239: What if a single decision led to a spiral of loss?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Living in a constant state of anxiety does something to you, right? It keeps you in a moment of stagnation. It's like I'm not able to progress. I'm not able to live. I'm not able to love. I'm not able to thrive. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 239. What if a single decision led to a spiral of loss?

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My mother is from a very impoverished country in the Caribbean. My mom didn't really have a lot. She grew up with five siblings. She was actually the oldest of the five siblings, and she is the only one of her siblings that has a different father. My grandmother was 15 years old when she had my mom. She was actually part of an arranged marriage.

She was married at 15, was immediately pregnant. My grandmother entered into a really abusive relationship. Ended up figuring out, you know, this is not the person that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. So ultimately kind of ran away from the situation, kind of ghosted this guy. She had a kid. She didn't know where to go. Obviously, she was only 15. But she finally went on to meet her husband, who she would have the rest of her children with. My grandmother was really a hard worker.

She packaged peanuts. She would come up with different items and different knickknacks that she could sell. My step-grandfather, her husband, that would eventually become the stepfather of my mother, was actually a nurse. And eventually he heard about this program in America where they were looking for nurses, where they would arrange some sort of sponsorship. So my mother got a ticket to leave the Caribbean and come over to the United States at the age of 16.

So, my mom tells me a lot of things about the culture shock when she landed in Brooklyn, New York. She was afraid. She didn't know what she had got herself into ultimately coming over to America. It's a daunting task to come to a new world and have all this new perspective of life. My father is from Brooklyn, New York, born and raised. He comes from a very long line of poverty and just not the best conditions.

My grandmother, she was a drug addict and an alcoholic. So you can imagine the amount of trauma that my father had to go through. My dad was a really laid back, charming guy. He was a really smooth guy from what I'm told. Very handsome. My father actually used to sing in nightclubs in Brooklyn. Talking like mid-70s, you can probably imagine kind of what comes along with that. You know, a lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol, a lot of late nights. This was what he knew.

My mom always tells me the story about how she met my dad. She was still in high school. They actually met when she was walking home. My dad and his friend were hanging out, saw my mom, and his friend bet him that he couldn't get her number. And my dad won. He walked up to her and the first line was, you know, what's your sign? So my dad is actually a Scorpio. She told him she was a Taurus and from then she was interested.

My mom being Indo-Caribbean and my father being African-American, it was a little taboo at that time, right? So my grandmother and her husband, they weren't super thrilled that she had met, you know, somebody African-American from Brooklyn that was just in the neighborhood. The first date, my dad asked my mom if she would hear him sing at a nightclub. You know, they sang songs, covers for like Earth, Wind and Fire. And my mom really enjoyed it.

He walked her home. And when he walked her home, my grandmother happened to look out the window and she saw who had walked my mom back home. And she was extremely angry. They got back. It was pretty dark. And my grandmother did not want to open the door for my mom. She refused to let her back in the house. So my mom was really distraught.

She really enjoyed it, really liked this guy. He walked her home. But because, you know, he wasn't the right race, she wouldn't open the door, wouldn't even let my mom back in the house for the rest of the night. So my mom is, you know, on some strange Brooklyn corner, kind of crying. She doesn't know what to do. And she tells my dad, I don't know where to go. He said, look, you could come back to my place, promise her that nothing would happen.

You could probably imagine the fear in her being very traditional. She doesn't really know this guy. She doesn't even really know this country. She's only hasn't even been here probably a whole year. But, you know, she had nowhere else to go. The one thing that did impress her is how much of a gentleman my dad was. Never tried anything. Told her if she needed anything, he would get it for her. She was just really impressed by the way he treated her. He was an absolute gentleman. And from there on, you know, a relationship and a bond was formed.

On that first date, when my mom, you know, went back and ended up having to stay the night with my father on that first date, he disclosed to her that he was a recovering addict. And she really didn't know what that meant. And he told her that he had used heroin in the past and he was in recovery and he was currently on methadone. But at that point, the bond and the love that they grew, I mean, she ended up overlooking it. Eventually, you know, my mother was pregnant.

