I was raised by my mom and didn’t really know my dad. I didn’t have the best childhood and developed a distrust towards adults very earl in life. My mom had an on-and-off relationship with a guy named Chris. My siblings and I were used and abused by this guy when my mom wasn’t around. My mom treated me like an inconvenience; therefore, I didn’t think she would believe me if I told her. For years I endured this abuse. Life was depressing, I didn’t feel loved, and all around me was death. At one point, it seemed like everyone I knew was dying.

Going into high school I was very confused about my sexuality. I was struggling to figure out who I was. When I was in 11th grade, I had started to undergo hormone replacement therapy. This was the first time I felt like I was doing something for me and only me. Even then, I wasn’t completely happy. I tried to commit suicide when I was in 11th grade. I left school, packed my bags and left home for a new start, and I changed my name to “Star.” I shared an apartment with another transgender person who I observed and tried to learn from.

My life was messed up. I self-medicated to feel and show love while filming. To me that was the only way I could portray that emotion.

I was never around Christian values, but I knew that my grandmother prayed and went to church. Personally I didn’t know anything about God. I remember saying prayer sometimes, but I didn’t know where or to whom those prayers were going.

The day I truly called on God, I was sitting under a bridge depressed and hurting; I just wanted my life to end at that moment, didn’t care how it ended, just as long as it ended. I sat by myself with one bar on my cell phone, I had no drinking water, no clothes but the ones I left home wearing, no food and I just felt sick. I started crying uncontrollably and hitting myself; all the while asking God to help me.  I cried myself to sleep under that bridge. I woke up the next morning with a mission to find nearest church that was open. I ended up at First Baptist Church and met a little frill lady who sat down with me and listen as I cried and talked. She showed me a folder with names of agencies that offered Christian based programs.

On a cold December morning of 2017, I walked into the front door of the Durham Rescue Mission and turned over my own self will; and in a small office off from the chapel, I surrendered my body, my mind, and all that I was in repentance to God. Because of God, I learned how to be a caring human being, an attentive student, a better son, brother, and uncle. I learned to walk different, talk different, to be a gentleman, a loyal Christian, more alert and on point, and how to manage my money.

Sometimes I look at my life as a puzzle with a thousand pieces that seem to take forever to put together. I don’t like to be that, but it is. My grandmother once told me that, “water doesn’t do nothing but rust iron and keep scales on fish.” the older I got, the more sense it made to me. She was telling me to grow up, and I could do anything or be somebody through Christ Jesus.