We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Esperance Taylor. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Esperance below.
Esperance, sincerely appreciate your selflessness in agreeing to discuss your mental health journey and how you overcame and persisted despite the challenges. Please share with our readers how you overcame. For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.
I’ve overcome some of the many mental health issues, which I suffered without treatment for many decades in three continents. It has been a long bold journey. I owe my healing journey to finally realizing and accepting that I have experienced severe traumas and getting the courage to seek help with professional therapists.
As a victim of genocidal crimes against humanity, including sex and labor trafficking in Africa, Europe and in the USA, I am a survivor with PTSD, who discovered the benefits of therapy. Now mental health is a cause about which I am extremely passionate. Now I encourage others who suffer from mental illness to seek therapy.
One task on my healing journey was to finish writing my memoir, a project I began in secret while still in captivity with my trafficker. This work was extremely heavy and often triggering, yet it was an essential part of my healing. I was already in therapy, when I started to collaborate with co-writer, author Laura Secord. Thanks to our work on my memoir, I was able to recall many details from the abuses I’d suffered for years. These were traumas I had suppressed for decades.
As an anti-slavery activist and a survivor of PTSD, I know how western professional therapy has helped me to heal from and encouraged me to release my shame, humiliation, and guilt over my tragic past. I’ve learned to forgive and love myself. Now I want not only to survive, but to thrive.
I know how professional therapy has saved me, so on my Facebook page I post messages about mental health in order to encourage anyone who suffers from trauma to seek mental health therapy.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
First, I have a completed a memoir entitled, Re-Trafficked: A Survivor’s Story of Hope and Rebirth. Along with Laura Secord, I am struggling to find literary agent representation. My hopes and prayers are to find someone who can help me to publish this international book, which will speak to many people across the globe.
I am a skilled motivational speaker. As a survivor of modern-day slavery, both sex and labor trafficking, I began years of intense research, reading about those crimes against humanity globally, and including my own experience, and experiences of the victims I encountered in Africa, Europe, and this country, I’ve become a self-taught expert on modern slavery. I’ve spoken about my trafficking experience throughout my state. I want to to team up with other advocates around the world and help to abolish slavery today.
As a survivor of three genocides in Rwanda, I’ve given talks on Rwanda to universities, churches, and organizations across the US. Those talks on Rwanda felt extremely important to me. I want to give a face, name, voice, and dignity to more than a million of Rwandan victims of those genocides. Among those Rwandan victims were my parents, humanitarians who were assassinated during the genocide in April 1994. I see this work as part of their legacy.
Since I’ve survived the impossible and the unthinkable, I now am opening to new dreams and visions I want to achieve.
As a fashion lover, I want to become a fashion model. As a young woman I was often approached for modeling, but too traumatized and fearful. Lately I’ve been asked to model in fashion shows and photo shoots. I would love an expansion my modeling career, with a vision to inspire, encourage, and give hope to victims and survivors of modern-day slavery today around the world.
Finally, I’ve started to write a children’s book. In Rwanda we didn’t have any mental health specialists, yet Rwanda has been devastated by mental illnesses, generational traumas and addictions. Drawn from my own experiences, it is about an orphan Rwandan girl, named Ruby Umutoni, who was enslaved and suffered untreated trauma. She has attempted suicide and suffers suicidal thoughts. She befriends a gifted cat named Boubou, who is a therapist. Boubou and Ruby become best friends, and have many different adventures around the world. I love writing Boubou and Ruby’s stories. It is interesting, inspiring, and way too much fun to write. It’s encouraging, and rewarding, making me proud of myself and very happy.
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If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
A) Go to therapy: Don’t be afraid. Therapy isn’t about discovering what is wrong with you. But you must feel before you can heal. Therapy is about talking your story and learning self-love.
B) Write your story: To help you see your life, understand yourself and learn what you need to heal.
C) Add to your therapy: Things that bring you joy and health. For myself these are: exercising, eating healthy, writing, reading, resting, praying, art and fashion.
Combined these have an impact positively on your healing journey. Over time result I got my life, health, hopes, dreams and world vision back.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
As a French speaker, who was denied regular school when sex and labor trafficked as a girl in Rwanda, and again by my American captor in the US, I was still an artist and a thinker. I had intellectual curiosity and made my own classroom. Despite my challenges, when I started to write my memoir in French, and later, wanted my story to be known globally, I taught myself English by reading these books using an French/English dictionary I found in the trash: I Rigoberta Manchu; Night by Elie Wiesel; The Diary of A Young Girl by Ann Frank; 12 Years A Slave by Solomon Northrup, Dreams From My Father by Barak Obama; and many more.
The most valuable lesson I learned from these authors, was the resilience of the human spirit. A resilience which started when I was a child refugee during the Rwandan genocide in 1959, living in a refugee camp in Congo. I almost died there, but my beloved parents’ prayers, and my paternal grandmother praying and unconditionally loving me gave me strength to survive the trials in my life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.reckon.news/honey/2021/05/as-a-human-trafficking-survivor-my-story-is-bigger-than-myself.html
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esperance.uwayiregetaylor.9
Image Credits
Shirley Ferrill, Kristina O’Quinn
