Skinny Girl Chronicles: The Good, the Bad, and the Healing

By Sherry Hopper-Wall

Despite adversity, living a wonderful life is the ultimate goal and can be achieved by anyone determined to do so. You can be stagnant or move forward to greatness. In Skinny Girl Chronicles, author Sherry Hopper-Wall shares some of her major life events. Th ese include the highs and lows and the fear she developed at an early age, a fear that almost deterred her from creating a better life than her early years in Virginia.

Her story reveals personal feelings and details about her coming of age as a young, black girl in a small, southern town; a strained mother-daughter relationship; a failed first marriage; and a renewed faith in love. She also highlights the fact she’s a highly sensitive person and how being so has played a major role in how she perceives the world around her, as well as how she responds to it.

An intrinsically happy person, Hopper-Wall demonstrates resiliency and determination in moving forward from any encounter that doesn’t bring about positivity. When she became ill with Grave’s Disease, unlearning unhealthy habits became her primary focus to return to the full happiness she once knew. Skinny Girl Chronicles shares not only the good, but also the trials and uncertainties, which Hopper-Wall conquered with determination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665726788

Sherry Hopper-Wall

Sherry Hopper-Wall is a thirty-one-year veteran educator who has traveled the world with her husband. She earned a bachelor’s degree in intermediate education from Winston Salem State University and a Master of Education in curriculum and instruction from Old Dominion University. An Army/Army Reserve veteran who served from 1987–1991, she also mentors young women. Hopper-Wall is currently managing Grave’s Disease.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Sherry Hopper-Wall.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2676-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2677-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2678-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912666

Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/18/2022

Contents

Preface

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Dedicated to my daddy and husband, who are my greatest loves and inspirations. Thank you for giving me the courage and confidence to live this life and loving me through it all.

Preface

Some people hinder themselves from accomplishing their goals because of fear and rejection of the unknown. I am not some people. I have been able to accomplish great things without allowing the fears that I have to stop me because I know deep down that fear’s intended purpose is to keep me from my greatness and living my life authentically. This is the story of my internal battle, which I have fought the better part of my life, due to the perceptions I created in my own mind after experiencing trauma and negativity at an early age.

Even though I have enjoyed a life that some people see as financially stable and with uncomplicated privileges, it did not come about without constant determination, sacrifice, pain (at times), and hard work. The exact opposite of what is perceived about me is the truth, and it is something that many don’t know and those who do, don’t seem to understand. I learned to overcome the struggles that plagued my parents to live in a way that many people desire, but are sometimes hindered from seeking out and pursuing.

I am a school teacher and educator, who is married to a now-retired military officer. My life didn’t just happen. I had to pay the price of starting over again numerous times and bouncing back from unfortunate experiences, if I wanted to maintain my happiness, which was the reason for it all. I could see beyond where I came from and I wanted to go there.

The stories I am sharing reveal the sometimes misguided journey of my life and how it changed my view of people and their intentions. I have real connections with people whose friendships span time and distance. I appreciate them more than they may realize. They see the human that I am and have no qualms with me.

At times, my experiences may not have been what I had hoped for, but it was the exact reason why I never gave up. The love that I share with my firstborn, Nathan, saved my life during my divorce and heartbreak as a twenty-something trying to find my way in the world. I am praying that the same love will now save him before it is too late. I haven’t been perfect, but I have been the best that I can be under all circumstances.

Being able to travel the world and live out my dreams has been one of the greatest gifts that God has blessed me with. I used to fantasize about faraway places after reading a novel in English class or about a particular country that I had studied in history. I would always think to myself, I am going to go there one day. I knew that if I shared my thoughts, I would get negatives from naysayers who couldn’t see dreams as I did.

I held onto that dream and a few others and made them all my reality once I became an adult. All I had were my dreams. My determination and resiliency during adversity helped to make me a strong woman who always held my goals in sight and maintained my tenacity to accomplish them. Achievements sometimes come with a price, and I am not the exception to that rule.

