Today we’d like to introduce you to Starlenie Vondora.
Starlenie, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Honestly, this is rarely a brief task for me. Most of the time, someone’s story begins with the mention of their environment, parents and cultural identity. All of those things, along with my perception of myself, were challenged once I met my birth parents. Prior to the second grade Miami, Florida was my home. I had one parent who was both mother and father to me.
When I was seven-years-young, my birth parents arrived at my foster home in Florida. In short, the reunion was difficult as I had no recollection of my biological family and no concept of my Caribbean-Latina identity [as the child of Dominican and Haitian parents who migrated from Cuba]. My birth parents introduced themselves as my “real parents”. And I learned that only one of the young girls in the home was biologically related to me. You would think bonds would be altered once the truth had been revealed. But my attachment to my foster mother remained strong after my birth parents left.
Sometime during the spring of 2006, my sister and I went to court with our birth father. I didn’t think much of the occasion since I didn’t see him again after that. Soon after that, my foster mother called my sister and I out of our bedroom one afternoon and told us to grab suitcases from her closet since it was time to go ‘home’. The next day a woman came to the house, put us in her car, and took us to her office. Sometime after sundown, a man picked us up then drove us to the airport. At the airport, someone led us to the terminal where someone else waited to take us to the gate. Once my sister and I boarded, a stewardess greeted us by name and asked what we wanted for dinner. The next thing I knew I was at an airport in the Midwest.
I’ve been in the Midwest with no contact with anyone from my foster home since then. I don’t have anything from the first eight years of my life nor do I know why I was transferred to my parents’ custody on the North Shore. My birth mother briefly spoke of the situation once when I was a child. I overheard her say the police arrested my parents one night and put us five kids in the custody of the state Department of Children & Family Services. Due to unending curiosity, I began a small investigation of my own one year after I graduated from high school. At age eighteen, I learned that the local Adoption Center has no record of me being taken into DCFS custody or foster care. As one can imagine, this resulted in more feelings of doubt and confusion. Although it’s possible that the Florida office may have something on file, the records I retrieved from them didn’t provide me with a resolution.
I used to wonder if somebody found me in a dumpster in Miami or whether my foster mother is actually my birth mother. For a while, it troubled me that I may never know. But in the midst of my journey of self-discovery, and dispelling the confusion surrounding my story, it became clear to me that I am the one who gets to write it. I no longer have doubts about whose child I am. I have learned so much about and have learned to embrace my multi-ethnic identity as a Caribbean-Latina of Levantine & Philippine descent. I stopped attaching the pain that my childhood left me with to my cultural identity so I could connect to more parts of myself. This helped me to take pride in being West Indian – specifically Hispanic & French Latino – instead of denying my ethnicity just because I am also first-generation American. It is truly imperative for people to know thyself; I’m grateful to know and to love myself. When I was at my lowest point spiritually during junior high, I could not do that. I didn’t learn that you are not your circumstances but rather what you choose to do about them until I emancipated myself from my parents at sixteen-years-young. As I continued to fall into the hands of abusive and exploitative adults who posed as my temporary caregivers, I was forced to provide myself with the care that they didn’t. I learned how to be who I needed as a child. Then, at age sixteen, I decided to use the art that I’ve created along the way to express what I went through before, during and after my experience as a foster child turned emancipated minor in the United States. My intention is to inform and inspire. I want those who encounter my testimony to be aware of the obstacles and abuse that displaced youth encounter – especially the people who refer to foster care and adoption as a solution to unwanted and unplanned pregnancies. In hearing my story I hope that people recognize that foster care and adoption are not a solution but oftentimes an invitation to childhood trauma and despair. I want to bring awareness to our common struggles which aren’t known by the masses. And I sincerely hope that people will make mindful decisions when it comes to parenthood. The children are the future and just like all of us they really deserve better.
Can you talk to us in more detail about the struggles along the way?
