The Moment I Stopped Being A Victim

A kinda horrible experience that showed me what I'm made of.

Girl, I got pelted with some nasty moldy lemons! (Thank God!) Keep reading…

Hey,

Do you have a negative pattern that keeps repeating in your life? Like you seem to work for people who always fill-in-the-blank. Or date men who always turn out to be dot-dot-dot. We’ve all heard the phrase when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. My orientation is a little different. When life gives you lemons? Girl, there’s probably a lemon tree on your property somewhere that you don’t know about. And btw, we all have some proverbial lemon trees planted in our internal landscape. Lemons don’t just drop from the sky. So “life” will keep delivering you said lemons over and over until you discover the source and manage your accidental lemon farm. Until then, you’ll just keep getting pelted. (Ouch!) 🍋🤬

Let me spill my lemon tea for you (and yes, I will stop with the lemon metaphor!)…

In 2018, I was in a very different place than I am today. I was still married…and I was struggling. I had grown so much since I’d left Seventeen and had done a ton of work on myself. But something just wasn’t right. I was exhausted all the time. My memory was super spotty. I had gained about 50 pounds without eating differently. I suffered from chronic sinusitis that would turn into pneumonia once or twice a year. I so dreaded the idea of an intimate relationship with my husband that I stopped having sex with him years earlier and yet, I longed to have an intimate connection with someone. Yet everyday I acted like things were normal because…well…I had so much to be grateful for. I was married to a good man. He was a good father. I was a good mother. Our family unit was solid. We enjoyed abundance: We didn’t have to worry about so many of the things he and I struggled with as children. Although I wasn’t working in my old capacity, I was fundraising on behalf of Hidden Water, the incredible organization that supports family systems impacted by childhood sexual abuse. I felt so passionately about this work since Hidden Water helped me begin to process my own sexual abuse a few years earlier. So, I focused on the positive and turned away from all the other stuff.

But some of that stuff was hard to ignore. Especially, the health challenges. Anytime my children were in school, I was ping ponging from doctor to doctor looking for answers. In fact, by fall of that year, I had an appointment with an impossible to-get-in-to-see doctor in LA (I live in NY – if that gives you a sense of how desperate I was getting). I had all my eggs in her basket and was literally counting down the days until I saw her with hopes she would give me the magic diagnosis and treatment plan I’d been praying for. Meanwhile, two of my children were also battling these recurring intense colds/allergies. They were in an endless loop of inhalers, nebulizers, and meds which was all the pediatrician could do to help. The whole health vibe for our family was kind of dark, to be honest. But again, I just kept looking toward the light. We have resources. We’ll figure it out.

Our family went away for Christmas and returned to spend New Year’s Eve in the city with my brother and sister-in-law. But the moment we walked into our apartment, my sister-in-law started sneezing. She asked me for some Claritin. It was just allergies, she said. Huh…Interesting… I made a note to myself to have our HVAC ducts cleaned. Maybe they were dusty. The duct-cleaning guy came that following Monday to give me an estimate. But he gave me much more than that. “You know this is mold, right?” He pointed to some dark spots on the vents on my ceiling. Mold. Holy shit. I listened with half an ear to his estimate, thanked him and rushed him out the door.

I looked at the clock. It was 10am. I had to move fast.

By mid-day, I had found a temporary place for us to stay about twenty blocks away. I packed every suitcase we have with most of our clothes, their special toys and important kitchen equipment. I called my husband at work and told him he would be coming home to this other address. I got a babysitter that my children loved and asked her to pick the girls up from school and keep them out until after dinner…. “And oh, this is our new address. I will explain to the girls when they get here.” Listen, no one told me I had to evacuate immediately. But a mother knows. A mother knows. I didn’t want a second opinion before I acted. There was an invisible perpetrator in our house.

Within the week, we had an enviornmental testing company assess the situation. It was much worse than we thought. He pointed to the mold the guy had shown me on the vents. “This is just typical household mold: some condensation that wasn’t cleaned properly because it was so high up,” he said. Almost all households have a version of this. But the air testing showed we had toxic sporing mold. Particularly high levels in my bedroom. My daughter who had been sick for months? She is specifically allergic to the exact mold we had. My other daughter who had struggled with Asthma and other health issues all the years we’d lived in this apartment? (We’d moved in when she was an infant.) She had the highest levels of mold in her body. Both girls had to undergo very intense treatment to remediate their bodies while we remediated our apartment.

This was inconvenient to put it mildly. The children had to…ugh…honestIy? I don’t even want to get into it. I don’t want to relive their part. I will just say their treatment was invasive. It was relentless. For 6 months, our lives were turned upside down. Our temporary, thankfully mold-free home held us while we treated the girls and searched for the source of mold in our home – by demo-ing much of it…also so invasive. The culprit? An overly tightened sprinkler head inside the wall of my bedroom, that had been dripping one tiny drop at a time over the course of five years, resulting in a monster bloom of mold with no smell and no visible water marks. Oh, and it was right next to the HVAC vent above my bed…blowing on me…for years. It was insidious and dangerous, this hidden water.

Hidden Water. Hidden Water.

Do you remember where you first read the phrase Hidden Water in this note? Hidden Water was the name of the childhood sexual abuse organization I was working with. Hidden Water (aka Mold) was the secret perpetrator in my home hurting myself and my children reenacting the secret perpetrator in my childhood home that was hurting me.

Stay with me.