So my dad started looking for, you know, property, started looking for a job. This was an opportunity of a lifetime. He was totally ecstatic about it. They would eventually move from Brooklyn to another large city on the East Coast to start a life here.

The company moved down as well. It was like a Christian company that worked around, you know, world hunger and poverty. So my dad was now working in the mailroom at this company. My mom was there working as well. So they had jobs. They were good. They actually bought a house, which was huge. My sister is born. She's born first. She's older than me by a few years.

His daughter's born. My father decides to take a trip to California to hang out with his half-brother. My father's half-brother is a really interesting guy, man. He's like really eccentric. This is the 70s, man. This is like we're talking perms, like flowy, blousey shirts. There's a lot of rumors that he potentially could have been a pimp. And he goes out there and hangs with him for, you know, a couple weeks, I believe.

Came back. My mom never really asked questions. So after that, my mom ended up pregnant with me. And then she is pregnant again 18 months later with my younger sister. Around the time my sister was born, my younger sister, my dad started not really feeling well. He had developed like this really persistent cough. He was having fevers a lot. And they really just did not know what was going on.

You know, they ran a battery of tests. Nothing kind of came back. They didn't know what was going on, but they just knew that his health was kind of declining. Really lethargic, couldn't really walk, a lot of flu-like symptoms. They would just say, it's just like a flu. He's going to be fine. Just feed him, give him fluids. It's going to work out. But the cough never subsided. They ran additional tests, and there was this new disease that they had heard about that had just started coming on called HIV-AIDS.

How about we try to run this test? And the results came back positive. At that point, he was positive with full-blown AIDS. He had passed the HIV stage. He had full-blown AIDS. You can imagine, my mom is really distraught. At this point, she's only 25 with three kids. Her husband has just been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS, a disease she's not even really familiar with, really no one's familiar with.

There's not even that many people that have shared or disclosed their status. There's really not many people to talk to. To make matters worse, she started feeling bad. Lo and behold, the test came back positive. My mother was now HIV positive. To her, this was a death sentence, and she didn't know exactly what to do with three kids, a husband literally dying in front of her, and her wondering, you know, what's next for her.

My sister is about eight years old. I'm about four years old. I can tell things are not right. We're taking a lot of trips to the hospital. We're spending a lot of time. I even had like a favorite ice cream bar that I used to get from the cafeteria and I got it one too many times. So I would go see my dad. I do remember that.

I remember even things before the hospital. I remember playing with my dad. I remember playing tickle monster. He would chase us around the house and he would body slam me on the couch and we would laugh and he would take me places. I have these really short, vivid glimpses of memories that I hold onto with dear life that are sacred to me. I just know my dad's not well. I just know he's not home.

What became really confusing to me is when my younger sister fell ill. My little sister started becoming less of herself.

We were so close in age. We used to play together a lot. She couldn't do a lot of the things that you normally should be able to do at around four years old. Like she couldn't really climb the steps. She would get really tired a lot and she would always be sleeping. And like her eyes were really red or yellowish. They had this strange tint to it. She just looked different. She was diagnosed with full blown AIDS as well.

We're going to two different hospitals now, right? My dad's in one hospital, my younger sister's in another one, and I don't even know why my sister's even in a hospital. And going from that hospital to another hospital to go check on my dad, he was spiraling. He was going down quickly. He was getting sicker and sicker, and I could notice that, you know, almost in a vegetative state. I was five years old. I just had a birthday in November, and my dad actually ended up passing the following January.

We had got the word that he passed, and I don't think I was fully understanding what was going on, but I just remember, you know, showing up to the funeral. My dad's like in a box. He's not moving. He's not there. He's there physically, but he's just not there. I remember how he smelled. I remember what his skin felt like because I touched his hand. Things would never be the same again.

The house was different, but we had to press forward. And while we didn't really have a lot of time to grieve over my dad, my mom was always really resilient. You know, she just lost her husband. Her youngest daughter is in the hospital fighting for her life. Never mind the fact that she was just diagnosed, you know, HIV positive. But my sister, my youngest sister, didn't last too long after my father's passing.