You see, I have had many things happen to me, but my being unwilling to give up created the courage, determination, and renewed confidence within me to keep trying until I reached the outcome that I had initially sought. I know my grandmother’s prayers and God’s unchanging hand over my life are the reasons that I am no worse for wear and the person that I am today.

Many people told me what I could not do, but to the contrary, I always figured things out. I knew I could accomplish my goals and held onto the thought, Just watch and see. My motto has always been, Where there is a will, there is a way. I am one of those people who very seldom ask for help, and I believe it to be my biggest flaw as a human. If I had, maybe the tough times would not have been so tough. I have always reveled in the fact that I did things my way.

Realizing that people don’t see me as I am, but as they are and that their limitations are sometimes superimposed on me, allows me to be my authentic self. Once I detached myself from unhealthy opinions, I realized my value and had the strength to be the best version of myself. This is what I had to do to love myself unconditionally and realize that I am worth just as much as the next person was. I take credit for my fortitude and for wanting more out of life than the hand that I was dealt at birth. No one can make me feel undeserving of it.

There have been many versions of me. I would be remiss if I allowed perceptions from past encounters to linger because I have evolved into so much more. I was consistent in the things I chose to do to cope with life, but often morphed into the person I thought I needed to be to fit in with others. This was my way of surviving the moment. I realized that I spent the better part of my younger life in survival mode because that is all I knew and where I came from. The place where people were just trying to survive.

This is my narrative, told the way only I experienced it, of the journey I was destined to travel as a young, skinny African American girl from the South. The place I have often felt that I didn’t belong and would come to despise as a young adult trying to find my way out and break cycles of being undereducated, abused and alcoholism.

It isn’t the beauty of the South that I could not accept but rather, the atmosphere, attitudes, and treatment from both, those who were like myself and those who differed from me. Genuine love was not something I often felt from others. I knew I had to love myself and not harp on the lack of it. I thought I had love for myself, but I was heavy-laden with emotional scars that were left each time I had an experience that I interpreted as hurt and was traumatizing for me. It all came with me. My unresolved baggage and I set out in life thinking that things had to be different elsewhere.

The moment I had to exist in the world outside my home, I was faced with a multitude of forces that I wasn’t prepared for nor had a desire to deal with, but nonetheless, had to. The common factor was me. I was an emotionally inept young girl. Negative encounters I had with others were met with inadequacy that I felt for as long as I can remember. I could feel them deeply. They may have seemed like small incidents to some. For a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) like myself, they were encounters, which opened scars established long before and made them fresh again.

They transformed me into the person I am today. They imposed triggers on me, which I knew nothing about until I went through therapy. Whether I liked it or not I had to learn to deal with me and how I reacted. To this very day at times, I still find myself reliving these same atrocities. The only difference now, is I know how to cope. I am on a continuous journey of healing. Being triggered by a painful experience takes a lot of restraint in the moment. I have learned to ignore and revisit to process my emotions and not just suppress them, as I had as a kid.

I have many abilities, but I am sometimes apprehensive to share them for fear of being judged. Judgement—we all hate it, but nonetheless, we are all subjected to it. I believe it’s the reason that I, from a very young age, avoided certain people and situations. I stay to myself and will deny anyone access to me at any given time. I’m a loner. It is not an odd way to exist, as some may think. Finding solace in myself brings me the peace that I constantly crave more than anything else.

Engaging in meaningless conversations or socializing in large crowds creates an anxiety in me, that I can live without, but find myself functioning through often. These interactions are exhausting for me, and at times, they leave me feeling overwhelmed and underfed emotionally. I can remember just about every detail of an encounter and the feelings that were stirred within me, whether the encounter was positive or negative.

Having this sort of recall used to bother me, and I would tell people how much I hated being able to notice or pick up on every small thing that happened around me. I guess that you could say it is a gift and a curse. It’s the reason I do things alone.

