233: What if they invaded your home?
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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. It was almost like there was a color and a black and white contrast between feeling alone and feeling so loved. It honestly felt like my whole life had just gone from this amazing color-filled motion picture to just going into something so black and white.

Just feeling so alone all of the time. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 233, What If They Invaded Your Home?

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I grew up in a very traditional Mexican household. My dad had a couple of different labor-intensive jobs within construction, landscaping. However, in Mexico, my dad's actually got licensure of an architect. But moving into the U.S. and us overstaying our visa, my dad could only find job as some sort of contractor.

My mom started her own business. She would deal 14 karat gold. And that's usually where our main source of income came from. My mom was pretty much like the glue of the entire family. And I mean, like extended family.

We had a lot of different family members who would come down to Atlanta where we grew up. And my mom would actually kind of provide like a safe home for a lot of these nephews that were coming over to work with my dad as an electrician. They would just come and my mom would just always tell them, it's okay, you can stay here while you get on your feet. We pretty much had this open door policy.

In the evening times, we would all sit together as a family and have these big traditional Hispanic dinners. Me and my sister were so young at the time, like I truly grew up with them like they were siblings of mine. My parents loved to go on different vacations. They would take us out to Savannah, to Miami, Florida. My parents were just people who were ready to explore, and they just really wanted us to be people who saw the world.

My parents provided such a sheltered atmosphere for me and my sister, like there was nothing that could go wrong in the world. My parents were our ultimate protectors and we just had no idea what bad things were other than like what we saw on Saturday morning cartoons. Bad people did not simply exist in our minds. It was a very amazing time in my life to really feel so much love. I just remember being very loved.

It was 2003. I was seven years old and I remember it was a Sunday morning. And Sunday mornings for us was pretty routine. The day that the whole family is together, there's no school, my dad doesn't have to work. And Sundays are also one of the days that my mom would go and open up her jewelry store.

That Sunday morning, my mom was getting ready to open up the store. My dad was outside washing his truck and my sister was inside helping my mom getting breakfast ready. And I'm in the shower. I'm just there in the shower and my mom comes in. You know, she tells me, I need you to get this towel on and I need you to come with me. I just do as I'm told, put the towel on and I walk out behind my mom.

We go to where the living room is and I see two men standing in front of my sister and my dad. They point the gun at me and they tell me that I need to get down on the ground. And they told me this so many times, but there was just something where I just was not comprehending. I think they must have repeated it to me at least four times. I just kind of just stared at them. And my mom said I froze when I saw the guns.

I don't know what's going on. Why are my mom and my dad on the ground? Why are these men holding guns? According to my mom, all of a sudden, this strange person just kind of shuffles my dad quickly inside of our home. And they signal for everybody to get out of the kitchen and to go lay down on the ground in the living room.

One of the guys looks at them and they ask my mom, where's the little one referring to me? My mom tells them I'm taking a shower right now. And the robbers tell them to grab me and to make me get on the ground. They point the gun to me and they tell me I have to get on the ground. I have to get on the ground. I'm just I'm panicking. I don't know what's going on. My mom pretty much pulls me down onto the ground.

Being on the ground, I just remember being soaking wet, cold, and feeling so exposed just because I had been wrapped in a towel the entire time. I had no clothes on. My hair was soaking wet. I felt like I had to go to the bathroom. I just felt so vulnerable. I remember being so scared and burying my head into the carpet.

And instead of just kind of putting my arms out the way that they wanted me to, I ended up tucking my arms in underneath my stomach. I tried to close myself up the best that I could. I just did not want to look and I did not want to see. It was a scary movie and I didn't want to keep watching it. And every time that I would glance up, I would see them cutting the phone lines. And at one point they said,

give me your cell phones. They said, where is the jewelry that you bring home? They said so many things in there that seemed to suggest that they had been watching us for a while. It was just one of the scariest thoughts because not only did I feel so exposed, but now to think that somebody had been watching me

My parents with the store, they would bring a lot of the jewelry home because they didn't feel safe enough to leave it in the store itself. And by then, my parents didn't have enough money to get an actual safe yet. My dad had brought home very expensive golden, a backpack that he had. And that man just walked out of there with a backpack on his back.