I never really knew what it was that took her away from me. I just knew she wasn't coming home. My sister and I were really close, so we were the closest in age. We played together. We did everything together. My mom and dad had actually, in the excitement of having a new family, had actually went out and purchased a bunk bed. Me and my younger sister, that was supposed to be our room. Like, she was supposed to be my roommate.

The feeling of loss, the feeling of a different kind of loss, the loss of losing like a friend, like a really close friend. It was trauma compounding on top of trauma. We're in this house that was meant for five, but there's now three. Seeing my mom in this really bad emotional state, trying to hide it, trying to be as stoic as possible, but emotionally I could tell she wasn't fully there. She was kind of like a ghost of herself.

Again, at this point, I don't know what she's been diagnosed with. I don't know what she's going through. I don't know that she's sick. I just know that I've lost my dad and I've lost my sister. And I just know my mom is sad. I'm thinking she's just sad. One day, fast forward, I was about eight years old at the time.

My mom and my older sister, you know, they get into, you know, some sort of argument. I'm not even sure exactly what it's about, but I'm almost 100% positive it was about me because I was all over the place. I was a troublemaker. I used to be desperate for attention. And my sister was always like my biggest protector.

I just remember my sister being at the top of the stairs and me and my mom being at the bottom of the stairs and I'm getting in trouble. And my sister's yelling at my mom. She's like, no, don't, you know, don't touch him like that or leave him alone. You know, in my defense, in the midst of that, she gets really angry. And then my sister just blurts out to me, it doesn't even matter. She's going to die soon. She has age and she won't tell you.

At that point, I'm like, what the hell does that mean? Like, I don't know. I don't know what AIDS is. I just know my sister's up there like bawling, crying. And I can tell that her just saying that was something huge, just very triggering for her. And my mom right there is like trying to reassure me. Don't listen to her. She's just saying whatever because she's mad right now. Do not listen to her.

Clearly something is knocking my family down, but I don't know what it is. I don't know the gravity of it. I'm confused. So confused that I just didn't want to know the answer. I didn't want to know what she meant by that. So the next morning, my mom about to wake me up for school. I think I'm going to school. I'm getting ready for school. And my mom's like, no, you know, we're going to skip school today. Come sit at the table. I need to talk to you about something.

She tells me, she says, I have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and chances are I won't be here for a long time. I will pass soon as well, just like your father and your younger sister. And I need you to understand this. And I also want to know if anything happens, where would you want to go live? Just straight out. You know, I have HIV. I'm going to die. And where are you going to go?

At that point, the reality of the world set in and like a warmth kind of comes over me. Sweaty palms, just a heat just came over my head. I was scared for my life. I was scared for my future. I was scared for my sister. I was scared for everything.

I thought about everything that I just saw my dad go through. And I just applied all that to my mom. And in that moment, I was faced with this huge reality that I wasn't ready for. And I wasn't a kid anymore at that point. At eight years old, I was no longer a kid. I just wish that I could have spent more time being a kid because life was never the same after that.

The pain that was leveled upon me at that moment, it took me months, maybe even years to really grasp everything that was going on. I mean, I no longer was like in a grief state. I was always like in an extreme stress state. It just put us in fight mode, a fight in you that you just want to fix everything.

And she explained to me, you know what HIV was, right? Like you cannot have a cold and come around me. You have to be careful. You need to wash your hands and be on top of all these things because I don't have the immune defense to fight any of that at all.

So even that alone in itself, I felt like this huge burden of like, you know, my mom is not going to contract a common cold. And like, how do you as a 9, 10, 11 year old, like stop your mom from getting a cold? It's like impossible. But this is the stuff that I'm faced with. It's like I have to save her. I have to protect her at all costs because there's no way I'm losing my mom. And I want to keep her for as long as possible, even though I think that's not long.

It was inevitable, like it was coming. It was just, you know, only a matter of time. Night in, night out, day in, day out. Emotionally living with, when is my mom going to go? And I'm scared and I want to do something about it and I can't do anything about it. The stress of living with this as a kid only got stronger and stronger. The weight, the burden got heavier and heavier.

