Hello, I’m Sabi, that’s short for Sabina though because of my past I don’t feel comfortable going by that name, it’s my mother’s name and it ties me to her but it was the name my oppressor gave me. Mom had planned out a beautiful indigenous name for me from my native tongue Nahuatl…
This story comes with a heavy content warning of sexual, domestic and political violence.
My father was a colonializer
My mom just turned 72, I take care of her everyday, sharing the intimate details of what that means and looks like isn’t something I’m comfortable doing. It’s enough to say she has dementia and the main tie to my ancestry is forever lost in snippets of confusion. She raised me to know, I am from Turtle Island even if the English colonializers want to segregate me from the natives of northern Turtle Island, Mom taught me truth.
Born in so called Nicaragua, Mom lost my grandma at the tender age of 10, or so; marked with abandonment her teens were a sea of abuse from her siblings as the family scapegoat and the target of her father’s alcoholic rage and pain. Some years later she met my father.
He was from the same town, displaced because of his alcoholic mother who left him for dead. A story for another time. He grew up on the other coast of Nica and searching for his real family he found Mom.
The discard cycle started as soon as their civil union was legal. Mom’s father refused to help her escape when my father physically abused her the first time basically telling her, “you made your bed, now lie in it.” Some time after that a war broke out in Nica. So called “communists” took over the government. My entire childhood I remember fireworks filling Mom with terror and I watched the strongest woman I know trembling in fear.
My father’s parents had a farm and were branded bourgeois because my father’s aunt worked for the president as a nurse. Mom faced immense hunger eating a candy bar here and there, having curfews set on the civilians as people who would look for food (that wasn’t hoarded by the invading group) at night they would get gunned down or worse if they were caught.
At some point some soldiers and their wives confiscating Mom’s home, they didn’t kick her out, she was forced to feed them and clean up them, guns pointed in her face, forced to sleep on the floor and more. Mom shared a lot of stories about them but I don’t remember them well. I barely remember what they did to my father.om shared a lot of stories about abuse she endured in childhood tok but they’re not as relevant to this story. The soldiers moved on sometime later.
Eventually, there was a wedding in the Cayman Islands, my father’s cousin, thus my parents migrated to Coasta Rica to escape Nica and became displaced to keep themselves alive. Years later while my father sent in paper work to be “resident aliens” in the so called US my brother was born. Two years later I was born, and he (the father) stole Mom’s name and branded me with it.
Mom didn’t want to leave Nica, but my father wanted to come to so called US where his adoptive parents escaped leaving him and Mom behind. Mom was homesick stuck in a land with a language she learned in secondary school but it wasn’t her language, it wasn’t her people, it wasn’t her home. You see there they didn’t alienate her for an accent like tjey do here but ot still hurt her to not be with our people.
My father beat her, raped her, emotionally abused her and she went through everything you could possibly image while there. Many times she wanted to escape, defending herself from his drunk rage some nights with a kitchen knife in her nightstand. She didn’t want my brother and I to go hungry. As a femme immigrant in Cayman Islands she wasn’t allowed to work. Actually, side note I don’t have citizenship there because I’m a femme child of an immigrant, my brother does though.
My father’s oppression didn’t stop with Mom. Everytime she was a mother to me his deep unhealed mother wounds would bleed out as rage causing my mother pain and harm physically, emotionally, mentally. We had what we needed as far as food and shelter. My brother could do no wrong but he also got hurt and my father loved emotionally manipulating Mom with my brother.
Everything got worse when I was 5 and we left Cayman for the US. A lot of my father’s darkness went unseen by my brother and I in Cayman but in the US, as poverty started seeping into our lives and my father assimilated into white supremacy to try and gain more money, my father’s darkness grew like a pestilence that destroyed him. I remember thinking aliens abducted my parents as they felt unrecognizable.
A lot of it is vague but I get snippets here and there when I get emotional flashbacks and suddenly remember moments like my father holding a pistol to my mother’s head in front of me in our two story townhouse that we rented when I was 6… Later he said he was joking and Mom reluctantly agreed. The most disturbing part is I forgot that moment for at least 33 years but some random event in present day brought that up.