Before they left, they just kind of looked at each other, giving each other a nod. Then they tell my parents, don't call the police. We're still going to be around. Don't call the police. After everybody left, my parents gave it about 10, 15 minutes before they got up. My mom ran and she went to the neighbor's house and she needed to get a phone because they had taken the cell phones and they had cut the phone lines.

So she called the police and they came here and everybody was crowded on our porch just asking my parents what happened, what happened. And it's just such a surreal moment. So many people were so curious about everything that was going on and I felt so exposed, so vulnerable. My parents really hadn't been paying attention to me because they're trying to make sure that they can get all the details in.

I go and I ask my mom, "What do I need to do?" And by the time I get my clothes back on, she tells me, "You know, just go eat your breakfast. Just go eat your breakfast." The breakfast isn't even warm anymore. It's cold. And seven-year-old me is thinking, "Well, it's cold now because it was ready." But then these people came and took all this stuff. And now here I am eating cold breakfast.

I just felt like I wasn't even there. It felt like a part of me was just from the outside looking in. Like, I was a part of that crowd who had came to see what had happened with this family next door. I mean, how does a seven-year-old feel empty? How does a seven-year-old even begin to move on from this? I felt like I didn't even exist, honestly. From that day forward, I was never the same person ever again.

My mom and my dad got in touch with some detectives. These detectives came to our house like a week after the incident. And they had us flip through a book, like a binder that had just a bunch of laminated pictures of just different offenders. And I just remember looking at them and just thinking they all look just like the two men that came in.

Even from the moment that those detectives stepped foot in there, I felt the same feeling all over again. All I could see was the guns that the detective had with him, and I just, I didn't want to look. And I didn't ID any of them. My parents ended up going to testify in court for them, and they ended up getting caught. They had actually committed a series of crimes throughout the week. They apparently were also involved in a drug trade.

I don't know exactly how much was lost, but we never recovered anything. Me and my sister were too scared to continue to live there. We were in fear. We were in fear at all times. My immediate fears became I could not be left alone. For years, starting from that moment forward, up until I was 14, I could not sleep by myself.

And I would either go and sleep in my sister's bed or I would go and make a bed in my mom and my dad's room on the ground.

Once I finally started to get comfortable with being alone, I would lock myself in a room to make sure that nobody could come in there, nobody could leave. I started to develop a paranoia where I thought people were following me, constantly looking back and making sure there was nobody there following us.

There was one night that me and my sister and my mom were coming home and I was so convinced there was a car following us and I made my mom do like three laps around the neighborhood. It had gotten so bad to the point where my parents ended up buying a new place. It had been a year after the home invasion and my parents were really ready for us to start a new life, tone over the page.

I was eight years old. They moved us to the town over, signed me and my sister up into different schools. I was still trying to process everything that had happened in me previously. But now I'm trying to process moving. And when you move, there's so many people that come in and out of your house.

I was so scared the entire time that all of these strange men were coming into my house. And the person who was coming to set up the TV looks so much like one of the men that had robbed my house. I just left. You've got this eight-year-old who's just crying, just ridden with fear and bawling and sobbing, just going down the cul-de-sac.

And I kept trying to tell my mom, I'm just so scared. And my mom was like, I have to get this done. And I don't think it was just because my mom didn't know what to do. I think my mom just grew up in a kind of culture where just mental health wasn't anything. You just have to tell your kid to shut up and move on. And that's essentially what had happened to me. That's why I just left.

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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. I felt so alone, really, that my mom couldn't meet my emotional needs. Honestly, during that time, I didn't even know what my emotional needs were. And I don't think my mom had a single clue what my needs were either.

It was almost like there was a color and a black and white contrast between feeling alone and feeling so loved. It honestly felt like my whole life had just gone from this amazing color-filled motion picture to just going into something so black and white, just feeling so alone all of the time. I was just so quiet, and I felt like I just became a very observant person.