My mother's bedroom was right beneath mine, and there was a vent that was like right at the foot of my bed. I always remember, you know, my mom in the middle of the night more times than I can count just emotionally going through it.

I'm in my bedroom. She's in her bedroom. The vent is the only thing between us. And I'm just hearing this deep wailing sob from somewhere deep within, from the soul. Like just a cry that I can't even describe. To this day, I've not heard it. Just a sorrow. And every time I would hear that, I would cry with her. I would literally put myself in a ball and just cry.

The way that it hurt me is something that I still live with today. A sorrow that struck a chord of pain in me that I cannot describe. So as I'm getting older, AIDS is making its way through the media. It's progressing. People are learning more about it. But with that becomes even a huge stigma. So my mom, she kind of explained it to me. She told me there's going to be a lot of people that have a lot of things to say that are not accurate about your family.

And you're going to hear things and you're going to go through these things that I can't protect you from. Take it with a grain of salt, but that day is coming and you have to be strong enough to handle it. But the best way that she thought to go forward was to keep it a secret. You tell no one. No one knows that I have HIV. No one knows how your dad died. No one knows how your sister died. You keep that to yourself or you make up something.

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At this point in the early 80s, AIDS was a dirty disease. You were dirty if you had it. And kids are relentless. They have no filter. They say anything. You're at school and you pass somebody a bag of chips and they're like, "Where your hands been? You have AIDS. I'm not touching that." It replaced the cooties. It was no longer the cooties. It was only AIDS.

It was like the new way to call somebody stupid or you have the cooties or anything. The new thing was you have AIDS. And little did they know, I mean, they knew nothing about my family, but those words, they forced me into a place or a feeling or a void of emotions that this is what my adolescence was about. It was about shrinking myself and making myself really small, you know, flying under the radar. I kind of picked that up as a defense mechanism.

At this point, I think I was 12 or 13 and my mom, she would go into the doctor's office. She had an infectious disease doctor and she would always talk to her doctor and she would ask, "There's people that I want to connect with that might be going through something similar. How do I do that? I don't know who to talk to." And of course, a doctor's office cannot disclose who has HIV or AIDS. So my mom, she asked this doctor, "Do you mind if I just leave a flyer here?"

With a phone number, if there's anybody who's going through something like this, you know, just give me a call and we could talk. So the doctor said, yeah, sure, cool. I think that would be great. So one day, you know, my mom gets a phone call, said, hey, you know, I found this flyer in the doctor's office. Like, it's crazy. I was wondering the same thing. I want to talk to somebody, but there was nobody to talk to. Right away, my mom had a new acquaintance.

She thinks, you know, I can really do something with this. Right. So she calls the phone company and she says, I want to get a separate line added into our house. And she comes up with like this HIV hotline. She has her own number, creates a new flyer, puts that that number on there. And the next thing you know, the number is just ringing again.

More and more calls. First it was like one or two, and then it went to five, and then it's 15, and it's 20. And all of these people are calling, just wanting to speak to somebody who's gone through something similar. So with that, you know, she kind of found her calling. She would tell me all the time, she was saying, God has something in store for me, like I have a job here. And the job is to connect people with others so they just don't feel isolated and alone the way that I felt.

I was extremely proud of my mom. I was like, you know, seeing your mom finally having something to invest her energy and her time in and something that she's really happy about. It just really felt good. So my mom started doing support groups.

and eventually got a little basement in a church. And people would come out to this little basement and they would just have, you know, snacks and they would talk about everything that was going on. And then they would have like, you know, child care. Like we have child care, bring your kids. We're going to make like a family atmosphere. So now my sister was like watching other kids and people that were kind of living this parallel life as us were coming to the support group

Their kids were becoming our friends. These women were becoming our family. And when I tell you how good it made me feel to have a newfound family, they've lost fathers, they've lost sisters, they've lost everything that you can imagine the same way that you've lost it. Why the adults would be in the basement meeting, the kids, we would be outside, you know, playing on the basketball court or, you know, taking walks. And we would actually just open up and talk about how we felt about what we were dealing with.

