Life Behind the Name Podcast #4

Podcast 4, 5 and 6 I will be sharing my life testimony to give God Glory. I hope to reach other's who have been wounded like I was and give them hope for healing and wholeness. 

I felt led to share my testimony, my story at this point in time, so that listener's can better understand why I created this podcast and the website that has the same name. I am seeking to reach the wounded, weary souls out there that feel unloved, unwanted and like they don't matter. I have truth to share with you to help set you free. 

This is part one of my story. 

Transcript

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Hello. Welcome to the Never Nothing, Never Nobody Podcast. This is a place for those who have felt unloved, felt like they were nothing and nobody. To learn the truth about who they really are and who God created them to be. This is a place to find hope for healing, to end your search for significance, and to find the truth that you were never nothing and never nobody. Hello, welcome to the Never Nothing, Never Nobody Podcast. My name is Jana. The next few episodes are going to be about my life, my wounds, and what led me to believe that I was nothing and nobody. I'm hoping to reach individuals like myself, whom others have made to feel worthless, useless, unwanted, unloved, unwelcome. I'm re wanting to reach out to those who have felt like nothing and nobody, or believe that to be true of themselves, just like I have. I was four and a half years old, playing in the backyard of a lady's house, when her husband came out and screamed at me, Who do you think you are to play on my son's swing set and eat my food? My little kid mind thought he was joking, but he wasn't. His challenging words told me I had no right to be there. I had no right to eat those raisins, and that to him, at least, I was nothing and nobody. However, his words marked me for life, and I fully believed for over forty years that I was nothing and nobody. To this day, even every now and again, I'll hear the enemy of my soul trying to stir up this old wound and revive this lie that I was nothing or that I am nothing or nobody. God has taught me that this is absolutely untrue, not only about me, but it's untrue about anyone who has ever been made to feel that way. Probably about a decade ago, I was watching this TV show called Once Upon a Time. There was a character on the show that was in this particular story arc, she was fighting the dark ones. She was to become the Dark One, but all the ancient Dark Ones came and harassed her with lies to stir up her old wounds and cause her to feel the way she had as a child, who had been abandoned by her family, or so she had felt. One of the dark ones in particular taunted, telling her not to give up her power, not to destroy the darkness, because then she would go back to being nothing. And Emma, in all the strength she could muster, raged against the idea of that. She said, I'm not nothing, I was never nothing. Her words pierced my heart. Her words echoed what my younger version of myself had been screaming for all the years that I had believed that I was. I played that part of the show again and again just to listen to the tone of the voice, to see her face, and to hear her say those words because those words were like medicine to my soul. I so wanted this to be true of me, that I was never nothing. But when you've believed alive so long, it becomes your truth. I had lived with this as my truth for most of my life. Even though deep down inside I had believed I was nothing and nobody, there was always a part of me that was desperate to prove that I was somebody and I was worth caring about. I tried proving my worth through perfectionism by being the good girl, not breaking the rules, not getting in trouble, not making my mom get upset with me. I remember particularly low time in my life when I was in middle school and I was really struggling with who I was and what I had to offer and but I created this questionnaire for my friends, and even my then boyfriend. I needed to find out why they liked me and why they were my friend. I couldn't understand. I didn't I didn't know why. I didn't see anything in me worth anything. They never knew what kind of person I would be or what mood I would be in. I was a very moody, preteen tween and even a little bit in my teenage years person, and why anyone stuck by me I never understood, but they did. Most of my friends were kind and they answered my questions honestly. I only had two people that gave me a hard time about it. I later realized those two were never really my friend. But my friends rallied around me and showed me love, and they gave me real honest, heartfelt answers to help me see what they saw in me as a friend, and I kept those questionnaires and letters for years. That man yelling at me when I was four and a half years old was not the only thing that happened in my life that led me to the deep core belief that I was nothing and nobody. I had been um abused sexually, lived in a contentious household, my biological father was an alcoholic, and the man who later became my stepfather was also an alcoholic. There's always fights and yelling going on. I never felt safe anywhere. When I was four, four and a half, all this happened all at the same time. The man yelling at me, being abused, and witnessing domestic violence in my home all happened in such a short span of my life. I'll never forget the brawl that took place in my living room. It was between my biological dad and a man who had rescued my mother from a vicious beating. I witnessed my dad grab my mom by her long brown hair and slam her up against the wall, which knocked the wind out of her, and just as he was getting ready to pummel her face, this other man jumped in and got between my biological dad and my mom and rescued her. I mentioned being sexually abused. The person who did it was a fifteen-year-old boy, and he had given me an STD, but back then they didn't test for such things and they would give medicines that did nothing to help with the pain. I would awaken in the night with chronic pain and unable to go back to sleep. My stepdad would come and pray with me and he would tell me to pray and ask Jesus to come take the pain away and just keep thanking Jesus until it happened. And it happened every time Jesus came and took that pain away. Nothing else worked. I grew up in a contentious home, mom and biological dad, and it got physical, but the man my mom married who became my stepdad, it was only verbal, but there was always yelling and screaming and throwing of things, and I would run and hide under the bed or in the closet or m behind a couch. I lived a very afraid childhood. I would stay out of the way as best I could, and I would get even more scared when my mom would push my stepdad over the edge and he'd slam his hand against the counter or table and holler at her and then one or the other of 'em would take off and I don't know what I feared most, that my mom would take off angry and never come home because she'd been in an accident, or my stepdad would leave and never return. Either way, I was always afraid. I was no safer