I feel like I never really had a say in anything after that whole situation. And I think a lot of that wasn't because that's what my parents made me do. That was just a lot of what I did to cope. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn't want to open up to anybody. Solitude was just the easiest way for me to protect myself. I was so emotional. I never once remember my sister crying the way that I cried.

I don't know if everybody just kind of went through something a little bit different, folded up and put their experience away. But I struggled a lot with it. Once I was 14, that's when I started to develop a lot of self-isolation issues, just locking myself up in my room. And I just was like, nobody talked to me.

I developed a lot of like hygiene issues. I was so scared of getting into the shower. I was so scared of keeping my eyes closed in the shower. I've developed a really bad habit of only like showering once a week because I was so scared of getting into the shower. Instead of my parents taking the step back and being like, well, where's the shift in her behavior coming from? I feel like they just thought that I was just being a gross kid who didn't want to take a shower.

I think they were confusing that with an actual traumatic experience. I think they didn't realize how bad I was hurting because they had already moved past it. Whereas I was still paralyzed with fear. I really was just genuinely not okay anymore. By the time that I had turned 14 going on 15, it really was a wake-up call for my mom because it got to the point where I just, there was days where I was spending 13, 14, 15 hours just inside of my room.

My mom had gotten to the point where she started to empathize with me and not necessarily scold me. She would clean my room for me and she started to really understand that what I was going through really wasn't normal. She heard on the radio one day about this lady who was a hypnotherapist.

I remember going there and just sitting down in her big chair that she had. But when I was talking to her, I never told her about the home invasion. I just told her that I had a lot of feelings where I just felt like I was very depressed. She had diagnosed me as depressive borderline ADD.

Now, all of this meant absolutely nothing to me, honestly. But she told me to envision a happy place. All I could think of was like, I don't have a happy place. But she told me at one point, just let it come to you naturally. So naturally, I would think of a blue sky in a field of sunflowers.

She told me to imagine a door and she told me that if I opened that door, sitting there, I was going to see a box. And in that box, I could put all of my troubles and to literally throw it away.

Now, is that the best thing to do? Now I'm learning that it's really not the best thing to do. But when I was so young, that to me was the easiest thing I could possibly do. I couldn't move forward. I couldn't move past what had happened to me. And she really, really helped me move forward. Just putting it all into a box and throwing it away. And we're going to start fresh. Tomorrow's going to be a new day.

But my parents couldn't continue to pay for these sessions anymore, couldn't afford to have insurance for us. 2008 had happened and there was like a very large recession in Atlanta. People's homes were getting foreclosed on. And that's what ended up happening to my family. My parents ended up losing their house. And that's when my parents made a very tough decision for us to move to Mexico.

My brother had been born in 2007. So now it's three kids at home. Business wasn't doing as well. There was a lot of immigration crackdown in Georgia where my mom was losing a lot of her Spanish-speaking clientele, which made up about 80% of her sales. My mom ended up having to sell her store because it just got to the point where she was just getting more and more in debt.

My dad was starting to stay home a lot more often because there wasn't any work available.

My mom tried to get jobs as like dishwasher at our local like Johnny Rockets. Like I said, my dad has a degree in architecture. And I think my dad just felt like he was just settling for a very, very low lifestyle. And my parents just could not continue to do it anymore.

And it was just so crazy to see my parents going from like this 14 karat gold dealer and being able to afford nice vehicles just to see them really end up with nothing but like broken dreams.

So fall 2010, my parents had been already planting the seed inside of my sister and I's mind about, you know, when we go to Mexico, things are going to be a whole lot better than this. We don't have to live like illegals here in a country that doesn't even want us, even though we've been paying taxes. Come February 2011, my sister is the first one to leave.

because by now my sister has already graduated and couldn't find a job because she did not have a social security number. So my parents told her that she was going to move in with a different family member and that my parents would be meeting her at some point during the summer. Come July of 2011, we had already gotten all of our stuff in order to get it shipped to our house in Mexico.

