Where do I start?

A close friend of mine told me: “start from the beginning”…

I grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, in a small and humble neighborhood in the south of the city. My whole life I experienced ups and downs with my family’s financial situation. Sometimes we had enough, sometimes we ended up having to “borrow water” from the neighbors. It was hard when water company would suspend the service due to non payment. When I was 12 my parents couldn’t afford to send me to school so I spent a whole year in the house, mostly on the roof staring at the people walking and watching tv. I enjoyed talking to the owners of the stores on my street during this time. I had no friends my age to go out and play with, so I made friends with the people that had stores and small businesses around the block, I was so happy! They taught me about life, mistakes, told me stories and one of them even hired me as manicure assistant.

Time passed and things got better, we moved to another neighborhood and had mesmerizing experiences for about 2 years, until I finished high school. My biggest dream was to study psychology for the same reason most do… “to help people”  however, when it was time to start college my family situation got bad again. We went back to the old house and there was no money to fund my dream, it was 2009 and the semester for Psychology was about $1,000. My family made a huge effort to help me and I started my journey, but after a year they couldn’t pay it anymore. That was it, I felt my dream was gone.

After looking around a bit I got a job at a vacations center in a small town near Bogotá. I was helping with activities for families, the experience was fun. We learned how to talk in public, direct aerobics, learned choreographies for dancing performances and became part of a community that truly believed magic was real. “Mystic” was the word we used there, it referred to doing our job out of love, putting our heart in it and not just doing it for payment, that was the greatest lesson I got from my first real job.

I was there for about a year then took some time to procrastinate life, took some jobs at libraries or call centers till I had enough to travel. I backpacked down South America for a couple months, slept at train stations, had to ask people on the street for money to eat but it  still felt like most exciting adventure in the world.

After I returned from Argentina I found myself thinking that my life was going to be a failure.  My biggest goal back then was to marry someone, have a few kids and become a housewife for the rest of my life, I killed my dreams, I killed my ambition and told myself a lie that I wasn’t good at anything. I remember dating some guy from the block, sometimes I’d go help him with his store,  I wasn’t happy in that relationship but it was the only thing I had at the time, or at least that was what I thought. He broke up with me and told me it was the best for both of us if we went in different directions, that day I felt like the only thing I had in my life was vanishing away, I felt alone, abandoned and the thoughts of not being good enough were stronger than ever. I was devastated.

No job, no relationship, no life, no future, no NADA! I felt like my life was ending. I spent weeks crying, but now I’m aware that I wasn’t sad for breaking up with him, I was devastated for realizing how miserable my life was. I had absolutely nothing to fight for, I had no goals and more than once I felt like it was time to end it all. I couldn’t see an open door, I was alone.

Out of nowhere I found in my house a book that talked about “frequency  & positive stuff” a book that talked about the law of attraction and other concepts that I wasn’t familiar with, I read a few pages and started changing little by little my outlook in life.

For some reason I ended up joining a Catholic group and started going to church every day and praying to Mary and things I’ve never done in my life, it felt good at the time and bought great things to my life. I was so involved with the church and it opened a door to go back to University, they helped me with a half scholarship and all I had to do was find the rest of the money. It was 2012 and I needed around $500 for the first semester. I still had no job, no money, but was decided to find a way to make it work.

I remembered that one time someone told me about this particular job on the internet where you can make some money typing some documents in a Notary, so I started looking at the ads in the newspaper about it. I called a few places and I was kinda shocked and scared when I realized there was no such thing as typing documents. It was  doing erotic shows on the internet for people outside Colombia. I freaked out and just hung up, being naked on the internet?, hell no! that’s not what I want to do, sounds kinda scary, then I started thinking about all the things that could go wrong if I went in that direction. I was petrified, I always saw myself as an ugly person, why would someone want to see me on the internet? why would someone pay for that? As weird as it sounds, it wasn’t a moral discomfort what was bothering me like people would expect, it was the fact that I though no one could possibly like me, after all… thinking I’m not good enough was something that I kept in my mind for many years.