So it was amazing to me, man. I was proud of the situation. I had a new family. I had a lot more friends. But the downside of that is losing them.

So one by one, as if the trauma wasn't hard enough for losing my dad, losing my sister, preparing to lose my mom, I lost people that were so extremely close to me. They would die. And then another one would go. And then another one would go. And before you know it, I'm in a cycle of kind of this...

death and this sorrow and this pain of wanting to help people but being kind of pulled down by what comes along with that the destruction you're seeing you're watching it destroy families some of these were single moms who would pass on and next thing you know you know my friends in the foster system or doesn't have a parent like these were the kind of things that you were dealing with

As I'm immersed in this group, I'm starting to learn more and more about treatment.

So AZT was a new drug that came out actually in 1987. My father passed away in January of 1987, but this drug wouldn't be available until later that year. So had he been able to hold on until the FDA would approve this drug, he could have been given that and potentially could have lasted the same way my mom did. Like the AZT was a lifesaver for my mom.

A number of different drugs ended up coming out, but having one bought time to the next one. You know, as we're getting older, my mom's starting this business that she's now turned into a nonprofit and it's thriving and she's getting, you know, grants. She has she got a grant writer to get funding. She's really saving people. She's providing resources and connecting women and children and families.

Not only just HIV and AIDS, but poverty in the city and not being able to get food and quality health care. My mom was connecting those dots for people. She was thriving. This agency was doing really well. In the midst of that, you know, I started going through a little bit of growing pains. I was getting in a lot of trouble, small things when I was younger that did start escalating. Around my ninth grade year, my mom told me that she thought it was best for me to go away.

She wanted me to leave the area and go away to essentially a boarding school where they would place at-risk inner-city youth. They would place you in a college preparatory boarding school outside of your environment. And I was pissed. Like, I hated her for it. I did not want to go. Even though I knew it was the best thing for me,

My mom was alone, and that scared me. I didn't want my mom to be alone in that house. I was her protector. I never want to be away from her. It really hurt me, but I ended up leaving to go away, which was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It was all boy school on a farm in a rural part of Pennsylvania. You know, me coming from the city, I was not ecstatic. As soon as I touched down on campus and I see cornfields, I almost lost it.

But this school was founded for students that did not have fathers. Tuition was free. I got to go to school for free here. Really strong on sports, really strong academically. It was something that I really needed. Although we were on a cornfield in a rural place, a lot of the kids that were there were just like they were just like me. They were from some city. They were from Chicago. They were from New York.

It was definitely a place where you can meet people that were looking for trouble to get into. Being young, I fell into the wrong crowd, started doing things, smoking, you know, a lot of marijuana, skipping classes. I was constantly finding myself in trouble, doing a lot of things that would start compromising my time at this school.

I got in touch with my scholarship program and they told me that, you know, don't worry, there's one more school that we can get you into. So I decided to go there. In this school, I'm thriving. I'm doing pretty good. Still getting in trouble here and there. That still hasn't really left me. But, you know, I'm making it towards the end of the school year. It's four weeks before graduation. And there's parents night.

They have this big weekend where all the parents come to the campus. It was something that everybody really looked forward to, so much so that I had heard about it like the whole year, like way to the end of the year. They had this big hotel situation that's going to be cool.

My mom, being sick, she never traveled anywhere. She never came to visit me in school. You know, all these people are having parents weekend and I'm just hanging out in this dorm. There's probably like two other people there out of the whole dorm that don't have parents. And we're just sitting there. So my one homeboy, he's like, man, my parents are here. Everybody's parents are here. You could just hang with us and stay the night at our hotel room. So you don't have to stay in the dorm room by yourself anymore.

And to me, that's a great idea. That's a great idea. Like, I don't have to be in here by myself. Like, I'm out. Like, I'm going I'm going to hang with all my classmates, all my seniors, everybody. I thought it was harmless. So anyway, I ended up going. They found out that I snuck out. They kicked me out of that school literally four weeks before graduation. They had had enough of me. We're kicking you out. I go back home. I'm in the streets.

It was hurting me. Obviously, everything that was going on from, you know, the situation dealing with family to the disappointment in myself and my family looking at me like I couldn't even accomplish graduating from high school. I felt like I was just inadequate, a deep feeling of inadequacy. Living in a constant state of anxiety does something to you, right?

It keeps you in a moment of stagnation. It's like I'm not able to progress. I'm not able to live. I'm not able to love. I'm not able to thrive. I was into a bunch of drugs. I was spiraling quickly. I was doing a bunch of things I shouldn't have been.

I was doing everything from popping pills to alcohol, even PCP sometimes. And when you are in that lifestyle and you're doing a lot of drugs, then comes needing money for the drugs. So then we're just doing all kinds of petty crimes. And I was just, you know, ended up on the wrong side of the law a lot more times than I'd like to count.

Just being in a space where you're just existing, operating from a deep place of pain and surrounding myself and associating myself with people that were going through similar pain brought me comfort. Emotions are sometimes really hard to process, especially when you don't know exactly what you're feeling or how you're navigating some issues. It's almost like you're on autopilot flying through, but the pain is still there.

I just never felt secure or comfortable where everything was or where anything was going. So I think that's what kind of drove me to not only participating in some of the activities that I did, but more so surrounding myself with people that had similar experiences. And I thought, this is where I belong. Like these people are kind of like, they're like me. And with that, you know, the trauma from the past just keeps coming back.

One of my mom's closest friends, one of her first friends, the original and original member of her support group who eventually had passed. Her son was actually murdered, who was a really close friend of mine.

He was one of those people I used to hang with, play basketball with, or disclose how I felt about family situations. He ended up being shot and killed. And not just that, I'm losing friends that I'm close to. I've lost many of them to the system through incarceration, through violence or murder or drug use as a whole.

All of this when I'm in this kind of transitional space where, you know, I'm failing, I'm failing in school, I haven't graduated, I don't really have a clear future of what I want to do. Going through all these problems legally with the law and I'm finding myself locked up in too many situations.

It's just a cycle of loss. It's a cycle of loss. And it's also brings me back to that question when my mom asked me at the table, where are you going to go? What are you going to do? Who are you going to be with? But I also wanted to make some corrections in my life. So I was always thinking of a way to fix things in a deep longing to correct things.

That was always in the back. You know what I mean? Like, how do I make this right? And the one thing for me is, you know, my mom was adamant. It was like, no, you're at minimum, you're getting a high school diploma. So we try to figure out ways that we can get a diploma. And the school district tells me if you could take a semester of community college and pass with a B plus average, we'll just give you your diploma because you're taking college grade classes.

I ended up going to community college and I applied for Temple University. So I'm accepted into the university. And this is, you know, amazing to me. I'm like, I never saw this in a million years, to be totally honest. Like I was just on the corner doing God knows what. And now I'm like at this, you know, well-known college. And I'm just like, wow, like I almost can't believe it.

During this time, though, I'm having to come home every two weeks because I have to make urine drops for probation. This is just like, you know, the dual life that I'm living, right? I'm on a college campus with a lot of people that are just really smart, really driven, educated, sitting in this class with people that I always just felt weren't like me.

It's a feeling of almost imposter syndrome. Like I'm on probation. I was just in a jail cell and I was just doing X, Y, and Z. And now I'm in a place, I'm in this world where I just feel I don't belong. All of this just made me feel out of place. And then I would always second guess myself. Like I just never felt confident.

Dealing with imposter syndrome is never easy because you've worked so hard to get to this place of where you are, but it's almost like you're beating yourself up for even being there. You can have all the right answers. You can even know what the correct answer is and be 100% knowing you're accurate and in fact, and you'll still doubt yourself because you're the one delivering it.

I remember I took a test and I swore I was like, you know what? I told myself, I just really thought I extremely failed this test. And I got it and I got the test back and I got one of the highest grades in the class. And my teacher had actually used mine as an example to talk to the class about. So just a level of, you know, me doubting myself, the level of doubt that I had laid upon myself was so deep to dig out. I still go through it now.