at school. I was bullied and I was sexually assaulted there too, um, believe it or not, in kindergarten by other boys, the evidence of which was chronic UTIs. I was a very angry kid. The things that I witnessed, things that I learned, things that had been done to me left me with m emotions that I didn't know what to do with. I hated crying. I still do. I saw it as a sign of weakness. Anger was the emotion I expressed and felt the most. It was an emotion I felt comfortable with. It felt like it gave me power or strength or control or somehow being angry kept me from being a victim or being hurt. It never took much to set me off. At home I found I could do nothing right. I was often screamed at by my mother. She would say things to me like, You're such a slob. I can't take you anywhere. Can't you do anything right? She was the kind of person that if she left a ten item list of things to do and you only got nine of them done, she would just focus on the one thing you did not do, and then yell at you for it. So try as I might to not be yelled at or to upset my mother, I failed all the time. Again, all these things fueled my feelings of being nothing and nobody. My mom wasn't all bad. She was very loving and very kind and she would say very nice things that would build me up and make me feel good, but it never took long before I'd mess up and it would all come down again. I loved it when she made plans for just the two of us to do things together, made it for a special day. I always loved my mom even though she hurt me so and but she was also my hero because it seemed to me, one, she could do no wrong, and two, there wasn't anything she couldn't handle. She was super mom. But I was always left feeling like I wasn't good enough, that I could do nothing right, yet I still continued to strive for perfection, thinking maybe one day I could be good enough. One day I could make my mom happy. I had small successes here and there, like making the honor roll or getting some award, or making dinner so that she didn't have to. In high school I went to a special school. They called it a magnet program. It was for the arts. I was a part of what was called technical theater. That was for the behind the scenes work for plays, the sound, the lights, the costumes. It helped me so much to have something like that to be a part of. I was still making on a role, but I was still a very depressed teenager. I didn't know if it showed in my day-to-day. I don't think it did. But I would often find myself just before a show or during a show, hiding somewhere in the back in the dark until it was time to start or come back from intermission or something. I was always friendly with my classmates and pleasant to be around, except for when my best friend and I were fighting, that really got on the nerves of our fellow technical theater students. I was always a faith-based person. I wore the Christian shirts, everybody knew where I stood concerning my faith, and I was always trying to be a good friend to everybody. I didn't get any kind of counseling until I was in college. Went for a couple of years, but I never found it very helpful. The counselor was always trying to put me on medication. One day I told her, meds won't fix what's wrong with me. I knew enough about psychology to know what was wrong with me was because of what I had been through. My heart was what was broken. During this time in college, the pain I experienced when I was in my childhood, it returned. It didn't come just at nighttime and awake me from my sleep. It roared back to life in a very ugly way. It was so painful it got to where I couldn't sit, I couldn't stand, I couldn't walk, I couldn't lay down, I couldn't do anything without being in pain. It took several tests for them to uncover that I had an STD, which of course was a puzzle to my doctors because I had told them I had never been intimate with anybody, but I explained what had happened when I was little and they told me that the particular one I had a trait of it was it could lie dormant for a number of years. I thought, lucky me. I was given the option of either having laser surgery to deal with what they could see, or I could go in for six weeks for a series of shots. I chose the surgery. They burned out all the layers of tissue where they could see any of the virus. This did not help my pain, in fact it kind of exacerbated it. They put me on something called ametryptaline after several months because they thought that the pain I was continuing to have was quote unquote psychosomatic, and they said that this would help me with the pain, but it turned out it was some kind of antidepressant. Eventually, after probably six months, I finally stopped having chronic pain. I was probably around 19 or 20 when this happened. I had first become a believer in Jesus Christ when I was five years old. I prayed in my bedroom with my mom, asking Jesus to come into my life and be my Lord and Savior. You may wonder what I could possibly know about Jesus at such a young age. Here's what I knew. He was with me when I was in pain and he took the pain away. He was with me when I was hiding. He was with me when I was scared. He was with me when I was alone. He was the one that never left. So when this happened, I felt like I had been completely let down by Jesus and by God. They were the only ones who knew what was going on when it was going on. They were the only ones who could have done anything about it, and they sat back and watched. I fell apart. I went into autopilot. I would take my classes by day and they would work by night. I'd come home, I'd curl up in my bed, and I'd turn on the TV. I honestly don't know how I maintained good grades or passed any tests. I don't know how I made it to point A to point B in my driving, and I don't know how in the world I focused on work at all. It was the first time in my life that I wanted nothing to do with God. Nothing to do with Jesus. I stopped talking to God for the first time in my life. I refused to go to church. I was done. I was ruined. My life I thought was over. Thank God my story doesn't end there. And I want you to know that the only purpose of my sharing my story with you is to reach others like me who have been hurt like I have been hurt, let down like I have been let down and made to feel how I have been made to feel. I have some hope for you, and I hope you will continue listening to the next couple of podcasts and maybe beyond, so that you too can be set free, made whole, and completely healed. If this invokes you to share your story, I would love to hear it. This is not about me. This is this my story, but it's for God's glory, because you will not believe what He did and how He turned it all around. And I hope you all will listen to hear how amazing God is. For my first-time listeners who might be needing some encouragement or hope, listen to podcasts one, two, and three. For those of you who need to know that God truly can heal you to the extent and to the point that it's like it never happened. Please continue to listen to the next two podcasts as I continue my story. The broken years that God didn't waste and the truth that changed everything.