She was a self-proclaimed daddy’s girl. Always had been.

 

But by the time she was four, the title had worn off.

 

It subsided around the same time her dad started abusing her, with events that would push her life story in an entirely new direction. She would end up living with eight different families by the time she turned 18, and would go to eleven different schools.

She would live without a home to go home to at 14, and would attempt to commit suicide at five. Despite all of this, the last word that should be used to describe Kim is “weak.”

 

The first thing you’ll notice about Kim is her grin. It’s illuminating, and she wears it often, usually accompanied by her contagious laugh. She’s outgoing, no doubt about it.

 

But it wasn’t always that way. She had to learn to make friends easily when transferring schools so often.

 

“I moved quite a bit, and haven’t really been able to stay in one place,” Kim says. “I had to have a really outgoing personality, because, you know, no one wants to have no friends in a place that they don’t know. So that’s why I’m outgoing. It’s just a coping mechanism.” 

 

When she was just 13, she and her brother were taken from her parents and put in a foster home.

 

“I had gone to school and the counselors had seen the bruises and called CPS. So I went to a foster home in Fowlerville with a lady who was physically abusive to one of her foster kids,” she says. “That, and she ended up telling the court that my brother had sexually harassed me, and he never did, but they split us up. So then I was in a foster home all by myself.”

 

Kim wrote a letter to the court about the foster parent abusing one of her foster kids, and when the woman found it, she kicked Kim out of the home. She found the second foster home was better, but she was still living with strangers.

 

“The easiest way to explain a foster home is that you’re basically living in a house with eight people you don’t know.”

 

Three months after moving into the home, the court moved her back in with her dad.

 

“And of course, no one can change in like, 8 months. I mean, my dad was still my dad, and he was still abusive and manipulative,” Kim says.

 

Six months after moving back in, her dad kicked her out. And at just 14 years old, Kim was homeless.

 

It became a back-and-forth game of tug-of-war, where Kim would move in with a neighbor, move back with her dad, get kicked out again. She was changing homes constantly and never knew where she would end up. Never knew whether or not her dad would welcome her back into his home or not.

 

“I’ve lived with 8 different families my entire life, and so it was always something new, and after you do it a while, it becomes normal. Which is really sad to say, but it does,” she says. “Being 14, that’s not something you should have to worry about. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

 

Soon, Kim began to suffer from these pressures.

 

“I just remember being really stressed-out all the time. I would get sick a lot because I would just have so much stress not knowing what to do, not really being able to handle all that.”

 

It wasn’t the first time Kim had felt like that. The stress and fear were challenges she faced daily, and they seemed to overtake her life.

 

“It was hard. I remember I would come to school and wouldn’t want to go home, even before my dad kicked me out, and it’s just, like, fear. I lived with constant fear because I didn’t know what my dad was going to do, if he was going to kick me out. I would always go home not knowing if I had a home to go home to,” she says.

 

Kim now lives with a couple, who are pastors, who she can call family. She says they’re uplifting, but there’s still a sort of longing left by her absent parents, who she hasn’t talked to in eight months.

 

“I think the thing that makes me who I am the most is just knowing that my dad did a lot of things that sucked. Throughout my entire life. And I haven’t had the easiest life, but I haven’t had the hardest life either,” she says.

 

Kim hasn’t let her past get in her way. She’s taken her experiences and used them as inspiration.

 

“It’s just knowing that I never want anyone to go through what I went through. Because it wasn’t fun at all. I was so depressed by the age of five that I tried to commit suicide. And that’s not something a five-year-old should have to think about.”

 

Kim has 18 years of baggage to deal with. But you would never know it unless she told you. Sometimes, she finds herself putting on a happy face to mask the days and moments when her past gets the better of her.

 

“It’s really hard. Some days are worse than others, and it’s not just days, too. There are also moments that get really hard for no reason. Like the other day, I was just like, ‘Wow. Today sucks,’” she says. “It’s hard, because there’s a lot of people that can just come to school and learn, and it’s more of whether I’m emotionally capable of coming to school and [...] having my life together.”

 

But despite the bad memories, the happy faces and the longing for family, Kim doesn’t want your sympathy. She doesn’t want your pity.

 

Because the best word to describe her is “strong.”

 

“I’m one of those people who doesn’t want other people to feel sorry for me or to treat me any differently because of all of this. Yeah, it happened, it’s whatever, but I want you to treat me like you treat everyone else.”