And my dad decided that he was going to stay till the end of 2011 in our empty house. So that way he could save up. My aunt, who lives in North Carolina, comes down to Georgia to say goodbye to my mom. We're sitting there talking and she kind of looks at me and she says, how would you feel about staying here?

I was like, what do you mean? Leave my mom and my dad? No, no, I'm only 15. I'm not going to do that. She starts talking to me and asking me how I would feel about staying at her place up in North Carolina. Finish high school here. By then, my mom joins in the conversation. She's like, you really need to think about it. You may be able to help us to become citizens one day.

And you could go ahead and graduate high school with an American diploma. And I'm like, but all of my stuff had been sent to Mexico already. What do you mean? I'm sitting there talking to them and they're trying to decide how I should proceed with the next couple of years of my life.

Once again, I felt the same way I did when that whole crowd of people came onto that porch. I felt like I was on the outside looking in, just people describing a certain experience that I was dealing with.

I was going to have to share a room. I was going to have to abide by a different family's standards. And I think it was just fear of the unknown. My mom and my dad just ended up making the decision for me. And they told me I just needed to stay here. So the very next day, me and my dad dropped my mom and my brother off at the airport. And that was the last day I got to see my mom and my brother.

I just remember having to leave my mom at the very first security checkpoint. My brother was maybe around three. I just sat there in the food court and I just cried. My dad finally comes back and he finds me and we go to one of our favorite little hole in the wall, Mexican places. And that was our last supper.

Because the day after, my dad gets to drop me off so my aunt can pick me up and take me back home to North Carolina. My dad had to sign over guardianship to my aunt and my uncle. I'd never see my dad cry, but my dad cried that day. And that's how we were separated.

Just seeing my dad having to sign over those papers, him hugging me one last time and just telling me, remember to always do the right thing. That is the only way you will make it in this country. And that he loved me. That was the last time I physically saw my father.

My parents were 100% convinced that there was going to be some sort of immigration reform, purely based on hope. They were hoping that if they left me behind, something could happen where maybe they would even give us citizenship. We came here with visas. We just overstayed our visas. I honestly grew up not even knowing of my status.

In 2012, President Obama enacted what was called DACA, letting kids who were brought to the United States who overstayed their visas to get a social security number and a worker's permit. The trick to that is, is if you leave the country, you forfeit it. And to this day, I still can't leave the country.

They left as undocumented immigrants and overstayed their visa and cannot reenter the United States for 10 years. Depending on what ends up happening with my immigration application, once I finally get approved for citizenship, I will be able two years after that to petition for my mom and my dad.

Being able to become a DACA recipient in 2012 and just being able to now have the right to getting the driver's license and now have the right to be able to find a job legally and have a social security number. I'm so thankful, honestly, that my parents even had that kind of hope because if it had not been for them, I would have missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

My aunt and uncle did the very best that they could in integrating me as part of their family. They really wanted to make sure to instill into me what a typical Mexican woman does. You go to school and you clean and you cook. You need to clean the whole house. If you don't clean the whole house, then you don't get to go out.

And it's not like I could say yes or no to the things that they were asking me to do. And I struggled so much with my mental health while I was living with her. I was still having a lot of traumatic issues where I still felt like people were following me. There was one time where I was at the mall with my aunt.

I tried to tell her that there was somebody following us. She straight up told me there in front of everybody, you're crazy. There's nobody following you. It's not because she's a bad person, because to this day, I love her to death. I just don't think that she truly understood the severity of what I had been through and how much the trauma had affected my life.

My aunt would come into the room and she would see that I was crying and she would literally tell me to shut up and to smile and be happy because happiness is a choice. If anything, I think she felt like she was doing me a favor. So she expected more. But in my mind, I didn't want to do this. They made the decision for me.

