Hope Was Guaranteed Pain with Ashana Kaiulani

We tell ourselves a comforting story about children. We believe that if a little one is ever left alone in this world, surely someone would step in. Surely a neighbor, a teacher, a stranger with a soft heart would look at a seven year old, a ten year old, a child with a whole life still ahead of them, and say, I will take this one home. But my conversation with Ashana Kaiulani cracked that story wide open. Ashana went into foster care at seven, and by ten she was placed in a group home to await a family that never came. Not because she was unlovable. Because she was loud. Because when the system split her from her baby brother, the one she used to sing to sleep, she refused to go quiet. In her words, he had four mamas by then and he was not old enough for therapy. Her only crime was advocacy. The very thing we beg our children to become, a voice for the people they love, was the thing that got her labeled and left behind.

What has stayed with me most is the way she reframed what it means to raise yourself. We love to say a child grew up too fast, that they were mature beyond their years, as if that were a badge instead of a wound. But Ashana asked us to consider not who raised her, but what raised her. Book characters. Movie characters. She built an entire personality out of fictional people because there was no attuned adult left to show her how to be human. And in a home where children wandered the streets until dark and fended for whatever food was left, she learned a survival math that broke my heart. She told me that for years she believed hope was the stupidest emotion a person could have. Hope was guaranteed pain. If you never dreamed, you never had to watch the dream get taken. Sit with that. There are three hundred and seventy thousand children in this country right now, and so many of them have quietly decided that hope is a luxury too dangerous to hold. Think of what our world goes without when a generation of children never learns they are allowed to dream.

So here is the question I keep coming back to, the one I now ask everyone. Would you do it for one? Not the whole broken system. Not all three hundred and seventy thousand at once. One child. Ashana reminded me that the research is clear on this, that one consistent, believing adult can change the entire trajectory of a child's life. One person willing to look a child in the eyes and say, I believe in you, and mean it. We have the manpower for this many times over if we stop waiting for the fix to be big enough to feel heroic. So before you decide you are not the person for this, take a walk back to your own younger self and ask what you dreamed about, and who, if anyone, believed you could reach it. Then ask whether you might become that person for someone who has never once been asked what they hope for. Because you are more than worthy of that, and you are more than capable of it. It just takes you believing it first.

Find more about Ashana here: https://www.instagram.com/wayhomewellness/

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Until next time, keep shining bright!

- Corree