But I didn't want to be like these people that I felt comfortable with. I wanted to be like the people that I didn't feel comfortable with. You know, being uncomfortable kind of stretched me a little bit. And I think this is something that I needed, just to be outside of my comfort zone. Putting yourself in what they would call a PWI, a predominantly white institution, this kind of added to it, right?

Always feeling like, you know, you're speaking for everyone or, you know, anything that you do is always a reflection on the whole. That's always how I felt. And I always felt like, you know, I need to be great in order to, like, lift my entire community up.

So I found myself connecting with a lot of students that look like me and trying to find ways to get in, you know, black student associations or every semester I would try to at least take like one African-American history studies just so I can know more about myself. You see how small your world was before. Like I never thought these things. I never thought from this perspective.

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And with that, you know, I knew that I wanted to do this. I wanted to be in business. And that's something that I was extremely adamant about being in business, you know, taking my talents to a company that would appreciate what I had to offer. And with that, the further kind of the distance, I guess, that I'm getting further and further away from, you know, my beginnings.

I just saw the difference between me and where I was going with, you know, some of the accomplishments that I ended up having versus some of my less fortunate peers that I came up with. My best friend, I grew up with him since I was eight years old. We did everything together. He was not as fortunate as me.

His mom died of alcohol abuse and drug abuse. All those things sent him into a spiral. Binging, he was in mental hospitals, he was doing PCP, he took it to another level.

When I felt like, you know, leaving and going away to college and ultimately getting a job or getting a career, I kind of moved on. And while I would check on him and I would make sure everything was good and try to stay in contact with him, the more and more it would slip away. And that's just not with the relationship with him. That's the relationship with the majority of the people that I grew up with.

I got a call one day that my best friend had actually been found in an abandoned house in our neighborhood that we grew up right next door to my house that I grew up. He was an abandoned house that was next door to my house and they found him there. And by the time they found him, he had been mummified. He had been there for at least, they said, at least like three months. And they only found him because, you know, it was a change in weather. It started getting hot so they could smell it. He was homeless, like on the streets.

And he was a mummy by the time they found him. He used to actually come visit me while I was in college. You know, he was always so proud of me. He would tell everybody in the neighborhood, like, he went to this school. Like, y'all are not on my boy's level. Like, he was one of my biggest fans, one of my biggest supporters. And I just felt like, you know, me focusing on thriving myself.

You feel like you've left these people behind or you feel like you've been afforded maybe opportunities that they haven't. Many opportunities I got that some of them didn't. Trying to prove to these other people that really don't matter to me why I'm not like these people that mean the world to me. That's probably my biggest hurt where I felt survivor's remorse.

From my dad to my sister to the friends back in the neighborhood to all these people that I couldn't take with me. Why am I not there where they are? What makes me so special? The further you go up, the less people look like you professionally, or at least in my case, they did.

And this is where the imposter syndrome really hit its maximum peak for me. And it's almost like I just stole somebody else's life. This is not mine. You know what I mean? Like, I don't belong here. I belong somewhere else. Always feels like it's, I'm not the right messenger. And I don't know why I'm not the right messenger. I just feel like I'm not the right messenger because of this past that I have that I can never kind of get past.

I think I was about 12 years old or so when my mom explained to me the truth about what happened. I never really knew how my father had contracted this. One day she disclosed to me that he was a heroin addict. She also disclosed to me that when she first met my dad on their first date, he disclosed to her that he was a recovering addict.

She told me that my dad had relapsed, ultimately, by sharing needles with his brother and had contracted it that way. Obviously, he went on to pass that to my mom and then, through pregnancy, pass the virus to my younger sister. One action is all it takes. And that one slip-up reverberated through the universe and would have impact for generations to come.

And do I forgive him for that? I do. For a long time, I didn't. I used to have a lot of resentment for my dad. It angered me because I just felt like, you know, a drug, man. Like it's just all this for to have fun for a few moments or whatever you were kind of going through to completely take out my family over that was extremely just like irresponsible.