I felt like it was all completely left up to me once they were saying that I could potentially be the one to get my parents' citizenship in the future. I felt like I had no choice. I felt like I had to do it. This season, Instacart has your back-to-school. As in, they've got your back-to-school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back-to-school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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I'd be able to speak to my mom and my dad on the phone every now and then when they would call. However, it was that familiar feeling of solitude. I almost started to find comfort in it. I wanted to feel the loneliness because that's just what was the most comfortable thing for me at that point. I chose loneliness because that really helped me grow up and know that I couldn't depend on anybody else around me.

As far as like with my mental health and like not being able to sleep by myself, all of that completely thrown out the window. Even if it took a couple of times crying and freaking out in the shower, I had to do it. So I did it. My hygiene got better. My aunt made me dress a lot better. She made me pay attention a little bit more to myself because appearances for her were very important.

I felt like I was just telling myself on a daily basis, you are becoming a young woman and you need to do better. I think that's honestly where I gathered a lot of that determination because I didn't want anybody to hurt me anymore. And I had to become what they wanted me to become because they were doing me a favor. And if you don't like it, they're going to tell you, well, you can leave. But I couldn't leave.

After I had graduated high school, I was really kind of like at crossroads with what I wanted to do in my life. I went to community college for like about a year and a half, finding just different jobs until I found what I was going to specialize in. And now I'm an optician. But me and my aunt had too many differences. We were on a family vacation at Disney World. And without getting into too many specifics, we had it out.

She pretty much asked me to, whenever we get back, she asked me to leave. And that's fine. That's cool. I was 21 years old. I was starting to make, you know, pretty good money. So I decided I was going to do it. I had also at the time, very unknowingly joined a cult, which is a little weird.

Once I moved out at 21, my whole life became about the cult, like a Southern Baptist kind of cult. Everybody that was in this group, 10 of us, we were all within the same age as the youth leader was.

We were going out there and helping out with the community, doing inner city ministry, volunteering down at this after school program on Friday nights. It was all good stuff, but I had a lot of betrayal happen to me in this cult. The youth leader was making very inappropriate advances towards a lot of the young women in the group.

Eventually with the cult felt like I was just in this vicious cycle of like getting this amazing Jesus high and thinking that everything was going to be okay. I'm doing the right thing. Truly thinking that these people were here for me, but little did I know that these people were actually fueling these bipolar episodes that I was having.

I remember we had this one night where we all got together and we would go around in a circle and we would talk about the most vulnerable moments in our life. We had to share our deepest, darkest secrets because that's what it meant to be fully transparent with your community. But now we were holding these secrets against each other to make us do certain things. And now I felt like I was having to choose between my family and all of this.

Everybody knew I had gone through a lot of trauma and I had already developed a lot of trust issues. When my house was invaded, I felt very exposed and vulnerable. And I felt like the only way that I could truly make sure that people don't ever make me feel like that again was really not with words, was with aggression.

I was okay with picking fights with people. And in fact, I wanted to pick fights with people. I would go from zero to 100 really quick. I had no problem with putting my hands on someone if I had to. I wanted to be heard. I wanted to be known that I'm somebody that people can't fuck with, that people can't mess with. I was not afraid of anybody anymore.

One afternoon at my house, it was just me and my best friend at the time, who was a student from the youth group. This girl was the closest thing to family I had ever felt. There had been previous times we had gotten into a couple of intense verbal altercations, disagreements, but this time the feeling was a little bit different. This time I could not stand to even hear her.

I just distinctly remember seeing her mouth move, but not really hear anything. And I just, I put my hands on her. I was so angry. I could not stand to even hear her. And I choked her. Honestly, I felt on top of the world because I had so much power and so much control and I could feel my aggression being released.

However, her eyes started to close. It felt like it went in slow motion. And it was like there was a little voice in the back of my head that said, this isn't you. And I quickly let go. My friend ended up falling back on the bed and she kind of just laid there and I shook her and I asked her, are you okay? We both just looked at each other, kind of speechless.

