"Daddy isn’t coming home". I hear this as I lay in the morning wearing my penguin pajamas on my mother’s bed surrounded by my three siblings. My eleven year old mind cannot fathom what that meant but I knew it was serious because it was the first time I had ever seen my mother cry because she saved her crying for after we went to bed. My family went through traumatic emotional abuse at the hand of my bipolar father. and my mom finally kicked him out and filed a restraining order. This one day changed my entire middle school and high school experience. Instead of attending Halloween dances, I was meeting with my own lawyer or testifying in court. Throughout their three year divorce I spent days at the Center for Child Protection as strangers decided my future. The next year I switched to St. Andrew’s where I knew no one and no one knew my story. I was shy, isolated, and felt guilty of my past so I kept it a secret from everyone. In 8th grade I was forced to audition for the musical “Footloose”. I…show more content… Music became the one thing I looked forward to in my life and the only constant. No matter what my parents were fighting about, music was always there. Music became the father I never saw and the mother who was desperately trying to rebuild herself. It took years to reconstruct the confidence I lost after spending years blaming myself for my family’s turmoil, but the satisfaction and pride I felt singing made it easier. The peak of my transition into a confident young adult was my performance in “Sweeney Todd” during junior year. After always being the “callback girl” who never got the part, I got one of the three female leads. I never thought that playing a schizophrenic prostitute would be the most comfortable I had ever felt with myself. After a year as a lead in Sweeney Todd and travelling to National Cathedral with Select Choir, my life was finally back on
