The Bittersweet Success Story of a Lowly Checotah High School Reject
*Please see disclaimer at the bottom. “Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.” -Phillip Yancy
Hindsight is twenty-twenty; I really never understood how much weight this statement carried until I began to look back on some of the past experiences of my life. To most eyes, this will be the average pity party story; I don’t intend for this to be that type of message though. Instead, this is intended to be a story of perseverance, humility and overcoming the bullying and home abuse that stacked the odds higher than I could see. I started school at Checotah Public Schools in Checotah, OK as a preschooler in Miss Duvall’s class and left when I was in the tenth grade. My years at Checotah from start to finish were miserable; if I wasn’t busy being the laughing stock of my classmates, my teachers were filling in for them. Out of respect, they will remain nameless, because this is not your standard bash and trash article.
I wasted my primary and secondary school career trying to fit in and be someone I wasn’t to please others. Even now, I am told by others whom I am aquainted with that sometimes I try too hard to prove myself. Every day, I experienced tremendous amounts of terror from my classmates. I was constantly put down and stepped on by many different people at school; to the point where I first contemplated suicide in the Seventh Grade. If my classmates weren’t reminding me of how much of a loser I was, my teachers were informing me that I was never going to succeed at anything. By the time I left the Sixth Grade, I had adopted a personal rule that I never went more than twenty feet from the recess teacher on the playground. I had become a pro at staying in the teachers’ line of sight in the classroom. More often than not, I was written off as a teachers’ pet, but it helped me survive.
By eighth grade, I had completely stopped caring about anyone or anything that crossed my path. I was a soulless pit with a burnt out light bulb; I didn’t care about anyone because I felt that no one cared about me. I had two good friends, Mariah and Haley. Mariah was always there for me when I needed someone to talk to. Haley had some severe mental disabilities and I was convinced that that was the only reason she liked me; at first I refused to return her friendship, but we quickly became great friends.
Ninth grade, I was so far gone that I had completely lost my grasp on reality. I got into three fights that year, I thought of suicide oftern, picked up a very foul vocabulary and consequently been suspended for four weeks. In my Algebra 1 class, I actually had another student tell me, “Quit smiling, you are not allowed to smile because you have no friends.” On another occasion, the assistant high school principal sat down with me and my mother after I had got jumped in the alleyway of the old high school. He sat right in front of me and told my mother, “There are two kinds of people in this world, chickens and ducks. Ducks waddle into the pond and eventually they swim because that is what they are built for. Chickens go to the pond and wade into the water and their feathers get heavy so they sit down and this leads to them drowning. Audery…” he indicated at me with his rolled up newspaper, “is a chicken and she will not succeed.” At this my mother stood up, sent me out of the room, I hadn’t even shut the door before she began screaming at him. I moved away from Checotah in April of 2009, my sophomore year. I had doubted that anyone really ever wondered what had become of me, I didn’t really care.
I experienced a lot of emotional and physical abuse at home, I’m proud to overcome that ordeal. We grew up pretty poor by American standards, we often lived on po peoples food such as ramen noodles and other things. My moms’ depression was mixed with a really bad case of bi-polar disorder. I went to live with my dad my sophomore year. Though I enjoyed my time getting to know my little siblings. Their mother, Leota Troyer made my life a living hell the way evil stepmothers do in children’s stories. While I lived under the same roof as her, she was so narcissistic that she wouldn’t even take me to the hospital when I broke my ankle. After a day of her forcing me to treat a broken ankle with over the counter remedies, my dad came home off the road and finally took me to the ER. I was set to be in a cast for a few months. After I got home and my dad left, Leota decided to take my temporary cast off before I ever got a permanent cast put on. This resulted in my permenant disfiguration. I moved back to Oklahoma with my mom 6 mos before graduation from Beggs High School in 2011.
I enrolled in Connors State College for two years, while I was there, I served in over ten officer positions, held multiple jobs and maintained a decent grade point average. I also found Jesus; I rededicated my life to Christ in October of 2011 at a statewide collegiate Christian conference known as Momentum. I was elected by a delegation of my peers as one of two Junior College Representatives to the Student Advisory Board of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. I was elected as one out of seven students statewide to represent the interests of my fellow students to the regents. I helped write and interpret higher education laws for students at the bi-annual congress that is held by Oklahoma Student Government Association. I then moved into the Director of Communications position for the Oklahoma Student Government Association. I graduated from Connors quickly, and I’m a senior at East Central University about to graduate with my Bachelors of Science in Political Science with a minor in Legal Studies.
I often think back to those days and the thought sometimes creeps back to me. How most of my classmates are married and pregnant, or pregnant and not married, in jail, or college dropouts. Occasionally, I will begin to compare myself with them and try to convince myself of how much better I am than them because I overcame everything they threw at me. I am no better than anyone else; the self-righteous game is the devil’s advocate. Looking back on all of this, I am overwhelmed with a sense of humility at the thought of how much God was moving in my life when I thought He had abandoned me. Now that I live my life by faith in the Son of God who loves me, I realize that I never was alone. My success is not really mine, but it’s all His; and I will live to glorify Him forever. As for my future plans, so far, I intend to pursue a graduate degree in Student Affairs, I want to help college students succeed and I want to mentor others with similar experiences to mine. My calling lies within higher education, college ministry.
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This story was originally published on October 4th, 2014. Many things that are in this article have changed and I plan to write a follow-up soon.
