{"id":64824,"date":"2021-12-09T08:43:44","date_gmt":"2021-12-09T15:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=64824"},"modified":"2021-12-09T08:43:44","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T15:43:44","slug":"larissa-wilcox-op-ed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/larissa-wilcox-op-ed\/","title":{"rendered":"How NAU helped one grad put a stop to her family’s intergenerational trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"

*Editor\u2019s Note: The \u201cViews from NAU\u201d blog series highlights the thoughts of different people affiliated with NAU, including faculty members sharing opinions or research in their areas of expertise. The views expressed reflect the authors\u2019 own personal perspectives.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\"LarissaBy<\/strong>\u00a0Larissa Wilcox
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Wilcox is graduating Friday with degrees in microbiology and philosophy.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t born into poverty, but I did grow up in it. My once-thriving family who had substantial income, owned property and ran businesses was destroyed overnight by a heroin relapse at the hand of my birth father when I was just eight years old. My father had been clean for almost 20 years when he saw a physician who prescribed him opioids for a work injury and sent him into a downward spiral.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the peak of his relapse, my father\u00a0scammed\u00a0a church in a business deal for three quarters of a million dollars so he could pay for drugs, and in return we lost our businesses, our house, our vehicle\u00a0and all the money in every account. All we were left with was the clothes on our backs. My parents then got divorced and though there were multiple attempts at visitation with my dad, they often ended in tragedy and with him doing drugs in the bathroom.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The final straw was when my father nodded off from heroin while driving and drove his truck off an embankment and into a lake with my baby sister and\u00a0me\u00a0inside. The only times I saw my father after that were\u00a0when he\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0recognize me at a grocery store and asked me for a cigarette, and when I had to sign for his cremation\u00a0after he\u00a0succumbed to liver failure caused by Hepatitis C.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After the accident, my mom who was battling demons of her own, became a single mother to three girls. For a while,\u00a0our life was a roller coaster of highs and lows filled with cheese sandwiches, cold showers, food donations from churches on holidays\u00a0and hand-me-down clothing.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t until my mother met my ex-stepfather that our life transitioned to just lows.\u00a0My ex-stepfather\u00a0was a physically abusive, higher-ranking drug-dealer\u00a0who spent most of his life in prison\u00a0and smoking\u00a0crack cocaine. Throughout the\u00a012\u00a0years my mother was married to him, I learned what a SWAT raid\u00a0was like, what the difference between county jail and state prison is (including what the visiting areas are like)\u00a0and what\u00a0it means to meet a\u00a0monster in real life.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Three days after I turned 18, I moved to Arizona with the only family member I had outside of New York to escape the abuse and made a pact with myself that I would be different from those I left behind. I chose at that moment to not become a victim of circumstance and to instead use my trauma to grow and do something bigger than myself.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While attending Northern Arizona University, I was able to begin unraveling generational curses through my education. Growing up in poverty,\u00a0I only knew\u00a0what\u00a0I was\u00a0exposed to,\u00a0and most of it\u00a0was\u00a0morally skewed.\u00a0Northern Arizona\u00a0University taught me how to collect and understand information myself and\u00a0gave me the confidence and information to\u00a0finally make\u00a0educated\u00a0decisions fully on my own, which\u00a0gave me a chance to be better than those I succeeded.\u00a0Through university and therapy, I was able to take my power back from my abusers and\u00a0empower myself,\u00a0learn what morality looks\u00a0like, begin to break the patterns that I was so used to, allow myself to have a significantly different lifestyle than what I was raised in\u00a0and to persevere always.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My\u00a0educational experience\u00a0was\u00a0far from\u00a0easy, though. During my freshman\u00a0year\u00a0I was diagnosed with\u00a0lupus\u00a0and\u00a0as a first-generation\u00a0college student,\u00a0the feelings of imposter syndrome\u00a0were\u00a0consistently\u00a0overwhelming. I spent\u00a0all\u00a0my time in\u00a0high school worrying about what was going to happen\u00a0to me\u00a0once I got\u00a0home instead of learning\u00a0like the rest of my classmates, so I\u2019ve always felt like I was\u00a0behind. This only worsened in college because I never felt like I\u00a0was able to\u00a0catch up.\u00a0I welcome these feelings,\u00a0though,\u00a0because they\u00a0are what pushed me to\u00a0break\u00a0my\u00a0familial curses\u00a0by\u00a0showing\u00a0me that it\u00a0isn\u2019t meant to be\u00a0comfortable, but every struggle will be worth it\u00a0when\u00a0I one day have my spot in the sun.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Being able to graduate\u00a0from Northern Arizona University as a first-generation college student is the first of many generational curses to be broken, and it has proven that my trauma and hardship\u00a0will end with me.\u00a0If\u00a0any of\u00a0this resonates with you, know that\u00a0you\u2019re\u00a0not alone and\u00a0you\u2019re\u00a0capable of more than your mind will let you conceive.\u00a0In the words of Jim Carrey,\u00a0\u201clife\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0happen to you, it happens for you. So, relax and dream up a good life.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*Editor\u2019s Note: The \u201cViews from NAU\u201d blog series highlights the thoughts of different people affiliated with NAU, including faculty members sharing opinions or research in their areas of expertise. The views expressed reflect the authors\u2019 own personal perspectives. By\u00a0Larissa Wilcox Wilcox is graduating Friday with degrees in microbiology and philosophy.\u00a0   I wasn\u2019t born into…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-views-from-nau"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}