By Valencia B.

“You going to grow up to be just like your mother and your father. Doing drugs, alcohol, no job, and getting locked up,” my grandmother said. I was 11. I’d heard her say it so much that I started to believe it.

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I started living with my grandmother at the age of 7. She put me down a lot. When I was in 2nd grade and I got accepted to a gifted school, she told me, “You can’t go. How they going to let you into this school? You not smart enough.”

Hearing her call me stupid hurt a lot. And as I got older, that hurt started to overwhelm me. She would tell me I was going to be a failure.

I felt blamed for everything that went wrong in the house. I wanted to tell my grandma off so bad but I knew it wasn’t going to change her.

I felt as if no one understood me. I had so much pain in me that had to be released. Sometimes it hurt me so bad that I cut myself with scissors to take the pain away. Then I found another way to deal with the pain. I started to do exactly what she said I was going to do. And I felt free.

Nothing but Criticism

“Valencia, wake up, that’s all you do. Just sleep all day. Look at your room. It’s dirty. You’re so damned lazy. You know I’m going to court on Thursday. I’m going to have you out of here.”

My grandmother didn’t want custody of me. She often threatened to return me to the courts.

I didn’t want to argue that day. So I got up and started doing what she asked. I got up out of bed and cleaned my room. I made sure it was spotless because I didn’t want to get in an argument with her.

“Grandma, I’m going outside now,” I said calmly.

“That’s all you know how to do is run the streets. Why can’t you stay in the house just for one day?”

Anger filled my head. I wanted to curse my grandmother out. Instead, I stormed out the door.

Fighting Was My Release

Just outside my building, I heard, “Hi Valencia.” It was my best friend Mesha. She always made me laugh when I was mad. “Hey, where you going?” I asked.

“I was going to knock on your door,” she said with a bright smile.

I just wanted to be happy and forget what had happened in my house. We went to go sit in the park.

A few minutes later, we saw some girls I had problems with. One of these girls and I had fought numerous times. It was always over petty stuff. Now they were walking toward us to start trouble again. I was tired of getting picked on.

“Hi,” she said like she wasn’t coming my way to start trouble.

“What’s up,” I said, real hard.

She started a petty argument, like I knew she would. As she got more disrespectful, I snapped. I jumped up and with all of my power I punched her in the face. Then I kept on going at her. Mesha was trying hard to pull me off. But it was too late. The next thing I knew, the cops had pulled up, put handcuffs on me, and put me in the back of a squad car.

At the precinct, they asked me for me grandmother’s number. I could already hear her the words in my head: “You going to grow up to be just like your mother and father…”

They called her and put her on speaker phone. “Yes?” she said.

“This is the 41st Precinct calling you to tell you your granddaughter got into some trouble and the victim is pressing charges. She will be sent to juvenile detention tonight and you have to go to Family Court tomorrow morning.”

“What’s the charge?”

“Assault in the 3rd degree.”

“What time I have to be at court?” she asked.

Second Chances

The next morning, I awoke to a staff screaming, “WAKE UP, GOOD MORNING, RISE AND SHINE LADIES.”

After breakfast, they took us downstairs to a big room where lots of kids sat handcuffed and in shackles, and soon I was, too. They told us all to stand up and make a straight line and they told me to come in the front. It was hard walking in those shackles. They hurt my ankles.

I went in front of a judge named Robert Reed. He was nice. He let me out into a program instead of sending me to jail. I told him how I was going to follow rules, and I believed myself.

image by Erika Faye Burke

But once I hit my neighborhood, everything the judge said to me didn’t matter. My old friends made me feel safe. I was free.

I started to fight even more. I was tired of getting bullied. Once I learned to fight real good, I started fighting everybody who I felt disrespected me. I felt undefeatable. It got out more pain and anger than cutting myself.

I got locked up several more times. Judge Reed kept letting me go because he believed in me. He believed I was going to grow up and be someone. But then I caught another case for shoplifting. This time I had a different judge and she was strict. “I’m going to let you back into the community this time, young lady, but if you violate probation, be prepared for a sentence.”

Once again I said I wouldn’t mess up, but once I hit my block, everything changed. I stopped doing the program they gave me, I didn’t go to therapy, and I stopped going to probation.

My neighborhood is one of the most dangerous in the Bronx, but I had friends to protect me. Well, I called them my friends. And most of the teens were nice to me. They weren’t mean like my grandma. I got so into them that I never wanted to leave their sight.

They started smoking weed so I started smoking. I stopped going to probation because my probation officer would give me a drug test. And I was fighting even more. It was like I was in a gang but I wasn’t. On my block we just protected each other.

