My name is Cheleia. I was eighteen when I went to the streets. I wasn’t running from a bad home — I was looking for love, and I found a man I believed in, and I started selling my body to help him out of a jam. I told myself it would be quick. Thirteen years later I was still out there.

I gave everything to the people I loved. What I learned, the hard way, is that if you give someone all of you, you have to ask who is there to have your back.

I got out more than once. I went to college. I earned my medical assistant certificate. I worked two jobs — one at a clinic, one at a hospital. And then I went back, because I put a man’s needs in front of my own again. It took me a long time to learn the thing I know now: you put your own oxygen mask on first.

I ended up in federal prison. There I learned to meditate. I started writing my story. I taught my first class. And I found out I’m more than what the world says I am — more than an inmate, more than the worst thing that ever happened to me. I’m a woman with a dream: that other women learn what I learned, sooner than I did, and without paying what I paid. I know these women because I was these women. I know what reaches them, because I know what would have reached me.