#SerenasStory | Finding The Courage To Survive

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We hope and pray that all is being, doing and going well with you all, Familianz, New Coming Friends & Supporters from around the world! Thank you for joining us for another powerful testimony and inspiring conversation as we continue our mission of sharing authentic stories that educate, uplift and transform lives through the power of lived experiences.

In this deeply moving segment entitled, "#SerenasStory | Finding The Courage To Survive", Serena Rochell courageously shares her personal journey through some of life's most difficult and unimaginable challenges. With honesty, vulnerability and remarkable strength, she opens up about a past marked by abandonment, emotional hardship, manipulation and the difficult road toward rediscovering her own voice.

Whether you have faced adversity yourself, know someone currently navigating difficult circumstances or simply need a reminder that hope still exists, Serena's journey offers encouragement, inspiration and proof that healing is possible.

Join us as we listen, learn and witness another incredible testimony through the Story2Blessings™ platform, where stories become lessons, lessons become blessings and blessings become legacy.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello RDDC Hello everybody out there listening to this right now Okay Wow I told myself I wasn't going to be nervous and here I am nervous So let me just take a breath and start over Hello My name is Serena and I am so grateful to be here. I mean that in a way that goes deeper than just saying words. What the real double dose channel has built, what story to blessings is doing for people like me, it is something that I genuinely believe was not created just by human hands. There is something on this platform that moves differently than other things. Something that feels like it was put together with intention and with God, and with a real understanding of what people who have been through things actually need when they sit down to tell their truth. So before I say anything else, I just want to say thank you to this network, to this community, to everyone who keeps showing up here and keeps listening, because your listening is what makes spaces like this possible. Now, I need you to do something for me before I go any further. Find a comfortable spot. Pull your knees up. Get a blanket if you got one nearby. Because what I'm about to tell you is not a quick story. It is not a highlight reel. It is not the version I practiced in the mirror to make sure it came out right. This is the one I have never fully said out loud from start to finish without stopping. And I am going to say it today. It might not be perfect, but it is going to be true, and I think that matters more right now. My name is Serena. I am thirty one years old, and this story starts when I was fifteen, and does not end the way anyone would have predicted, especially not me. Let me tell you about the house I grew up in. Not the neighborhood, not the stats, the actual house. Three bedroom on a street that was quiet on Sundays and loud on Fridays. There was always something cooking. My mother kept a clean home. She was the kind of woman who ironed her pillowcases, and I used to think that meant everything was okay. I used to look at those crisp pillowcases as a child and think this is what a good life looks like. But my father left when I was nine. Not in a storm, not in a dramatic blowout that I could point to later and say that's the moment everything changed. He just thinned out. Like a radio signal losing reception. One week he was there every night for dinner. Three months later he was there on Tuesdays. Then every other Sunday, then gone. And my mother kept ironing those pillowcases like if the house looked right, the loss wouldn't be real. And I was nine years old trying to learn from her example, so I ironed my own feelings and called that strength. And I did that for six more years until someone came along who could feel the heat still coming off the iron from twenty feet away. His name doesn't matter. I'm not going to give him that. What matters is that he was twenty four and I was fifteen, and he had a silver tongue and a black camori, and he smelled like cedar and something expensive, and he looked at me one afternoon outside a corner store like I was the answer to a question he had been asking for a long time. And girl, I know I know what you're thinking, but you have to understand what it feels like to be fifteen and starving for someone to see you. Not the you that keeps it together, not the you that does her homework and helps her mama with the dishes. The real you the one underneath all the ironed feelings. When someone finally looks at that version of you and says, I see you, it doesn't matter how old they are. It doesn't matter what their reasons are. In that moment they are everything. He spent four months building something around me that I can only describe now as a beautiful cage. At the time I called it love. He remembered every single thing I said. I mentioned once in passing that my favorite song when I was little was this old RB track my grandmother used to play on Sunday mornings. Three weeks later, he pulls up to take me somewhere, and that exact song is playing when I get in the car. And I sat in that passenger seat and I felt something move through my chest that I had never felt before. I thought that was love. I thought that was what it felt like when someone chose you. What I didn't know was that he had spent three weeks building a blueprint of everything that made me feel safe, so he could use it. So that by the time the cage door closed, I would be too warm and too held and too grateful to notice. And he spent the next six months finding out if there was a limit. There was no limit, not at fifteen, not for a girl who had been invisible in her own home for six years. By the time I was sixteen and a half, I had lost every friend I had. Not dramatically. He never told me to stop talking to them. He was smarter than that. He would just be a little quieter when I mentioned