“You have that hope for things being better the next day. And that’s really what helps many people survive and transcend. But I’ve added to that whole thought process.

“One day, for some reason, I thought, who am I really? Am I somebody who is constantly going to look at someone and think he’s the guy who attacked me or the guy who raped me? Am I going to continually encounter people and put up a shield?

“And what I realized was that when something happens in your life — while it can be for just a minute or, unfortunately for some victims, it can last years — it’s still a very short period in God’s time. In reality, you have so much more life to live. So are you going to spoil the rest of your life by carrying that instance when you were victimized?

“Sure, you need to go through the whole process of grieving and acknowledging, then accepting and moving on. But then you should ask yourself, who am I really? Am I a gun-toting mama? Am I going to allow those instances to change the type of person that God made me to be? That’s what it all came back to for me, when I realized that those things don’t have power over me because I’m God’s child.

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“Then one day at a bus stop, I got held up at gunpoint and was attacked. I ran back home, and they never found out who did it.

“A few years later when I was 24, I was in my own home getting ready for work. My son was about 14 months old. And this guy breaks into my house and rapes me. I was an art major in college, so I was able to draw a composite. He tried coming back to my house a couple of days later to grab my trash, probably to go through it looking for my name. My husband at the time saw the license plate, which helped track down the guy.

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