People have always seen me as strong. I know what they see. I know what I have endured, what I have continued to do, and why they recognize strength in me. I can understand all of that and still never have truly fully believed it. Because there was nothing brave about me. There was nothing different. I had just become very well adapted to surviving.
I have endured so many different traumas that I sometimes feel as though I have lived forty-five different lives. None came with a pass to go back, though. I had to figure out how to live the next one while carrying everything that had happened in the lives before it.
For years, I told myself that everything I was enduring was teaching me something I would eventually need. All of these experiences were giving me the skills to do something great—to become someone great. I could not tell you what that would look like. But the possibility gave me something to hold onto when I needed a reason to keep going.
For so long, my energy went toward my kids, my family. That love is still there. They were my life. They still are my life. When I could no longer put that energy into our daily life together, I needed somewhere for it to go. Creating something else did not mean I wanted that part of my life to be over. I still want this to be the one time I get a pass to go back.
When I created this Foundation, I was living inside a contradiction. I needed somewhere to put my love, my effort, and everything I was learning. I also needed to help myself survive yet another ongoing and devastating collapse.
In my life, surviving trauma had become normal. Each next event seemed worse and more profound than the one before, until eventually, the worst of everything I could have imagined had become my actual reality.
That is not a stretch of the imagination. That is not hyperbole. That is the sequence of events I lived through. I lost my mom when I was a child. I endured abuse from my dad and immediate family throughout my life. I lost my life with my kids as an adult. I have known a depth of rejection I struggle to put into words. I have been left with no one, nothing, nobody to turn to.
And while I was trying to understand how I could feel so completely abandoned by the world, I began to recognize how long I had been abandoning myself. Since I was a child, I had been looking outside myself for something that would finally convince me I was worth loving.
I cannot give you a perfectly tidy explanation of my motives in trying to change that story for myself. Maybe I wanted to prove to myself that I was good enough. Maybe I still wanted to prove it to other people. Maybe I needed something to occupy my mind so I did not want to die every day. Honestly, it was probably a little of all of it.
What I do know is that I began creating things because I NEEDED THEM. I needed resources, understanding, and something I could actually use to help myself survive my own mind. I had gone through things no one should have to endure in any lifetime, let alone without family, friends, or even the resources I needed.
Sidenote: this kind of reality was what I would have called a normal Tuesday.
There was a point when I realized that other people shared similar stories. Then I saw how what I was creating could help someone else.
I thought about the person everyone calls strong while never asking what it costs them to keep going. The person who can explain what someone else should do but struggles to do it in their own life. The person who needs a second to breathe before they can even begin to imagine anything beyond getting through the day.
I know that person. I have been that person. In some ways, I still am.
I have also spent much of my life seeing potential in other people and trying to help them recognize it. Sometimes I kept pouring myself into that effort long after it was hurting me. I am learning that believing in someone cannot do the work of believing for them. They have to encounter their own capability in a way they can recognize and carry forward.
“Be the light that shows others what they are capable of.”
— J.Michelle
That is the goal of the Jennae Michelle Foundation.
I want to help make those encounters possible: through resources, education, creative expression, meaningful experiences, and opportunities people can use to discover something about themselves.
Their effort belongs to them. Their choices belong to them. Whatever they build from an opportunity belongs to them, too.
I do not need you to look at my life and decide how impressive I am. I want you to have a moment in your own life when you can recognize how amazing you are—and something useful to help you act on that recognition.
I believe in leaving things better than I found them. That belief became part of what I wanted to do with the things I had first created to help myself. Someone else should be able to find what they need without having to build it alone while struggling to survive.
A second to breathe. A moment to pause. An opportunity to discover what is possible for them. Room for joy, love, laughter, and hope… the only things that matter in life.
Hope is so hard to cling to alone. But one day I was able to see that hope has always been more than enough.
J.MichelleFounder, Jennae Michelle Foundation