them, a little less warm, and I would spend the rest of the night trying to get warm back. Until eventually it was easier to just not mention them. Until eventually I didn't have anything to mention. And then one afternoon, so casually I almost didn't register it, he said we should take a trip. Just us. Get away from all this. And I packed a bag for what I thought was a weekend. I want to tell you I never came back from that weekend. Not for three years. I'm going to tell you about a night in a city I won't name. I was seventeen. It was a Tuesday. I remember because the restaurant across the street had a Tuesday special, and the sign was blinking outside the window red and yellow red and yellow. And I was sitting on the edge of a bed in a room I hadn't chosen, listening to two men talk in the hallway outside the door, like I was furniture. Like I was something that had been left in that room and would be there when they came back. And I remember looking at that blinking sign through the gap in the curtain and thinking about my grandmother's kitchen. Thinking about the way it smelled on Sunday mornings coffee and something frying, and that song playing low on the radio. And I thought she doesn't know where I am Nobody knows where I am. And if I disappeared tonight, that sign would keep blinking red and yellow red and yellow. The world would just keep going. And I sat with that for a long time. And then I made a decision not to leave. Not yet. I wasn't ready yet. But I made a decision that I was going to stay alive. That no matter what happened in that room or any room after it, I was going to stay alive. Because something in me was not finished yet. I didn't know what, but something. There was a woman in that life named Destiny. I have to tell you about Destiny because she deserves to be said out loud. She was twenty two. She had these eyes that looked like they had already seen every possible version of every possible bad thing, and had decided not to be destroyed by any of it. She never talked about herself, never talked about how she got there or what she wanted, or whether she thought about leaving. In that world, you didn't talk about those things, because talking about them made you weak, and weak got you hurt. But some nights some nights she would just reach over and hold my hand in the dark. No words, not even a look. Just her hand finding mine in the dark and holding on. And in a life where every single thing had a price attached to it, that was the only thing I ever received for free. I think about destiny every time I sit across from a girl who needs someone to hold her hand and not ask for anything back. I think about her every time I get to be that for someone else. I looked for her for years after I got out. I'm still looking. Destiny If you ever hear this, I'm looking. I got out on a Thursday morning in October. The air smelled like cold coming. That particular smell that October has in the Midwest, where summer is done arguing and winter is making its case. A door was left unlocked. Not by accident and not by miracle, though I believe it was both. Someone had gotten sloppy. And I had exactly forty five seconds where I understood that the window was open, and I had to decide right then whether I was going through it. No shoes. I didn't have time for shoes. I went down a back stairwell in my socks on concrete steps that were cold enough to feel through the fabric, and I hit the street and I walked. Not ran. Running draws attention. I had learned that. I walked like I was supposed to be walking, like I was a person who had somewhere to be, even though every single nerve in my body was screaming and shaking and praying simultaneously. I walked six blocks before I found a payphone. I had one number memorized one. A girl named Maya I had gone to middle school with, whose address I knew because I had written it on a birthday card once, and for some reason that address had lived in the back of my mind like it was waiting to be needed. I called her collect. It was six fifteen in the morning. She answered on the second ring. I said Maya, it's Serena, I need help. She said Okay, tell me where you are. I want to stop here for a moment and just say something about Maya, because she doesn't get enough credit in her own right. She was twenty years old. She drove forty minutes in the dark of early morning to pick up a girl she hadn't seen in years standing outside a gas station in her socks, with nothing but a phone call and a look on her face that told the whole story without a single word. She took one look at me, she opened the passenger door, she turned the heat all the way up, and she drove. She did not ask me one single question for the first forty minutes. She just drove and let the heat run and played something soft on the radio. And when I finally started crying, and I cried hard, the kind of crying that sounds ugly because it's real, she just put her hand on my arm and kept driving. There are people in this world who are angels without any of the mythology attached to the word. Maya is one of them, and I lived on her couch for four months, and slowly, painfully, one decision at a time, I learned how to be Serena again. I want to tell you about the night I found RDDC, because it didn't happen the way you might expect. It wasn't a search, it wasn't someone handing me a flyer. It was a Tuesday night, I'm on Maya's couch, which at this point was basically my whole world. She's in the kitchen, got music or something going on her phone on the counter. I'm staring at the ceiling, doing that thing where you're not really thinking, you're just existing, which was the best I could do some evenings. And then I hear a voice, a woman's voice coming from Maya's phone on that counter. And something about it made me sit up. Not what she said, I didn't even catch the words at first. It was the way she said it, like someone who had been through something real, talking to someone else who had been through something real, and neither of them were pretending otherwise. No performance, no careful language, just truth moving through a voice. And something in my chest responded to it the way