For many white comfy people thw economy was great in 1989 but for us we were struggling. Somehow my father managed to get a mortgage, forever chasing the “American Dream.” I still remember my brother and I protesting the move from Cayman to Tampa, FL but my father insisted on opportunities.
He forced Mom to work, she hated it being unable to see her children, the only family she had after her abuser forced her to be displaced. She did everything to go behind his back to get my emotional and creative needs met. She’d buy fabric to make sure I could be in choirs, she’d convince my father to buy me paint sets and drawing supplies, she’d take off work to be at my school concerts… Everything she could to support me. She also kept telling me that the poison my father was spewing into my heart about me was a lie.
He Left In a Flurry
I was 16, Feb 2000 when my father said he was divorcing Mom. My brother acted relieved, he even said good riddance behind his back. Mom and I were feeling safer. He said he’d leave in a month, two weeks later sibling and I found our home half gutted as my father stole half our stuff. A few weeks later we discovered that father’s great escape came with three months of unpaid bills, two mortgages, phone, cable, car insurance, homeowners insurance, water, lights I forget what else all left unpaid. Sure it’s easy to get a down-payment for an apartment when you steal your wife’s income and also leave your children for dead.
He promised to help with food and paying the second mortgage. Instead he stole Mom’s money from their joint account saying it was wages from his second job, wages he had promised to leave for my brother and I.
My brother worked to pay for his video games and anime. My father had given him a car at 16. He graduated high school easily and was going to college when we were forced to lose our house to foreclosure because Mom had just gotten out of thw mountain of debt my father left us when he decided to refuse to pay the second mortgage cause Mom got her own separate checking account.
2000-2009 I had my brother as my new abuser. I graduated high school and a year later while in college I got my first job to help Mom pay bills. She never asked, I wanted to help. My brother worked still through college but didn’t help keep us fed. He graduated college and got a job making gross $42240/yr he got a new car, paid it off in three months, and would get upset if Mom asked him to go slow on eating the food we couldn’t afford.
His girlfriend at the time was pushing him to help more with finances saying he needed to grow up, his solution was to abandon us after buying a Playstation 3 the same day I had to sell my friend’s piano to make rent or face eviction.
He kept having Mom pay his car insurance long after leaving hiding how much money he was making from her but having gloated to me. She thought she was helping her son get on his feet his first few months on his own.
That same year Mom’s hours at her job got cut in half. My college had several budget cuts and I lost my work study job and a few months later while working as a cashier at a pharmacy 36 hrs a week, taking 18 credit hours, and doing my preinternship for music education and prepping for my recital I had my first panic attack on the way to work. My CPTSD was in full swing though I had no clue what it was.
You see before then I had been fighting my CPTSD but I thought it was depression from allergy meds and later anxiety from allergy meds and I thought it was just life. I started having my first issues with cognitive function, severe brain fog and with an abusive vocal coach I was having deep trauma responses so badly that it didn’t matter that I studied and practiced my ass off, to her I didn’t bother.
I would go from knowing an aria like the back of my hand with a few muddy passages or some errors here and there to feeling like I had never seen or heard the thing in my life. I had maybe 1 meal a day and I thought my cognitive issues were from hunger. Mom was scared I’d have a heart attack and forced me to quit my cashier job.
Then we got news that my aunt had cancer, untreated endometriosis. A lady at the church we went to insisted on paying for us to go see her, I didn’t want to miss my recital or mess up school so I didn’t go say goodbye. The next month, Jan 2010 I found out Obama had passed a law that ripped away my financial aid and I had to drop out of college because it was too much money. With my lack of income and credit I couldn’t get more loans and Mom’s credit had been fucked up by my father years prior.