Things have been quite challenging actually. My upbringing was rich in trauma, isolation, abuse, bullying, poverty, and suffering. Yet I didn’t think I had the right to complain about it. I was aware that somebody always has it better than and worse than you do. So it made sense to journal away my thoughts and be grateful that my pain didn’t belong to anyone else. On top of that, I suppressed the anxiety, hypervigilance, depression, and hurt that consumed me thinking it would do my biological family a favor. When I met my biological family at age seven, I cried for my foster mother and begged my birth parents to send me back to Miami. My birth mother slapped me out of anger for recognizing another woman as my mom and my father put me down on the floor then walked away. It was clear amongst all ten of us that I had no recollection or connection to anyone in the household.
From day one, my older sisters and I were tasked with doing housekeeping tasks daily and caring for our three younger siblings full-time because my parents believed that it was our duty as girls. My brothers were merely responsible for taking out the trash and shoveling the snow every winter. Caring for my siblings as if they were my own children caused me to forget the child that I was and to grow more empathy for them than I had for myself. I regularly endured brutal beatings from my birth mother and it was likely as a result of her resentment for me. But I feared that speaking to anyone about the harm being done to me would cause my younger siblings to be separated and scattered across foster homes in the United States the way my older siblings and I were. The schools that I attended required me to see the onsite social worker every week during every school year. But I intentionally chose not to discuss the abuse my older siblings and I suffered from at home. It was a very long, strenuous and horrible period of silence for me. The decision to suppress my pain in order to protect my younger siblings from being taken away by DCFS seemed like a burden I carried alone. Because I was the only one who saw our quality of life as dysfunctional and I was the only one with enough courage to fully walk away from it. It may have helped my family’s sense of togetherness for me to be silent for all those years. But unfortunately for me, the abuse and neglect caused me to subconsciously believe that my well-being wasn’t important and then my inner peace became subordinate to others.
When you make the cognitive effort to choose someone else’s satisfaction over your evolution you will never be happy nor will you grow. That is my humble opinion. When you agree that you deserve less then less is what you will receive. My birth parents, siblings, and mean-spirited children at school pointed out every flaw they saw in me. But I became my biggest critic when I subscribed to and agreed with those depictions of myself. I truly believed that I was hideous, unlikeable, unworthy of life and undeserving of love. Might I say the worst thing you can do is beat yourself up after everyone around you has. That is what I came to terms with at the age of thirteen. I told myself, “when others harm you the solution is not to harm yourself as well” then I vowed to treat myself better than anyone else could. This thought completely ceased the tendency to contemplate the value of my life as I started to do during middle school. I realized that I truly wanted to live a beautiful, prosperous life full of love, creativity and positive human interaction. So the next step was to become self-sufficient and to sever my ties to the people, places and things that derailed me on that journey.
Slowly I began to choose myself. This meant abandoning self-sabotaging habits, abandoning people who discouraged me instead of uplifting me, and separating from people when they entered my life for a season and stayed for no good reason. Choosing myself meant becoming everything I was looking for in others. I’m sure this disappointed some people as it’s harder to accept what you didn’t expect. I don’t think anyone who I parted ways with expected me to say that enough is enough. People get used to exploiting you when you keep allowing them to. No one anticipated me saying, “It’s a wrap with a bow on top, you better move around and call a U-HAUL truck. Because that ain’t it.”
Quite frankly, I didn’t expect to progress so far on this journey to self-restoration as early as I did. It’s something I could only imagine because there were no positive examples set for me to model myself after and I had many unanswered questions about my upbringing. During my senior year, I realized that almost everything I wrote centered around the pain that I suppressed. And every time I graced the stage to perform a poem I broke down crying. I was the spoken-word poet who struggled to speak. The frustration with my inability to conceal my emotions and the weight of them led me to write my book called Things I Never Said. It’s the most transparent thing I’ve ever written. It’s also the first major step that I’ve taken in the healing process.