a plant responds to light through a window. Toward it just toward it. I got up and walked to the kitchen doorway and I said Maya, what is that? And she looked at her phone and she said Oh, that's the real double dose channel. Lexus T started it. I've been listening for a couple years. She builds these conversations that just get into you. You want me to turn it up? And I said, Yes, please. And I sat down at Maya's little kitchen table that had one wobbly leg she kept meaning to fix, and I did not move for two and a half hours. And something that had been frozen in me for a very long time started very slowly to thaw. I listened every day after that, sometimes twice a day. There were episodes that felt like someone had written them specifically for me, which I know is what good content does, it makes everyone feel that way. But this was different. This felt like being found again, but this time by something safe, this time by voices that wanted nothing from me except for me to keep listening and keep going. And I started to believe slowly, carefully, the way you believe something when you've been lied to a lot, and trust is rebuilt brick by brick over time. I started to believe that the story was not over, that what had happened to me was not the summary of my life, that it was a chapter, a brutal, long, unjust chapter inside a book that still had pages left to fill. And then I have to tell you about then because I told you this story had twists, and I meant it. About eight months after I got to Maya's, I met someone, and before you brace yourself, I need you to understand that for a long time he was genuinely good to me. I am not going to retroactively erase the good parts because of what came later. He was patient, he was funny. He had this laugh that started in his whole chest and arrived at his face a half second later, like his body couldn't contain it fast enough. And he knew what I had been through in the broadest strokes, and he didn't treat me like I was broken because of it. He treated me like I was a person. And after everything I had survived, being treated like a person was the most romantic thing in the world. I fell in love with him. I'm not ashamed of that. I think I was supposed to. I think some lessons can only come through loving someone first. The shift was so slow, so impossibly slow, like watching ice form on a lake. You don't see it happening. You just look up one day and realize the water is solid and you've been walking on it for a while without noticing. It started with his tone on certain nights, a particular flatness that meant something I couldn't name yet. Then a comment that landed too hard and sat with me for days. Then a night he didn't come home and didn't call. And when he came back the next morning he looked at me like I was the one who had done something wrong for being worried. And I started doing what survivors do when their instincts fire and they don't want them to be right. I started negotiating with my own gut. I'm damaged. I'm reading into things. My past is making me see danger where there isn't any. I talked myself out of what I felt every single time I felt it, until the night I couldn't talk myself out of anything anymore. It was a Wednesday. I know because I had made chicken and it was still on the stove. I know because the news was on in the other room, and I remember hearing the weather forecast and thinking tomorrow is going to be cold. And that was the last normal thought I had for a while. The argument came from nowhere. The way they do when they've actually been building for weeks. And then it escalated, the way things escalate when someone has decided they are done pretending. And I remember the exact second his hands closed around my throat because time does this thing in moments like that, where it stops being continuous and becomes still photographs instead. The ceiling, the light fixture I had always meant to replace, the sound the refrigerator made when it was running, his face above me looking like someone I had never met. And somewhere underneath the fear, underneath the pressure and the stars forming at the edges of my vision was one clear, burning, absolute thought. Not today, not me, not after everything I have already survived. You do not get to be the end of my story. And I want to tell you what happened next, because what happened in the following twenty minutes is the reason I am standing here today. But that is part two, and part two is going to make part one feel like the opening credits. What I will tell you right now, in this moment, is that I am here. I am thirty one years old, I am whole, I am doing work that sets other people free, and I wake up in the morning in a life that belongs entirely to me. Every corner of it, every choice in it mine. And if you are out there right now in something that has gotten its hands around your throat, literally or otherwise, I need you to find that thought, that one clear, burning thought underneath all the fear, the one that says not me, not today, not after everything. Find it. Hold it. It is the thread that pulls you through. And when you find it, come here. Come to the real double dose channel and keep listening. Because there are voices on this platform that will meet you exactly where you are and walk alongside you through what you are carrying. And if this episode landed somewhere deep in you today, if something I said made you feel less alone for even a minute, please send it to somebody. You know who I'm talking about. That person already came to your mind just now. Send it to them. Because the whole point of surviving something is using it to reach back for the next person. And if you have a story of your own sitting inside you, waiting for somewhere safe to land, story to blessings was built for you. This seat, this microphone, this community. Built for the version of you that has been through something real and deserves to be heard. Don't let what you went through be silent. The world was formed by a word, and yours is one somebody out there is waiting to hear. Every step forward. I'll see you in part two. Thank you. This was so liberating. Blessings to you all.