There was a warrant out for my arrest for violating probation and my grandmother turned me in. I was back in juvenile detention again. This time, I was getting sentenced.

Stuck on Negative

They put me in an RTC called Graham Windham instead of a detention center. A detention center is more secure. You are told when to eat, sleep, and use the bathroom. You can’t do anything without adult supervision, or permission. An RTC is a Residential Treatment Center. It’s mostly for kids with behavioral problems. There are rules, but more freedom.

When I first arrived, I was still fighting and I didn’t pay attention in school. I didn’t like all the rules. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I felt like nothing was going to change me.

I had low self-esteem. I thought I was the ugliest girl in the world. I mutilated myself. But Graham Windham changed the way I thought about myself.

There’s a lot to do at Graham Windham. We went to school, and there were trips on the weekends, extracurricular activities, and jobs to keep us occupied. We had talent shows in front of the whole campus. All these activities helped us stay focused, out of trouble, and away from negativity.

When I got to Graham Windham all the negative messages my grandmother had given me and all the negative experiences I’d been through were stuck in my head. All I could remember were the bad times. It made me hate myself. I wanted to fix the way I felt about myself, but I didn’t believe I could.

People at Graham-Windham taught me to have respect for myself. They told me that if I had attitude and disrespected people, nobody would respect me.

Opening Up

What really helped me was something called Girls’ Group. In these groups we’d all sit in the living room in a circle and tell our stories. The staff would hardly say anything. They would just listen to us talk to each other.

A lot of the girls in there went through even worse things than me. Some of their parents left them at a young age and never came back and they went into foster care. Some of them had been abused. One of the girls was a crack baby, and her mom kept telling her she should have thrown her in front of a car.

All of the stories were sad. Everyone cried and everyone listened. Some of the girls felt like they had gone wrong so much. I think they felt, as I did, that they could never change.

The first time I opened up to others was one day when the other girls were telling me how bad I was in the cottage and how I was making their cottage go bad.

One of the girls said, “Valencia, you need to work on your anger and the fighting. They won’t hesitate to lock you back up. I don’t want to see a pretty girl getting locked back up into a horrible place for not doing something that should be easy. Just focus on yourself and try to change your ways. And don’t forget, you can always come to me and talk.”

That was the first time someone my age had said something like that to me. I thought, if she believes she can help me, that means I really need to change. She spoke to me like she cared, and she didn’t want to see me fail. I felt like that was a true friend, so I took her advice. I started talking to her instead of fighting so much.

I Finally Felt Accepted

Soon I was able to share with the entire group. I was getting better and better. And I was proud of myself. I learned how to choose friends who accepted me for who I was.

Speaking about my feelings started to take away my pain. I was comfortable expressing myself around a group of teens with problems like mine. I didn’t want to keep doing the negative things. I wanted to stop. The other girls made me believe I could because they had. And every time I saw someone leave happy because they felt like they were a new person, it made me stronger.

When I was upset and wanted to destroy things, I would go talk to one of the other girls to help me calm down. I learned coping skills, like how to walk away from problems when I’m about to get upset. The girls told me that if my grandma says something upsetting to take a couple of breaths and tell her, nice and calm, that I didn’t think it was right what she said to me. If she kept on, I could tell her nicely, “I don’t want to get upset” and walk away.

Every time we had this group it encouraged me more to change the old me and make a brand new person. Everyone in the group helped each other grow.

Letting It Go

Now I’m living with my dad. He doesn’t trust me yet. When I do something wrong he says I haven’t changed at all and that I’m going to end up back in jail. But I don’t get mad and start stressing because I know I’m way different from how I used to be. Instead of talking back, I walk away. And if I get angry I write, listen to music, or take a walk.

My grandma still acts the way she used to, but I’m not going to let her get me mad anymore. And I feel the same way about everyone else that puts me down. Now when people say cruel things to me, I look at them and I say to myself, “Maybe they are going through stuff and they don’t know how to express themselves like me. Or maybe they have nothing better to do.”

When I feel mad I try to remember, everything that comes to thought doesn’t have to come to voice or action. When I feel like I want to fight, I remember that you get more with the positive than you do with the negative.

These experiences from Graham Windham helped me walk away from negativity and be proud that I’m doing it. I see my future now: a bright girl accomplishing her dreams.

I want to be a singer, a poet, and a psychologist. I want to write songs and poems to let people know how far I’ve come. It was hard for me to say what I wanted to be when I was younger, but now I see clearly. And I see a girl who feels truly free, unafraid of the world.