I'm sure to him, it was just he never thought the impact of what that would be for life. Putting everything that you had built back at risk. You had already recovered. You already built this new life here. And you go away and you make this decision. Extreme amount of resentment. You know, now that I'm older, I totally understand that, you know, an addiction, addiction is real. And addiction actually runs through my family. Generations, especially on my father's side.

Seeing the same things and the same behaviors in me with my addictive personalities, just understanding what he was going through, understanding that it's not as simple as just saying, I'm going to choose not to do this tonight. We're all working from a space of being numb or what we're going through emotionally. And who knows what he was going through at that time that he had that one slight mistake, that one slip up, that one relapse that would destroy life as we know it.

I'm still working through how that makes me feel today, but it's taken a long time for me to forgive him for how he completely annihilated my family. But I'll always love him and I'll always respect him for the amount of resilience that he had to pull himself out of his situation and buy a house and get a job and move. I can just say that I'm in a place now where I'm a lot more forgiving now.

But the most challenging and hardest part for me is the realization of what could have been.

It's crazy because I didn't have my dad for everything, right? I didn't have him for my first girlfriend or to ride a bike or even when I first tried drugs. I didn't have him for any of those things. I still, to this day, kind of talk to him alone about some of these things. I think the hardest thing for me is realizing how much I lost and not just from my dad, but just from my sister. That would be in her late 30s now that I would never know. Just thinking what if.

What if is the hardest part for me, but it gets easier knowing over time with the advancements of medicine and everything that's happened. Seeing my mom being able to kind of pull herself out of a hole and be this amazing figure for everybody and not just her kids, not just her family, but just being a success story just makes it easier to swallow.

My relationship with my mom has been love. If there's any one word I cannot describe how much, you know, unconditional love I've always had for my mom. Like, you know, now, granted, it's it hasn't been easy. Like I look back, you know, we've had conversations growing up where she's apologized to me for lashing out.

She was frustrated and she probably said things or did things that she tells me that she wishes she could take back. But again, just understanding everything that she's gone through, being from very humble beginnings and being able to come over here and build a life

My mom's extremely modest and extremely humble, and she would never really tell me too much. But one day I'm like at home and these people are just showing up at my house, like setting up cameras, setting up lights and all that stuff. And it was like Essence magazine. They wanted to run a whole story on my mom. And that was really cool. I'm like, mom, you know, you never told me like this is what was going on. But I didn't know Essence magazine is in here with a photographer shooting my mom.

After that, more and more things started happening. She was in the Washington Post. She was in a number of different magazines and newspapers. One of my closest friends reached out to me, calls me, you know, in full tears. And he says, man, I'm just sitting here in the dentist's office. Like, and I picked up, I think it was a People's Magazine. And it's a whole spread in there about my mom. And he's just shocked. Like, he never knew.

You know, she's been to the White House. She's met with Obama, President Obama, multiple times. She was on his AIDS committee. I was in college. I didn't even know she was like making all these moves. Like I was, you know, I came home and she was like, I want you to come with me somewhere. We walked in and she's being awarded an NAACP award, which is freaking huge.

She's also traveled South Africa. She's met Nelson Mandela before he died and was offering AIDS counsel to the government over in South Africa.

My family just looks at my mom, and this is more than just my immediate family. Like, everyone is just so in awe and proud of who she is, what she's done. She will help anyone. She will do anything. And she just is an extremely kind and thoughtful person. And I'm just blessed to have her in my life.

Where that comes from, I would never know. All I do know is that I don't think a lot of people can understand why so many people scratch and claw and do whatever just to make it across these borders. They just really don't understand what life is like over there. They don't. They absolutely don't.

And having that drive and not ever being able to go back to that is something that I think just drove a passion and drove an understanding of wanting to give her children better and wanting to give her grandchildren better. Losing my dad, too. You know, my mom talks to me all the time about the torch that she's carrying. She keeps his memory alive for me all the time.

If I could take it all back, I would. But everything we've gained is not only a gain for my family, but the exponential impact that my mom's had on our community and people across the world, all because of this one mistake that my dad did makes it all easier to understand and easier to accept.

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Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.

Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.