Meet Ames King

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ames King a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ames, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I believe that part of my resilience comes from my healing journey. I have C-PTSD after surviving narcissistic and SA abuse in my very first relationship as a teenager. This is a continual journey that I will probably work through for my entire life. It has been about seven years and I am so proud of where I am now versus where I came from.

In my early days of college, I had just gone through my second breakup with my abuser. I thought that I would never survive the heartbreak or the embarrassment I felt after being lied to, gaslit, and betrayed. I felt completely alone. I felt like no one understood what I was going through. I didn’t know what was real and what was a lie. I was convinced that all of my friends at the time hated me and that they only stayed friends with me because they felt bad for me. As it turns out, there were even more hardships to endure. There were meltdowns, anxiety, depression, flashbacks, triggers, brain fog, memory loss, panic attacks, paranoia, shame, low self-worth, feeling like I talked about my trauma too much, feeling like I wasn’t healed enough, and more.

However, despite all of this I continued to move forward and work on myself and my healing. I faced my fears and I proved to myself that I could do the things that people tried to convince me otherwise. I pursued my dreams as an actor. I went to school for acting. I started singing lessons to face my stage fright. I started to build up my resume. I got more involved in my local theatre and music communities. I even entered a healthy relationship.

I felt like things were looking good, but I was also distracting myself from a lot of feelings I had inside of me. I didn’t like to show it for a long time, but I was filled with a feeling of rage and injustice. However, once the pandemic hit, I was forced to look at those raw feelings that I had been avoiding. I was in a healthy relationship, so I thought I wasn’t allowed to be angry about the past. It didn’t matter because it was better now. It did and will always matter. Being in a healthy relationship doesn’t get rid of the C-PTSD or the triggers. Being in a relationship afterward can bring out new triggers that you never had to deal with when you were single. There will still be conflict and disagreements in healthy relationships. It’s a matter of learning how to communicate our needs with our partners effectively so that we can come to a mutual decision. It is no easy task either. It can be frustrating and take time to understand what is going on within our own minds, let alone explain it to someone else. There will still be behavior patterns and limiting beliefs that you have to break through over time, but the more you do it, the easier it gets.

I started letting myself feel all of the complicated and messy emotions that came along with being a survivor. I got on meds for anxiety and depression. I started journaling and being more open with myself about what I was feeling. I started remembering that it’s okay to not be okay. I allowed myself to feel without limits. I started to ride the wave of my emotions. I wasn’t going to brush things under the rug anymore. I learned to set boundaries and learned to say no. I started realizing what I knew all along, that feeling your feelings wasn’t a weakness but a strength.

No matter how uncomfortable parts of my story may be, it’s still my story and I’m going to tell it. What happened made me a survivor. It made me resilient. Maybe, I didn’t deserve what I went through, but I am happy with who I became after it. Even when I felt like I couldn’t keep going, I did it anyway because I knew I was worth it. Now, I am ready to thrive.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I am a local performer in Kansas City. I work as a character performer at a local amusement park. During the summer I perform as a costume character in the children’s shows, and during the Halloween season, I am an atmosphere scare actor. My Haunt character is named Seneca (after the Roman philosopher), and they are one of the Wicked Witch of the East’s flying purple monkeys. It is so fun getting to return every year and entertain the crowds of people who come from all over just to experience Haunt. We have very elaborate makeup and costumes. Purple marching band style jackets with sparkly purple sleeves, gold light-up shoes, a spikey helmet, and a painted prosthetic monkey mask. My character is very playful and mischievous (as monkeys usually are), and I have a ton of fun pulling pranks on the guests and finding silly ways to scare them.
I am also the lead singer of a local Kansas City band called Sara Bellum and the Brainwaves. Our band is a bit hard to define genre wise, but we like to think we live in the art punk/pop punk realm. Our sound consists of driving drums and bass, crunchy guitar tones, viola, and sound effects. A lot of our songs are about our personal experiences and our experiences with mental health struggles. We have been on a bit of a hiatus while finding the right members moving forward, but we have a ton of song ideas we have been gradually working on over the past 4 years. Keep an eye out for us in the future.
I am also a tarot reader as well. I mostly read tarot on a smaller scale. I’ve done readings at a local coffee shop for their Ghouls’ Night Out event during the Halloween season last year, but I primarily reserve them for friends. I would love to do more in the future, though. I love to use tarot not as a way of divining the future but as a tool for self-reflection. I like to read them intuitively and let the cards tell me a story. One day, I would love to have my own spiritual shop that’s also a coffee shop where people can come have a cup of coffee, chill out, and find community. I’m not there just yet, but the keyword is yet.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think three qualities that helped me in my journey were a willingness to learn, a willingness to collaborate, and persistence. These are very important qualities to work on not only in your daily life and with the people around you but also as a creative.

It is important to be open to learning new things because it opens up our minds. Having a beginner’s mindset can be a great thing even when you aren’t a beginner because you always remember that there will always be more to learn. There will always be room for improvement even for experts. No one truly knows everything about a topic. Knowledge is endless and there are some things that we just might never know and that’s okay. No one can know everything.

A willingness to collaborate is so important. If you’re working with other people you have to be willing to be flexible. It’s important to remember that things won’t always go your way and that’s good! Sometimes other people’s ideas make your ideas better. It doesn’t have to be a competition. Nothing can truly be done alone and it’s much more fun to brainstorm and share ideas.

Persistence is another important factor in my journey. There are so many ups and downs in life. You can take a break and allow yourself to pause where you’re at, but eventually, you have to pick yourself back up and keep going. Healing is a nonlinear thing, but as long as you persist, you will make progress and it will be worth it. You are worth it.

Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?

The person who has been most helpful in helping me overcome challenges is my partner, Noah. Noah has been with me every step of the way on my healing journey for the past 6 years. Through all of my struggles, all the ups and downs, loss of loved ones, through bouts of anxiety and depression, no matter how much I doubted myself and my talent, my fiance has been there for me through thick and thin. Noah is my rock and I am forever grateful.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @mx.sarabellum and @sbatbwband

Image Credits

Alexis S. Photography (headshot)