Transcription:

Hey, you all Sandi Savage here. How are you doing today? Oh my gosh. It is a fantastic day over here! How are you doing today? I am having a fantastic day and I hope you all are too. Gosh, listen. So if you haven’t figured out what I am doing right now,

that’s fine. Cause you know, I’ve been doing a lot of stuff. I’ve been this week, reading a little bits and pieces from the book that I’m writing – my memoirs and I wanted to share that with you guys. I know that in the next few weeks, I’m going to be talking about some other things like how to build resilience in your life and how to overcome certain situations and that kind of thing but I wanted to start out by giving you all, some little snapshots of the book. Now, if you go back and you watch the first video that I did about the book, make sure that your kids aren’t in the room and the next, the next one that I put out is fine. I was talking about my grandmother and, and just how awesome she was in my life today.

I’m actually going to talk about a pretty dark period of my life. That was really challenging. Hey, you know what I always say, get the kids out, get the kids out because this little snippet that I’m going to read happened in a time of my life are really was too young to have to deal with.

I was only 19 at the time and it really started off at a trajectory for me in my life. So I wanted to share a part of the book. I’m going to read this part of the book for you all and remember get those kids out. And I just, I really hope that these, by hearing the story of someone who went through so much in her lifetime,but it’s my story that I’m, that I’m telling you about that it gives you hope in the middle of whatever circumstances you’re in. That you can overcome it. You can get to the other side of it. You can have a life that is full and abundant and joyful, even though you’ve gone through some really challenging and hard things in your life.

I’m going to pull it up here and make sure that you can hear me. I, if you can hear me, can you post in the comments and let me know for sure that you can hear me. I know Stacy said, where can we get your book?

I hope to be done by next year with it. It’s something that I’ve been working on for a long time. And you know, in the book process, it’s edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit. So I just want to make sure that you all can hear me. Can you hear me great. Stacy says she can hear me.

So I will just read. This is a little section. Now there’s a section before this, that explains a little bit of how I got here, where I’m about ready to read. So I condensed it a little bit in the first few sentences. So it would make sense today, but here we go.

It was the early nineties. And a few weeks before Thanksgiving, I had been working at a Gogo bar in Ohio and was looking at being homeless. I’d been living with a few friends and having an affair with one of them. His wife of course hated me and with good cause. And one night after drinking 151 until I almost died, she kicked me out. Then I remembered, Hey, I have a friend from the bar that old biker dude.

I had his number. And I thought, for sure, he would be nice to me and give me a place to stay while I figured out things. So I called him, he gave me directions to his house and he said, he’d call a cab and pay for it. Once it dropped me off. When I arrived at his place, it was an apartment above his parents’ house and it looked clean enough,

I drug my little suitcase in that I had hastily packed and looked around at my new surroundings. It was basically a kitchen and a bedroom and a bathroom. The first few days I was adjusting to living in this man’s apartment. And he was respectful of my space. I was upset not knowing what my next step would be. And he seemed to understand I was in no way wanting any kind of relationship with him.

He drove me to and from work and I kept dancing and a few days into my stay his temperament changed. He let me know in no uncertain terms that if he was going to let me stay any longer, I needed to be his girlfriend and all meanings of the term and that night he climbed on top of me and forced me to have sex with him.

In my mind, I agreed to play along with it to act as if I was his girlfriend, but I started to develop a plan. I started stashing away as much money as I could. All the while making this older gentleman believed that I was falling for him. So he didn’t kick me out of the house. It began a pattern pattern of behavior.

For me, that was survival sex. We’ll get more into that later. So Thanksgiving rolled around and in my family, it was always a dress up scenario. And I was expected to go downstairs and have Thanksgiving dinner with his family, put on a pair of slacks and a sweater.

And when he got home, after picking up the bottle of wine,he walked in the door and said to me, Oh no, you can’t wear that your mine, which means you need to wear a black your shirt like me. I think it was his way of rebelling against his family. Making us look like some rough gang crew. I slowly changed into a short sleeve tee shirt and some jeans and some black boots.

As we met our way downstairs, we walked into his parents’ house and it was nice. The table was set for dinner and I felt really out of place. I held back tears. So the whole meal and at the end of it, I went back upstairs and told him I was leaving. He in turn, walked outside and screamed at the top of his lungs and pain as if we had desperately fallen in love with me and could part with me.

It was so confusing. When he came back to the kitchen with tears running down my face, I told him I’d stay. And then I devised my exit plan internally. He started locking me in the house unless I was at work and not letting me use the phone for fear, I would leave. Then one day I saw my chance. He was beginning to trust me.

And he went to the store without me. I knew I didn’t have long before he returned. And I had gotten one of my coworkers to get me a phone card, to make a long distance call. I had one person that I thought I could call Jimmy. Jimmy was a person in my life that ended up being my second husband. He is now since passed.

And I called him in that moment of desperation, not knowing what I was getting myself into. So I called Jimmy, Jimmy had gotten back together with his wife and he was trying to sort through things with her, but I wasn’t sure who else to call. I was positive. My family would be so mad to see where I ended up and I didn’t want to drag them into it.

Looking back. I wish I had called them. I jumped on the phone and thankfully Jimmy answered. I quickly explained I was being held captive and I needed to escape and leave town. I asked if I could come to North Carolina and stayed with he and his wife until I figured out my next move. And he said, yes, neither one of us in that moment thought about how his wife would receive that information.

But I was desperate. I had to get out and he said he would buy me a Greyhound bus ticket and put it in my name for the next day. And I would just need to get to the bus station. And then he would pick me up after I landed in North Carolina. So my plan was set. By this time I had accumulated almost $400.

So I would be able to pay for a cab to get me to the bus station. That morning it snowed. It snowed really hard. I didn’t care though. I knew if I didn’t leave, then something could happen to me and I would never be found. So when, when he’d left and locked the door behind him, I quickly packed my suitcase, leaving a disposable camera that had pictures from the past summer accidentally and waited until I couldn’t hear his bike. Then I broke out a window and crawled out of it and made a run for it through the snow I ran until I was a few streets away dragging my suitcase behind me and stopped to catch my breath and get my bearings. I was out, I couldn’t believe it.

I called a cab from a payphone to pick me up at the corner to get me to the best station. Thankfully Jimmy had came through and had a ticket waiting there for me. I could only hope he would be at the other end of the trip to pick me up. Night rolled around and it was time to load up the bus.

As we pulled out of the station, I had a passing thought that I was free. I was rolling down the highway to freedom little did I know I was rolling into another type of hell.

So that is a little section of a chapter of book that I’ve been working on for a really long time. I think it’s important for us to get our stories out there to let people know that they can have hope in the middle of whatever circumstance they’re in.

You can move forward and you can build again. So listen, I hope that you all have a fantastic weekend. I’ll be back on Monday and I cannot wait to share with you a few more things then. Okay. Have a great weekend. Bye.