Yannibeth, 19 – Bullied and Beaten

“Whenever I think about happiness I think about my family. Whenever I am with my family and we’re together and having a good time are the moments I cherish the most.”

“I did go through depression at one point in my life. I had been bullied growing up. Two reasons, one reason being I wasn’t the brightest person, so school was very tough for me. Especially, cause Spanish is my first language so I had to learn English when I was in school, and people would make fun of me because I have an accent. Another reason was because, I was sort of tougher than most girls and I was into sports a lot, so everybody thought I was lesbian. So boys would like physically beat me up, telling me ‘you’re a man  you can take it’.”

“Growing up was very hard on me and for me to love myself because I was just discouraged growing up so much by my peers. But I was able to, you know, through the gospel, actually through the Lord to be able to learn to love myself and accept who I am and be okay with who I am even though I have flaws.”  

“I feel like I would maybe change certain things I did in my life where I knew I could have chosen a different way but I decided to go with the easy route. So I’d just probably go back in time to those days and go through the tough route. Because I know that in the end that I’d be much better than it is now.”

“I want to own a non-profit organization. I want to work with people, in between either working with people that are victims of human trafficking or homelessness.”

“I just trynna make a difference and trynna help. You can just help one person and that person will help somebody else. I’d like to give back and help the world.”  

“My biggest goal is to just be somebody successful and to me, success is being happy. So for me to be happy, I want to have a family, I want to have kids and be a great mother to them and just teach them how to be good people in the messed up world, teach them that there are still kind people out there, there’s still love out there.”