home that turned into hours-long counseling sessions; the trips to the emergency room, court, the precinct; the celebrations over birthdays, graduations, and just the small daily achievements of hanging in there in the face of so much. The girls receive a thunderous and long standing ovation. They’re beaming. I’m still trying hard not to cry, proving Monica’s recent assertion that I’m the most “crying-est staff.” Her statement was pretty funny to me, given all the times I want to cry and don’t and the tears the girls have never seen, but I agree with her, I do have a tendency to choke up at the happy stuff, the proud stuff, the warm and fuzzy stuff. Today has been the most incredible conflation of all of that, so I feel like I deserve a break for crying today.

  Once the public portion of the evening is over, the tears so close to the surface really begin to flow. Julie sees me close to falling apart and grabs me by my elbow. I’m too overwhelmed to explain what I’m feeling. Outside the fresh air does little to stop my tears. It’s everything all rolled up into one. It’s the culmination of ten years of struggles, the fulfillment of the vision I had long ago on the steps of my building in the Bronx. It’s seeing these amazing girls develop into strong young women, and having other people see and validate what I’d always believed about them. It’s passing the first Safe Harbor law in the nation that will change things for victims in this state and eventually across the country. When the girls come out of the auditorium after being mobbed by the supportive and now enamored audience, they immediately come over. We’re standing in a small huddle and I’m struck by how right this feels, how much I love every knuckleheaded last one of them. “I gotta tell y’all—I wouldn’t change a single thing, not a moment, wouldn’t take away one bit of my life, of being in the life, cos I wouldn’t have ended up here with y’all.” I’m trying to hold back the tears, yet they’re rolling. “And you, all of you, make every single thing worth it. It was all worth it, to know you and to be lucky enough to be part of your lives.”

  “You mean that?” asks Monica, crying too.

  “Yes, more than anything. I love you all so much—this is where I was always meant to be.”

  There’s so much strength here in this circle of hugs and tears. Tomorrow there’ll be another crisis. Someone will come in late and have to be written up, new girls with new pain will show up, some still attached to their trafficker, others struggling with the early stages of leaving, girls who’ll go missing in the coming weeks, girls who’ll be arrested and treated badly. There are millions of perceptions to change and more hurdles to jump in the courts. But I figure for one night, I’ll just relax and stop fighting. We did good. After years of one step forward, ten steps back, today has felt like a hundred steps forward. Today’s been all about survivor voices, survivor achievements, survivor leadership, a stunning affirmation that offers a rebuttal to all the people who didn’t believe in us, in me, in any girl who has been sexually exploited. It’s one of the best nights of my life. I’m frequently proud of these phenomenal girls and young women. Tonight, I decide to actually be proud of myself.

  One evening, I’m sitting at the office chatting with a couple of my older girls, both of whom have been around for years. For some odd reason we’re talking about tanning beds and I admit that yes, I’ve been on them a few times.

  “I don’t believe it. Not you,” Ashley exclaims.

  “Really?” Jasmine cannot believe her ears.

  The girls both look at me as if I’ve just admitted to suffocating kittens. I know the health issues are bad, but still, they’re horrified.

  “Goodness! Why are ya’ll making such a big deal out of this?”

  They’re still in shock apparently as it takes a few minutes for either of them to get beyond, “Because” or “You know.”

  Finally Ashley is able to articulate their keen sense of horror.

  “You’re too empowered to tan,” she says. Jasmine nods in agreement. Both of them deadly serious.

  “I’m what?” I can barely talk, I’m laughing so hard. Eventually I catch my breath. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all year. Have y’all ever met me?”

  I think about my insecurities, my challenges over the years to accept myself, my well-known vanity and obsession with shoes. I start laughing again, but they look a little miffed that I’m not taking their point seriously.

  “You’re so, you know, confident and together, and you know, all that stuff. . . .”

  And finally I get it. To them, I’m the grown-up, poised and in control. Although I barely ever feel like a grown-up, especially as I forget to pay a parking ticket or spend four hours trying to locate a shoe in the mess that doubles as my bedroom, I realize that finally I’m “that chick,” that woman that I wanted to grow up to be. Dr. Hall mentoring in the guidance counselor’s office. Bernadette being a strong and confident working mother. Cherry Kingsley presenting in Canada. I’m not the girl who came to New York too shy to speak in meetings, thinking everyone on the street could look at me and just tell. I’m not the girl who thought getting hit was normal, or who believed that I had to settle for mediocre in my personal relationships. I’m not waking up in the middle of the night screaming, or crying with shame every time someone says something hurtful. I’ve still got a lot of growing to do, but it’s nice being seen at least as someone who’s over some of the early hurdles and has emerged confident and secure.

  “Thank you,” I tell the girls, and they seem pleased that I’m getting what they mean. “I do think it would make a great T-shirt, though, Too empowered to tan.” Just the thought of it makes me laugh all over again.

  That night, I think about the mistakes I’ve made, the hard lessons I’ve had to learn both personally and professionally, the times when I was counseling girls and heard myself give advice that I desperately needed to hear for myself
. I think about some of the girls who are now twenty-three and realize in hindsight how young and totally unprepared I was to start a nonprofit at that age. I had so much growing up to do, growing up that happened right alongside the girls. I think of how broken and damaged I was, even when I thought I wasn’t, and all the healing that happened in fits and spurts, painfully and awkwardly. I think of how much my confidence, my sense of self, my capacity to love and trust has grown. I think of everything that I’ve learned from the girls and how blessed I am to have founded GEMS and to have had GEMS find me. People would often ask, “Did you ever imagine that it would be like this, a decade later, when you started it?” And the truth was, I did. I knew that we were going to change things. I knew that young women had the power, and that survivors could be leaders and that we would create a safe space and a home for girls, and we would create programs and counseling and health care, and all the things we’ve been able to do over the years. But I didn’t know how much I would get out of it, and I didn’t know how much of a family the girls and women at GEMS would become. I had no idea just how much I’d enjoy walking through the doors every day to learn from and grow with some of the smartest, funniest, strongest, most resilient girls I could ever hope to meet.

  Acknowledgments

  This is definitely the hardest part of the book to write. In thinking about all the people who have not only supported me in the last two years of writing but also all the people who have supported me and believed in me over the years, which allowed me to even get to this point in my life, I’m overwhelmed with the enormity of love and kindness I’ve been shown. If I were to acknowledge all of the individuals who have touched my life in one way or another, knowingly or not, it would fill the pages of a whole nother book. So . . . if you have ever been kind to me, said an encouraging word to me, helped me in some way, taught me something or prayed for me . . . I’m sincerely grateful. Thank you.