The blessing to hit the bottom:
Gabriela Machuca at TEDxGuadalajara (Applause) Good day my friends. Everybody has already heart about
hitting the bottom, isn't it? And when we hear about
hitting the bottom, we think about: alcoholism or other types of addictions. However, we don't realize that there are thousands of
ways of hitting the bottom. For example, a person can hit the bottom
by losing a loved one, by getting a divorce, maybe even by breaking
up with a boyfriend. There are thousands of ways. The simple definition
of hitting the bottom would be to come to such an
extreme and painful situation when you feel that you
already cannot escape from it. It is something that overflows
you, brings you to your pain limit. Today, I would like to introduce
myself. My name is Gaby Machuca. I am a conferences speaker,
also a radio announcer, I have a television program. I would like to thank you for allowing
me to share this story with you. It is very hard for me to
talk about this subject, because, well, I am going to talk
about my mother and my father. Now, I already have a good
relationship with them, however, during many years, since
my childhood, it wasn't the case. I was raised in a dysfunctional place, with a typical submissive mother,
too nice and self-sacrificing and a sexist violent father. A place full of frustration, of a lot of pain, of many disqualifications,
especially for the woman. I am going to give you an example
of something that I lived at home. If my mother was seeing a
pregnant friend or a neighbor, when the baby was born, she
would ask her, "Who is it?" "It’s a girl" "Poor child! She came
to this world to suffer". Zero opportunities for a woman. This lady would have another baby, or another lady
- "Who is it?" "It's a boy!" "How exciting! If you could see how happy
we are, because my husband is happy." "He has all the doors opened
to go ahead in his life." Thus, I was raised with this idea. And then it was time to go to school, to the kindergarten and
to the primary school. And when you have this idea, well, when you think that
you don't have opportunities, and you are a woman, I was
wandering "Why should I go to school? Anyway, I will not succeed in life. There is no point in getting
up early to go to study". And it was like that during
all the primary school. Here, in his photo, pay attention, there is
a little yellow arrow. Well, it was where I first discovered that outside of the house there was also
certain discrimination towards women, as well as for the fact
of not having money. For being a woman and not having money. That girl, you can barely
see her little feet, is a girl who was taken out of
the picture frame for being a girl who didn't have shoes. And this was made by the teachers. Now I realize that there exists
something called "teachers' bullying" and that there are many teachers who are
doing it at schools towards girls and boys. It was something very
difficult to live with and there were many of the school mates
with whom we have experienced all this. It was a very poor school. It was a school where kids
were walking without shoes, and these who were doing well,
were walking with sandals. Thus, I grew up in that environment. When we are adults, it is so difficult to realize that we have a
low self-esteem, isn't it? We have already heard
about it everywhere. It is a sort of a fashion trend, these
phrases : "raise your self-esteem!", "go ahead!", "you can do it!". But do you identify it inside yourself? Imagine, if us as adults,
sometimes, we cannot do it, there is much less kids who can. And if you don't have a guide
at home or someone telling you: "you are valuable", "you are
important", "you can do it", well, in this case you
face the "bullying". Pay attention that the "bullying" is not
anymore the responsibility of one of the kids, it is the responsibility
of the both of them, the one who attacks, as much
as the one who is attacked. The both of them have low self-esteem. It is like that. Thus, when you have a low self-esteem, I compare it to an emission of
a sort of radiation, so to speak, which is consciously or
unconsciously received by the others. That radiation you emit,
you do it unknowingly. And it works, as if you had on
your back a little note, saying: "Treat me badly". Thus, the others receive it
and, obviously, comply with it. That's why you say: "Why
does everybody treat me bad?" "Why does everybody at
school treat badly my son?" It can be that he is
fighting with law self-esteem. And if a kid attacks, it is also because
he needs to feel important in some way, and he achieves it by
attacking the others. This girl was me in the
sixth year of primary school. You can see a quite chubby girl. And for being chubby, well, at that time, there weren't
so many chubby kids at school as now, now it's more natural, at that time I was the unique one. Yes, really, well, at that time I was the
only one in the classroom. And it is obvious that the
"bullying" was against me. When I was running, kids would say: "Attention! The school is going to
fall down because Gaby is running!" Well, it was funny, but I
was fighting with it a lot. And our kids are fighting with it,
I don't know if you lived it as well. I was eating my sandwich in the bathroom,
so that my classmates don't see me eating. If they were seeing me drinking a sip of water, they would
