"Look up at the sky. Your dad is looking down on you," my mother said. These words are still engraved in my memory as vivid today as when she first said them. I never attended my dad's funeral, nor did I have an idea my dad had decided to end his life and abandon me. With all the manifestations of his substance abuse I had withstood, this was a strange thing for my mother to say. He had always looked out for me, and his death was his final, cruel gift to me that I never could understand. At the age of 12, my mother whisked me away to Colombia, stripping me of everything I knew in New York. In the window of my mother's own grief and her waxing and waning presence, a predator saw an opportunity. I became pregnant at 15, and the nightmare only worsened when I was kidnapped by a cartel in the south of Colombia. My one rapist became many. But my story entails much more than just sexual abuse, murder, betrayal, a terrible earthquake, mental illness, homelessness, and teenaged motherhood. Returning to the states after years of reckless acting out, I found sobriety and community - the thing I had been lacking all my life. I want people to know how I survived those storms and overcame addiction to find love and build a family. My Two Faces is a brutal but compelling true story that charts my passage from the darkness back into the light. Through my emergence from tragedy comes a story that brings a compelling message of rising from the ashes no matter how many times I was burned, each time shining brighter than before.