Jacqueline meets a woman at the gym who survived sex trafficking and gave birth to three children as a result. Despite profound pain, shame, and family abandonment, the woman refused to give up and kept her children. Her story illustrates how resilience means refusing to let trauma define you.
Chapters
Girl came up to me at the gym in the Middle Eastern. She had some tattoos on her, and you can see the pain in her face, but there was also a light in her eyes. And I was about to run out. I already had my bag. And she's like, are you Jacqueline? And I'm like, yes, I'm Jacqueline. She's like, oh, my gosh, Listen, I started following Andy and I follow you. I went into the Middle East. And she's like, I got sex trafficked, and I have three kids as a result of being sex trafficked. And my family disowned me. She's like, I'm just so grateful that I get to meet you. You have no idea. You can tell that she's been through a lot of pain. You can tell that she's felt all of this failure, embarrassed, and with her body and all of these things that have go on with her. So I'm actually imagining her life as she's going through that, trying to get out of the country, trying to leave with no money, and her boys that everybody sees as a product of what happened to her that is bad. And she's like looking at like, no, these are my boys. I've gotta keep them. They're my life. And most women, a lot of people think, oh, this is the experience. It's gonna remind me of all of these bad things that I went through. No, this is not her. She didn't feel defeated at that moment. She could have taken that defeat when she went through all of that shit, and she decided not to. That was a good reason for her, and she decided not to.