Mariella

Mariella has spent most of her life living in her head. It’s a place where the shy, usually soft-spoken, diminutive young woman with stunning crystal blue eyes has dreamed of knights, castles and princesses, and of one day a prince charming sweeping her off her feet. Like Edward and Vivian in “Pretty Woman.”

Mariella’s life, though, has been anything but a fairytale.

Her journey has been a disjointed collection of experiences, punctuated, she now knows, by anxiety and depression as a child and young teen. More diagnoses surfaced later of Bipolar II and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – determinations, she says, that came after a rape that left her descending into promiscuity and, for a short time, life as a sex worker.

The revelations of the mental illnesses have helped her, she says, because they explain, at least in part, “why I’ve done the things I’ve done. Things started to make sense.”

But the melding of all the pieces of Mariella is still a work in progress. She says she’s often felt like a tumbleweed, “blowing wherever the wind takes me.” She says she’s also felt like Athena in Aphrodite’s body; one part the virgin Greek goddess of defense, wisdom and crafts and the other part the Greek goddess of lust, love, beauty, pleasure and passion.

“The best way I can put it,” she says, “is I know I’m not O.K., but I’m O.K. with that. I’m getting help and I’m working toward getting better every day.”

Mariella was a quiet tomboy growing up – something of a loner who rarely spoke. She remembers peers in the fourth grade counting how many words she spoke on any given day.

She read a lot, collected bugs, and moved often with her mother, adoptive father and younger sister. She’s not really sure why the family moved so much. She says her biological father, meanwhile, was a drug addict who wasn’t around and spent considerable time in prison. She refers to him as a sperm donor.

When she was seven years old, she says, her parents showed her a picture of her father and told her: “Don’t go with this man if he ever shows up. He’s going to hurt you.”

In high school, she was a cheerleader, volleyball player and good student, and always had a smile on her face. But she never felt happy. People told her she was pretty – and she is. But she never saw herself that way and longed for people to know who she was on the inside.

She had little understanding, she says, of being objectified, but she was. A voyeur watching her at a motel pool when she was 10, asking her if she had starting shaving, if she had had her first period. Peers calling her a whore long before she was sexually active. A much older relative making inappropriate comments to her when she was a teenager, including asking her if she drew pictures of nude people and leering at Facebook pictures of her wearing a bikini.

She had a boyfriend in high school but discovered he had been cheating on her. After they broke up, she began having random sexual encounters. Revenge, she thought, for her boyfriend’s deceit.

At 19 and a high school graduate, she went on a vacation to Texas with some girlfriends. She and one of the girlfriends arranged a Tinder double-date one night and when they returned from drinking and dancing, Mariella fell asleep. A short time later, her date, a military man, raped her.

“I kept saying, ‘Stop, stop, stop’ and trying to push him off, but he was very forceful,” she says. “When he was done, I just started crying and tried to convince myself that it was consensual.”

She eventually went to a hospital, underwent the difficult rape kit process, and was considering her next moves when her rapist’s superiors visited her and convinced her to not press charges, telling her she would not want to go through a trial. They promised that her attacker would be discharged from the military. She doesn’t know if that ever happened.

What did happen is that Mariella dove deeper into sexual activity, by her count engaging in 22 consensual liaisons. She also decided to take control of her sexuality or so she thought – and earning money at the same time – by looking for Sugar Daddy’s who turned out in her words to be Splenda Daddy’s. She also earned money sexting online. That was much safer emotionally. “You can close the laptop,” she says, “and that world goes away.”

But it didn’t really go away. Although she tried to numb herself against her sexual activities, her encounters chipped away at her flagging self-esteem. “It became,” she says, “a self-harm thing without realizing it until later.”

In time, sex-related activities became gross and demeaning for Mariella, so much so that she became nauseated in the past year when two men, uninvited, kissed her. In one instance, she hurried to the bathroom and dry-heaved.

These days, at the age of 22, she has traded sex work for jobs as a waitress and clothing retail salesperson. She has earned an associate degree in business administration. She is trying to stay focused on a better life, even amidst struggles with anxiety and depression that hover despite taking prescribed medications.

She is easily distracted – something she likens to a butterfly fluttering from flower or flower – and jots notes to herself in real time about what people say and what she reads. She might forget otherwise. She also works hard to find a middle ground between a friendly, eager desire to please anyone and quick-to-anger explosions when she holds too much inside. The anger, she says, is akin to dropping Mentos in soda.

She changes her hair color often to suit her moods. Shades of blue, purple, pink and orange, among them. The only color she’s never used is green.

“I try to stay strong,” she says, “but it feels like every day is a battle. Every day is a genuine battle for my life. I feel like at any second it can all be ripped away from me. It’s hard not to live in that constant anxiety. On some level, I don’t think it will ever go away. I hope that it does, though. I try to wake up every day choosing happiness and a purpose to be alive.”

To help her stay on that path, she paints and crafts, mostly flowers because they make her happy and help her find order in the midst of chaos. She even has a large, colorful tattooed garland of flowers and leaves draped over her right shoulder.

“They are all,” she says, “my unique flowers in wonderland.”

It’s a place she still visits when she can.

Written by: Rick Farrant