Nothing about incest is convenient to a family system. For one of your own to be hurting one of your own…in the safety of your home? There’s no quick and tidy solution, right? At least there wasn’t in my life. Even long after the fact it’s messy because my perpetrator is part of the family. After all, it’s his family too…and denial is real. If someone had stopped to wonder, why is Atoosa struggling so much in school? Why does she keep going to the nurse with a stomachache? What does she do every day after school? If someone had really pressed me for answers, they would have bumped into a harsh reality they’d have to deal with.

Believe it or not, the same is true for mold. I know many people who have chronic sinus issues who’d prefer to take meds year-round than check their houses for mold. I’ve had people whose houses reek of mold and when I ask them about remediating it, you see the thick glaze of denial just gloss right over their eyes. I can tell you why, my sister, because I’ve lived through it: It costs so much money. So much inconvenience. It’s totally destabilizing. Nothing was easy about that year in our lives. Not one thing. But in time, my children recovered. In time, I recovered. It was in this transitional living situation that I first stumbled on the IG account #thankyouatoosa. Prior to this, I was in such a fog of illness that I didn’t even really understand what Instagram was. But when I saw that account, I had a flicker of recognition. I saw the work that my team and I did back in the day. I read the words of readers, now grownups, whose lives were impacted by that work. Some of those readers were now esteemed members of the media themselves. 🤯

It’s like I’d been in a long slumber, and I woke up to my own potential again. But most importantly, I had gotten my children out of a dangerous situation. Connecting this mold disaster to my sexual abuse history was the beginning of a kind of world view for me. I see life almost as a video game: We get sent hard situations that replicate an unprocessed feeling from our past…to give us a chance at a do-over. A chance at integrating this hard experience. A chance at making different choices. When I found out about the mold, I felt the same terror I felt growing up shooting through my body. The hidden perpetrator in my childhood home that I wasn’t rescued from? This time, I rescued myself and my children. My child who used to be connected to a nebulizer one week out of every 4…never used a nebulizer again once her mold treatment was done. I lost the weight, left the marriage, reclaimed my sexuality and eventually started writing again. (Insert video game she-shoots-she-scores music!)

Those moldy lemons got me writing again, thank goodness! 📸: Aymann Ismail

This particular lemon tree has its seasons and right now I’m experiencing a milder version of this old wounding again: The replication of not feeling safe in my house. (Not mold this time, something else. I will say more once it’s behind me.) But rather than getting lost in the drama or the narrative (“Can you believe…”), I see it as an opportunity to flex my internal muscles and gain more mastery. This time, can I love myself through the invasion? Can I hold myself tenderly as I walk through the fire? I won’t lie. It’s hard…it’s hard. But the alternative is to get pelted by lemons and that’s not just hard, it’s fucking demoralizing. So, although I didn’t ask for it to be lemon harvesting season…it’s here and I’m not going to resist it. Everytime I feel those lemons coming, I get busy. It’s time to do the internal work. Time to gain a little more mastery. But the key is to get out of the story of what’s happening. Like, it’s not about how annoying the mold was or whose fault. Instead: How did it make me feel? When have I felt that feeling in the past? When was the first time I remember feeling that way? (Boom, original wound!) I encourage you to do that exercise when shit’s going sideways in your life.

Then you sit in that feeling, breathe through it holding your younger self in a safe place in your heart. Loving her. Loving you. From there you can begin processing through therapy or whatever modality speaks to you. Energy work has been super effective for me. But I’ve also done tons of therapy – Internal Family Systems, hypnosis and somatic therapy. Check out the box below for some phenomenal healers who work remotely that I’ve had the honor to work with in case you’re interested.

Sita, Selen, Dana, Caitlin, Elizabeth

My point in writing today is just to say, one of the ways I’ve stayed out of victimhood and remain empowered in my life is this particular orientation. I’ve had friends say how awful they feel for what’s happened to me. That it was horrible luck. I don’t believe anyone is “unlucky.” I believe we’ve all had varying amounts of childhood trauma, and every so often, we have experiences that recreate old feelings that are still unprocessed in our bodies. If we remain unconscious or in denial that this vibration is in our own energetic field, we may just complain or blame other people when we have these challenging experiences. But righteous anger usually keeps us stuck in trauma. If, instead, we have the courage to look back on our past hard experiences, we can find the source of the wounding that our life is trying to get us to process so we can take positive steps toward healing. As they say “You feel it, to heal it!” Like in the case of my mold: I could have tried to sue our developer. It was, after all, a builder’s error that wreaked so many years of havoc on our lives between the poor health, the doctor’s bills, the construction bills, etc. And don’t get me wrong, I was definitely angry for a few days. But how would a years-long legal battle over money really change all the years we were ill? Instead, I did an emotional u-turn and shifted my focus toward steering my family toward health…and although our insurance first said they wouldn’t cover it, in the end they covered everything. I have found that when we do our healing work, the universe conspires to help us. Again, another score for the home team!

I will do the same with this cryptic thing that’s happening now. Because of my own unique trauma history, my mantra in life is: I am safe. I am safe. I am safe. I will remind the little one inside of me of this. I will care for her tenderly. I will make sure she is, in fact, safe. And we will weather the storm together knowing it’s rooted in our unique history. And we will. We will.

And so will we – you and I. Thank you for journeying with me back then…and today. I’m here. 24/7, as always at atoosa@atoosa.com.

xo, atoosa

The soundtrack of my 🤍🖤❤: