We all want to be happy, but sometimes it feels like life just keeps throwing curve balls. On this episode of A Glimpse Inside, host Wendy Perrotti introduces you to Cherese who’s had more than her fair share in life. Tune in to hear how Cherese has coped so far and get real time tools and insights on how to move from heartbreak to happiness.
Yeah. Thanks. Welcome to A Glimpse Inside. I’m Wendy Perrotti. You’re listening to episode two of our four-part series, Letting Happiness Win. If you missed episode one, What’s Really Behind A Happy Life with my guest, Justin Recla, you’ll want to check it out. Justin’s got the secret sauce to happiness pretty well sewn up. My guest today, like many of us, has had some really, really tough times. She’s turning her life around and wants to be happy.
Before we say hello to Cherese, I’d like to take a moment to remind you of the rules of the game here on A Glimpse Inside‘s coaching episodes. This isn’t about telling people how to fix their lives. Life is messy and that’s okay. Plus, the sorts of “answers” that are meant to fix us are the very things that leave short-lived solutions and keep us stuck. The work we do here is about seeing ourselves, others, and life in general, clearly and without judgment.
It’s about using that new awareness to interact in new ways, to experiment with our lives in real time. We often attempt to create solutions to our problems that are just as complex as the problems themselves. With so many moving parts, we set ourselves up for failure, and we do this stuff every single day. Here, what we’re looking for is what works in people’s lives as much as we look for what doesn’t, and we build on that. Just like a toddler learning to stand before he walks, walk before she runs, we’re learning to live in open curiosity.
We’re learning to play with the elements of our lives until we find out what fits us, and by us, I mean us as individuals, best. We’re turning life itself into a laboratory for growth. And while change may be constant, my friends, growth only happens in one direction. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in nature on grows and neither will you. So, welcome, Cherese.
Hi, Wendy. Hi, everyone.
Hi. Thank you so much for being brave and agreeing to do this work publicly so that others can benefit too.
Absolutely, absolutely. Anytime I can help, I’m ready to dive in.
At a girl. Before we start the coaching, what’s important for us to know about you? Would you be willing to tell us your story?
Oh boy. How much time do we have? I am 43 years old. I’m in the process of a divorce. I have a 25 year old daughter, and I have a four month old granddaughter. I was a teenage mom. I got pregnant my senior year in high school. And at that time, my mom was still alive then and very, very religious family, so that was a no no. But I defied all the odds. The negative connotation around teenage mothers is that you’re going to become a statistic and you’re going to end up this way and you’re going to end up that way. And I said, “Absolutely not. Can’t let that happen to me.” Want to be Happy
So, I graduated high school. I went to work not too long after I graduated, and I continued to progress. I graduated with a trade in cosmetology, which was my passion to be able to help people and make them feel better about themselves, which was awesome. At the age of 23, I moved from New York to Pennsylvania, purchased my first home after I separated from my daughter’s father and I said I wanted to have a better life for her and for myself. My mother’s side of the family had actually relocated to PA prior, but not too long after that I lost my job.
So, I had just bought this house. I was in a new state and things were upside down due to my health. I was having some pain that was unexplained. But now, we link it back to something else that happened when I was 14 with my ovaries. And I lost my job, so that put me into the work market in Pennsylvania, which was completely different than New York. I was working for less than half of what I was making in New York City with a child and a mortgage and all of that fun stuff.
Few months after I lost my job, my mom passed away, and she was my rock. And here I am at 23 years old and I just moved and I’m like, “God, why did this happen?” And I was very angry for a while because I was just devastated that my mom was taken from me at such a young age. But at that time, I didn’t understand why or all these things were happening. A month later, her sister, my aunt, which was very close to me, passed away, and they both passed away the same way. They both died in their sleep. So, that caused me to go into a depression. We all want to be happy.
And at that time, I was diagnosed with anxiety because I was scared to go to sleep and my heart would race and all these crazy things would happen. And long story short, I ended up getting diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and heart disease, which my mom and my aunt both had. So, that scared me even more because I’m like, “Okay, this took their lives. What about me? Then who’s going to take care of my daughter God forbid something happened?” So, I really had to dig deep to try to figure out what my purpose was. And I knew it was something along the lines of being able to help women and help them understand that because they have circumstances in their life, that doesn’t mean that their life is over or that they should be written off.
Not too long after my aunt passed, I started the relationship with my soon to be ex-husband now. We dated for about four years, and then we got married in 2004. In that time, I started a business, a hair salon with a few other ladies that I was working with. I went to work before Verizon for a while. I couldn’t take that because the stress at that job was just way too much for me to deal with. So, we went and we opened our own business. And from there, I went to open six different locations and, for a few years, I had two salons running at the same time until my health took a drastic turn.