And we just went on about our day. I couldn't believe I had done that. I could have killed her. I could have killed her with as much as I had built up then as many issues as I was having with going untreated with my mental illness. I could have killed her right then and there and I would have been probably okay with it. But I saw her eyes start to close and I just had to let go.

I could not believe I had sunk that low. I had so much anger built up from the way that my family members treated me, from the way that I was being treated by this youth group, from just everything. I was just such an angry person. I had never been able to channel that aggression into anything. It wasn't until I took that step back and truly saw the scene, I just realized I wasn't okay.

Everything that I had been doing up until that point was not okay. And probably emotionally abusing my best friend because I didn't realize how sick I truly was. You know, I apologized to her and thanked her for never pressing charges. But she did relay this information to the cult. And by then, everybody definitely thought I was crazy.

The incident really was a rude awakening for me. It was 100% a wake-up call to let me know that this wasn't right. My conscience was telling me, this isn't you. This is not who you are. That's really when I decided that I really needed to get help because I was very explosive.

My therapist and I worked really hard through my different traumatic experiences that I've had, the separation of my mom and my dad and my siblings. She had me see a psychiatrist, and that's when I ended up getting diagnosed as bipolar with PTSD.

The psychiatrist talked to me a little bit about why I feel the way that I do, the chemical imbalance and how I could truly get to a much better place. She ended up prescribing me Lexapro.

That did not work out. And I was so terrified because it didn't work out. And I thought that I was a lost cause. But I ended up getting established with Zoloft. And honestly, I'm 100% a believer in medication, if possible, because I have truly watched it make some life differences and some miracles for me. Aggression has just 100% disappeared.

It has really helped me to be able to think rationally. Looking back at my past experiences, I felt like I couldn't even grasp what was happening to me or why I was feeling the way that I was feeling. I was dealing with so many negative emotions that I felt empty. I just felt so empty inside all the time. Zoloft just changed my life. It really did.

the world suddenly looked a whole lot brighter and I was loving it. I had a lot of issues trusting people in the past because I felt like people were just always going to let me down.

My first real post-cult of really trusting somebody was my godmother. Little by little, she helped me break down my walls. She truly helped me learn how to talk to people again, learn how to become someone who was more approachable, someone who's a little bit more inviting. With all of her help, that's how I was able to meet my husband again.

He still had to ask me like three times to be my boyfriend. I'm married to a veteran. I love him so much. Just the most supportive human being I've ever met in my entire life and has had so many reasons to not support me, yet ends up choosing me at the end of the day. That's where I've learned to put my trust in.

I think the most challenging thing for me was just to see my family go through something where they felt so helpless. Watching them, you know, put their head down in frustration and talking about how are we going to make ends meet? I just wish that I could go back in time, honestly, and have been a better daughter for them.

And that's the part that hurts the most for me. I don't care about what I went through with the cult. I don't care about what I went through after I left my aunt's house. I care about what my mom and my dad went through and how I can help them get to a better version of their self. I call my mom every day. My brother's a US citizen, so I actually just got to see my brother after like 10 years of not seeing him last Christmas.

From like a three-year-old to now a 15-year-old. Wow. He's taller than me. It was truly one of the happiest moments of my life to be able to see my brother again. One thing I felt like I took out of these different traumatic experiences was I was given the gift of independence. I am a person with a lot of ambition and a lot of drive.

I am someone who will set their mind to it and I will get it done. I've managed to make myself out of nothing. I now am in the process of buying my first home. My immigration status is still on pending right now.

The finish line is so near. I'm hoping this year will be the year I can go see my mom, walk right into their home and call it my home and just reunite with them again and pick up where we left off. My whole life I went through thinking that I can't do anything. My whole life I've been too scared to do anything.

But now I'm so happy to be able to be in a life where I have the mental stability, the finances, and the opportunities. I don't depend on anybody. Having that security within myself to know that I'm always going to be okay one way or another has been one of the most liberating feelings in the world.

Today's episode featured Evelyn. If you'd like to contact her, you can reach out through email at everetdev at gmail.com.

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Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.