Vondora Goods – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I have no competition. I only aspire to be better than the version of myself that existed yesterday. Verolina Goods is a vision that encompasses my life’s purpose and I work towards refining that picture everyday. I promote authenticity and transparency via the use of creative expression. I touch the heart through art by means of storytelling usings stories and songs. Writing is truly my first love. As a child, my passion for the art form grew stronger once I realized that writing is something I do really well without needing anyone to tell me that. In general, I don’t rely on social validation to build confidence within myself. But that is especially true when it comes to my art. I don’t write for readers to like what I choose to say; I do it for the therapeutic process of pressing pen to paper. I share my creations because I agree with the notion that “your ability to share your story only helps the trajectory of others who listen”. My writing stands out because it is merely a reflection of me and I am unique. You will never find another extraordinary wonder like myself – not another Starlenie. I am a divine wordsmith embodying the essence of the cosmos. From reading and writing for twelve years, I’ve learned to wield words in a beautiful, powerful way. Although the emotion in my poetry is assumed (not often stated) it is definitely something you can feel. I leave it all on the page and then on the stage.
In my book, readers can witness that act of transparency. Things I Never Said is a collection of free verse and prose poetry that explores life – specifically after it has been reset several times. Told initially from the perspective of a child, this novel chronicles the upbringing of one girl as her environment, family, and cultural identity changes over the course of eighteen years. Throughout the three sections – Afterbirth, Afterlife, and Rebirth – the speaker details the trials and tribulations of her journey while in foster care, after reuniting with her birth parents, and after severing the ties between herself and her biological family members at fifteen years old. Things I Never Said captures gratifying and gut-wrenching moments in one survivor’s life as she is exposed to abuse, trauma, loss and neglect. This is an invitation to the severest moments of the speaker’s journey; as well as an invitation to everything she has extracted from them.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
This is a great question. For me, success is an accomplishment that allows me to grow emotionally, spiritually, mentally, or physically. Every year, every month, and every day I aspire to improve myself. Personal development and self-care are also strong passions of mine. Wanting to succeed is like wanting to live: it takes more out of you. As to live is to be more than alive. And to succeed you have to set the bar high then aim above it. Success of any kind requires consistent diligence, patience, and discipline.
I would undoubtedly credit any success I have to my resilient nature. I am convinced that my vessel was molded with great tenacity. Because no matter what, I do not give up on myself. I believe in my capacity for greatness. In addition to that, I have a very strong appetite for life and knowledge. I am a hungry girl, but I grew up seeing hardly any food in the house during a period of my childhood. That inability to meet my basic needs forced me to think about what I want to eat often. To escape my uncomfortable reality, I chose to dream. As a teenager, I learned the quote by Albert Einstein which says, “imagination is everything; it is the key to life’s coming attractions.” This encouraged me to see the obstacles in life as temporary and to imagine a better life so vividly that one day I would actually experience it. However, the quote that helped me see my goals as achievable is the one by Greg Reid who said, “a dream written down with a date becomes a goal. A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan. A plan backed by action turns your dreams into reality.” Those wise words helped me understand the formula for success. That quote has stayed in the crevices of my mind ever since. I am goal-oriented and determined to create a better life for myself everyday. I owe that to my resilience and to my desire to love myself and the life that I live.
Pricing:
- My poetry collection “Things I Never Said” is available on Amazon.
- Passionfruit Books & Passionfruit Stationery products are available now on Amazon.
- Journey to Self-Love course book is available on Amazon and the digital course available on Thinkific.
Contact Info:
- Linktree: https://linktr.ee/sverolina
- Email: ContactSVPromotions@gmail.com
- Journey To Self-Love Course Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/
B0CR1L1DFN - Digital Self-Love Course on Thinkific: https://sverolina.thinkific.
com/courses/journeytoselflove ( - Passionfruit Stationery products: https://rb.gy/if2vpp
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