So I started searching for full time work but since I had no license because of 9/11 I had to rely on the bus system and there were countless jobs I couldn’t do because I couldn’t get there and Mom didn’t make enough to provide rides for me and keep her job (which she started work at 5 AM). In Dec 2012 I found a full-time job at a financial institution that I could get too very easily. I was planning on saving up funds to go back to school and finish my degree.
Spring 2013 Mom got laid off. Unable to find jobs in her industry (seamstressing) except for places that paid shit wages she was forced to retire. I’ve been the primary breadwinner ever since. July 2015 my financial institution job destroyed my shoulders permanently. I lost my ability to write by hand. I lost my ability to draw and paint and I was struggling to play guitar.
I’m not sure how long it had been then that Mom and I were living off of 1 meal a day, I honestly can’t remember when that started. It was before my brother left but I’m not sure how long. The thing is in 2015 with the immense shoulder pain, the lack of food and the struggle to cover the bills I was having severe migraines several times a month, heavy periods that left me too weak to walk and I started missing more and more work and they kept finding random ways to fire me after I had a credit card through them.
Nov 11, 2015 I started my vlog channel on YouTube shortly after uploading a song to share with one of my abusers (I call him TAM, we met Sept 2015), and a week later or so I got fired. SabiLewSounds was born and I couldn’t share a video without severe trauma responses. I think I’ve talked about this everywhere, but I know what it takes to grow a channel on YouTube or Twitch or Instagram or anywhere but my CPTSD makes it dangerous.
My daily fight with suicidal ideation had started long before and it was always in coporate slave jobs that it was the worst knowing there was so much pain in the world but I couldn’t even feed myself much less the homeless folx saw everywhere. I felt powerless stuck in an white walled room scanning paper work for loan sharks and having to rely on “community” just to try and connect to people who had less than me.
I was part of a church from 2009-2015 that claimed to center the poor and the marginalized but I wasn’t allowed to help anyone because I was without a car, without a license, far away in proximity and keeping a roof over my mother’s head, my bunny’s head and my head. Everyday I felt disgustingly selfish and useless. I had no reliable internet at home or at all for a big chunk of that. It was too much money.
After I was fired and out of that church I would feel a speck of power when I’d share a video on YouTube, making it, pouring my heart and soul out for creative folx hoping to help them feel empowered to share music and art and everything with small beginnings as the culture of “internet influencer” was growing and the idea of having a fuzzy camera was considered demonic. I had seen it my whole life, creative folx being told they’re not enough, their work was trash because it didn’t meet some phantom standard.
I wanted to end that. However, when I would feel the rush of joy and love and hope I would immediately get crushed by the voices of my oppressors telling me I’m lazy, selfish, self important, foolish, naive, a child, stupid… On and on… Because I felt my creations were starving my family to death as I was struggling to find another job and the work it takes to grow a platform was killing my through trauma responses and shame.
Nov 11, 2016 I got a job at a pet crematory just barley making enough to skirt by on a deep soul search to find out why I was so “toxic” according to TAM. I discovered what CPTSD entails and I found my answers to everything I have been fighting long after my father left me. His oppression running through my neuro pathways he had colonialized my soul to snub me out.
I fight him, my brother, church folx, and TAM and others after them everyday, even as I write this. I’m buried in the poverty my father left on my family 24.8 years ago. That’s a condensed story of my life, my mother’s life and everything that lead us to today, a homeless caretaker for an elderly disabled indigenous woman and their Emotional Support Bunny. I can’t even think of everything to explain how the global majority struggle like this everywhere on colonialized lands and we have been long before Trump or Kamala were even born.
We have no family here, the family we have elsewhere are dead or poor as well. Decades of friends are trails of betrayal and abuse because I didn’t know my worth until I discovered my light and voice. I was told to kill dreams. I was told I was nothing. I was told I am worthless. I was told I deserve death. I was told I’m a burden. I was told I’m too much. I was told I’m not trying hard enough. I was told I have been doing everything wrong. I was told the only way to keep my loved ones safe is to disintegrate and become ashes in the wind.
As they burned me down, my core remained. From the dust of their shame I rise.