Feeling other people’s emotions and not only my own is an extremely exhausting existence because it is constant. This causes me to want to shut out the world on most days. I have to decompress and regroup at any given time. I feel what they feel. This is the main reason it took me so long to write my story. Distracting myself from this feeling consumed most of my life. And when my life slowed down, it all came flooding back. The world overwhelms me and I was forced to deal with the anger that was left and sadness that it had put inside of me.

The feelings that I have conveyed here still linger within me, and revisiting the past has brought a lot of the pain from past experiences. My vulnerable side was to for those I knew wouldn’t judge me. Those who have watched me closely know that I am my own person and see the changes that I have worked hard to make. A colleague that I worked with years ago said to me once, Mrs. Hopper-Wall, I like how you walk to the beat of your own drum. It shows in everything you do. I was surprised that she noticed, or maybe at the fact that she would say it aloud. I just wanted to be me and I wasn’t afraid to let others see my differences. I am not! She even gave me a birthday card that expressed the same sentiment. It made me feel good that someone actually saw me. Not many people do or even care to.

I had matured in my womanhood and grown in the sense that there was no need for me to try to fit in with others any longer, because I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong; I sometimes like being around others, but when it’s not authentic, I can’t handle it. I rely on facts to guide my senses, to understand the world around me more than I let on. I question the things I do not understand, especially when authenticity is not immediately apparent to me.

Some may say that I am naïve to a certain extent because my perceptions of what I think are usually not the outcome of an encounter or situation. When I question, I am not trying to issue a direct challenge of one’s thinking, but trying to understand. Some people get annoyed at the way that I ask for clarity and the mere fact that I ask for it at all. Why would people want you to misunderstand their words or intentions? It isn’t the way I ask, surely. I need clarity when I simply don’t get something. This sometimes brings about unwanted and unwarranted discourse, which isn’t my intent, but is perceived to be.

This all comes from fear that was instilled in me by my mother. She had a way of not saying a word and still projecting what she meant by a simple look of disdain and an aura of contempt. My father could be the same way, but he was somehow able to still exude the love that he had for us all and that always diminished any sort of ill feelings we may have gotten from him. During that time, children were to be seen and not heard.

This was also the driving force in breaking my mental peace and stirring a fear in me that would span my lifetime and cause me to avoid certain people and places, even though they posed no real threat to me, because of my perception. Feelings that were suppressed and words left unspoken would become my norm.

Maintaining my positivity and finding fulfillment in my family life, which comes from the love of God, are the two constants I desired most in my life. Peace is my greatest treasure, and I am unwilling to compromise it. From an imperfect world and a person who most certainly is not perfect, this is not far-fetched, but always hoped for. Everything flows effortlessly when I have it. When you know where you want to go and what you want out of life, your desires are attainable. Will there be roadblocks and deterrents? There absolutely will be and I knew this from the beginning, but I’ve managed to maintain a steady path despite them because I didn’t and don’t give up easily. Consistency is key.

If the opportunities are presented and the chances are taken, you can achieve anything you dream of. I am a living testimony of this fact. I am no hero or larger-than-life figure. I am an ordinary person who had dreams that were greater than my circumstances. I had no means in which to achieve them, but I found a way.

Working hard and taking a chance created the way for me to succeed. I did what I thought was necessary to make my life and what I wanted out of it come to fruition. There are no apologies to be made there.

I have always wanted to choose my life and not have life choose me. I wanted it to be of my design with a career, a family of my own to love, and the tranquility I didn’t have growing up. And even though things didn’t always work out the way I had planned, I still refused to give up on having them. Figuring out how to trust the process was my only obstacle.

People will guide you in a direction that they think you should go, unless you take the lead and walk your own path. I have always navigated my own way, due to my parents giving me little-to-no advice on the matter and at times, having no one else to turn to for it. I wasn’t taught about the things that I would face in the world. I had to experience them for myself.

People say, Experience is the best teacher, and I have learned quite a bit from experiences of life. I don’t blame my parents for anything. They loved me in the only way they knew how. I know that some people aren’t equipped to pass along what they have learned and you certainly can’t pass along feelings that you never felt or things that you don’t know. I’m just thankful that I was able to see the good things that happened for and around me, so that I could achieve what I wanted out of life.