Right before my health took a drastic turn, my dad had two heart attacks, a stroke, and I nursed him back to health. And when he got on his feet, he went to get his own apartment, which we didn’t want him to do, and they found him passed away inside of his apartment about six months after he moved out. So, the stress, all the trauma and everything, it just kept mounting and mounting and mounting. And I just kept pushing because that’s all I knew to do. I knew IÂ want to be happy.
In the interim, part-time, I was training to be a financial analyst in life insurance as well. So, I was training to help people get their lives together, and get their debt together, how to save for retirement and teach them about money and that sort of thing. But when my health went for a nose-dive in 2007, it was three years after I got married, it got really, really bad, and I was not able to work.
So, I had to see a specialist down in Atlanta. And when they opened me up, they discovered that I had stage four endometriosis. It was all over my abdominal cavity all the way up to my gallbladder and my liver. So, they had to completely clean all that out. I lost my uterus, I lost my cervix, I lost my left ovary, which was completely encapsulized, and they left my right one, and they took my gallbladder out. That surgery had a recovery time of 13 months.
In 13 months’ time, the disease was so aggressive, it came back. But I was in no physical or mental condition to travel back down to Atlanta because they wanted to do more surgery for me. So, I was referred to another doctor up here, up in New York. But the crazy thing about this disease is that the specialists don’t accept insurance. So, you have to pay out of pocket and it’s to the tune of like five thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand dollars just to go in for the surgery. And, as you guys know, being sick for so long and not working mount a lot of debt, medical bills and that sort of thing.
I had the second surgery in 2011 and, in that time, I had two salons going. I had to shut both of them down because he said, “You’re in an emergency state right now.” My food wasn’t digesting, I wasn’t eliminating. It was just really bad. So, I had to have, at that time, a bowel resection, a rectal resection. They took my other ovary out. I had to have my bladder reconstructed. I had a lot of work done. And during that surgery afterwards, I almost died. I was in the hospital for five days.
I still get a little bit… Just thinking about it. I was in the hospital for five days. I came home, and then for three days, I had a fever and that fever was not moving no matter what I took. So, I went to the ER and they sent me back to New York because they said I had an abscess and I needed to have an interventional procedure done, which I had no clue what that meant. But I found out when I got there. I had that done and then I landed back in the hospital for another five days because the second day I was there, the residents cut my wound open without any anesthesia and it put my body into shock. So, my blood pressure dropped, my heart rate sped up. The machines in the room were beeping, beeping, beeping, and the nurses came in and they were like, “She’s about to go. We have to get her to the CCU unit.” So, my five days in that hospital, four days extra, where in the CCU unit after that happened.
I tell you all of that so you can understand where I’m coming from now. You fast forward, we’re in 2020 now, I’ve spent the last nine years of my life working to recover from severe trauma, depression from losing my girly parts and people not understanding that. I look normal, I sound normal, but on the inside, I’m really not normal, and fighting for my life without taking any pain meds and all the other medicines that I have two big freezer Ziploc bags full of that they’ve prescribed to me so that I could have a great quality of life. Because IÂ want to be happy.
I stand for my endo sisters as an ambassador to show them that you can still have a vibrant life in the face of three autoimmune disorders and not be bed-ridden. A lot of people don’t understand where I come from with my humor and the way I choose my mindset and to be happy and certain things, I just can’t not allow to penetrate and stress into my mindset. So, I have to keep a tight reign on that so that I can remain healthy, and be able to move forward. So, that’s a little bit about backgrounds, long story short without all the little stuff in between.
That is a lot, my friend.
Yes. We all want to be happy.
That is a lot. We’re going to take a break before we get to coaching, but before we do, we’ve got these two sessions together. What would you like to create or have happened as a result of the work that we do?
I feel like I’ve put myself into a box, and a box that nobody else can really see but I feel it, and I’ve noticed it. It’s like I got one leg out, one foot, one leg, one arm, my eyes are peeking over the edge but I’m still halfway in there so I just want to get out of the box.
Okay, we’re going to get you out of that box. So far, we have heard Cherese’s incredible story and we’ve learned what she’d like to dive into today. When we come back from this short break, we’ll get right into the coaching, and as always, give you some tips that you can start using to help with your growth and transformation as well. Stay with us. We’ll be right back and we will discuss more on how we want to be happy.
Want to be HappyÂ
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window