I have always wanted to write, but my ideas had been lost for quite some time. I grew-up trying to thrive in chaos. Because I had seven brothers and sisters, my calm came from leaving the house to explore the small farm on which I grew up. Finding a robin’s nest or a patch of black berries brought me the joy and calm that I needed to center myself from being overwhelmed with the dynamics of my family structure. I found refuge in simple things and hanging out with my schoolmates or roaming the community to find whatever excitement I could. These things were simple pleasures and didn’t complicate my world. They eased the burden of having to think about it.

The ability to do multiple things at once was never my strong suit. Writing was cut from my list of priorities in adulthood—that is, until now. I had a thyroidectomy in July of 2020, and it seems that once the brain fog lifted, thoughts came back to me, and I needed to get them on paper.

I know that now is the right time to bring my journey to life through my words because I have let go of a lot of the things that have held me hostage for a long time. I can finally be totally me. Being inspired to write and express the way I have navigated this world is at the forefront of my current chapter in life. It’s time to cleanse and let go.

No matter how my life may appear to others, it is no fairy tale. It is an episodic tale about me establishing it, all while fighting an internal battle of low self-esteem created by objectification from others, my encounters with racism and people pleasing to fit somewhere I never will.

My resiliency and determination are apparent through my life’s trials and achievements. They are infused with people and events that were designed to deter me from my journey and make it difficult. I can never forget my true friends and a few acquaintances, who brought and continue to bring balance and support to my life. Without them—my husband, children, bestie and siblings—I would not have had some of the best experiences of my life.

From the beginning, there has always been something or someone that I had to battle, especially when things were calm and progressing in the right direction. I don’t compete with people, which I feel only brings about discord. I simply do me to the best of my ability. I live each day as it comes and give from my heart, not expecting anything in return.

I only want recipients to feel the happiness and love that the world sometimes doesn’t give. I have tried my best to make this world a better place, and through my teachings in and out of the classroom, I hope that the mark I leave is a reflection of it.

Although at times, it was painfully obvious that I was different from those around me, I never let it stop me from what I needed to do, and the things I hoped for. People who truly love and care don’t seem to mind my quirks. When I am not at my best and I reveal my feelings, I get refocused by my husband’s encouraging words. He always says, Sherry, you are being too hard on yourself. You are fine just being you.

I have heard on numerous occasions from others, You’re different. Well, yes, I am, and I don’t apologize for it. I think I make people uncomfortable by being myself. Desiring peace over attention is different. I have been searching for my idea of it my entire life. Most people crave stimulation and socialization. I don’t, due to my sensitivity and often being overstimulated. I want to exist without the overwhelming feelings these can sometimes bring.

Because I have always felt different from those around me, I found it was necessary to find the missing pieces to my family’s puzzle. It’s one feeling that I have never been able to shake or get a resolution from. I am on a journey of self-discovery to find out exactly where I come from and who my people are. It’s a part of my healing too. I have researched my genealogy and discovered parts of my lineage that I never knew existed.

We, my ancestors and I, descended from the Bantu people of Western Africa. They were part of the great migration, and settled in the area between Nigeria and Cameroon. This is from my mother’s side of the family. I had hoped to find out more about my father’s side during my research, but had no such luck. Nothing has turned up as of right now. Everyone should know the story of how African American people came to live in America, so I will spare you those details.

It hasn’t been easy getting to where I am today—a successful school teacher, wife, and mother—but I feel as though I achieved what I set out to do. Where I am at this moment is a reflection of the experiences I have had and people I have met along the way. The manner in which I interact with others is a direct result of things I endured from my past.

I don’t have half the nerve to say some of the things that have been said to me, to anyone else. Once I became feed up with this type of behavior from others, I reacted with the same. It had become tiresome and unnecessary. It never dawned on me that there were other hurt people in the world who projected theirs, while I kept mine inside.

Experiencing the heartache and pain of lost love and disappointments