say "Soon she is going to finish everything in the shop". Thus, I was spending
time in the bathroom. And my teachers, well, they were punishing
me because I was missing their lessons. Once, tired of all this
abuse, I punched a girl, and I was excluded from the school. On this photo, it is the
place where I ended up. In that school. Pay
attention, there are only men. I spent two years in a school for boys. I never appeared in a group photo, because the director
told, "You are a woman and you stain the frame". Thus, I lived with that
idea. Nobody likes fat ones. I have always heard these comparisons, "Look
at your cousin, what a thin, what a beautiful." "Everything will go well in her life". Nobody likes fat ones,
they don't fit anywhere. Imagine how sad is that, when you see
clothes as small as these of Barbie, these of the Strawberry Shortcake
- these characters that we like when we are girls, while you have to wear a lady clothes, because there is no your size. It is difficult to live like that. As I grew up with this idea
that nobody liked the fat ones, well, the only consolation that
I could find was in the food. How contradictory, isn't it? And then I got alimentary disorders,
called anorexia and bulimia, which at that time were hardly known. There was no Internet, I
am already a little old. There was no Internet! There was no way someone
could read symptoms and say: "My daughter has this", or "This is what is happening to me". I got to hospitals with
terrible stomach aches, because I wasn’t eating, and neither
doctors knew what was happening to me. "You have gastritis, teenage tantrum". "That's why you don't
want to eat, it's ok". And then, here is where I
have just begun losing weight, I reached the weight of 32 Kilos, at the age of thirteen years. And well, all the rest
has already been said. And then I met a guy, a young boy. Because of that lack of love at
home, well, I fell in love with him. And I fell in love with a violent
person, exactly as my father, always looking for that masculine
figure outside of the house. And he seemed well to me,
because he made me eat. And I said to myself, "Well, I will get rid
of this conflict that I have with the food, of this hate that I
have towards the food". However, afterwards, he was not only
obliging me to eat, but also to dress as he wanted, to have
friends that he wanted, and then to not even have friends, not talk to my parents, not go out on the street, and
at some point he also started to sexually abuse me. And I, during four years
have never said anything, not in my house, neither outside, because it was normal to
suffer for being a woman. It was like the fact
of "earning heaven", "carrying the cross". That was what I was hearing in my house. I was saying, "Well, the more I suffer,
the more quickly I will go to heaven". One day, I was beaten
with an extreme brutality, to the point that I couldn't move,
and in my house nobody was aware of it. When I recovered from the hits, which
I curiously know today, my friends, that a beater and a violent person only beats
the places of your body that nobody sees. And when he was doing it, I have
noticed, that he was very careful, so that people wouldn't notice, to be able to
continue beating me, without anybody asking. When I recovered I went away. I was living in Tepic, and I went to Guadalajara,
escaping at the age of seventeen years old, as well as escaping from
my father and my family. Here I have found a job
and I married my boss. Imagine, only that, at
the age of eighteen years. I had a year living
here when I got married. Also a violent man. That is not a coincidence. We believe that it happens to us just like that,
but it doesn't, we unintentionally attract it. That is a photo of my wedding. Here, I would like to mention, that
I keep being with the same person, however, we have been having
a therapy for eight years, and we are doing very well. Girls, nobody can change a man,
unless he is willing to change, and he was willing, and
now we are doing very well. I divorced seven years later. During the divorce, I was also
faced to the discrimination, because in many jobs while you are in
the job seeking process, people tell you: "As you have already been married, well,
you surely are available to accept everything else". It is very curious, that your very girlfriends, women,
or family members are these who precisely point you out. "I won't hang out with you anymore, because my husband says, that
as you are already divorced, you are not a good influence for me". And they stay away from you. It is obvious, that after living all
of this, you fall into depression, also a very trendy illness, so to speak. Very often we don't
know that we have it. I stopped eating again, I stopped
taking a shower for nearly one month. I spent approximately twenty days without changing
my clothes, not even panties. That says everything. I ended up looking for the help of a psychiatrist,
because I felt that I started to go crazy. And starting from then,
I have begun my therapy. I still follow the maintenance therapy, because it is very important that a person knows how
to manage his thoughts, and how to look after himself, if you had so many emotional
wounds during so many years. When you have negative emotions and
you hate yourself, as I hated myself, you produce a poison which is harms you. When you say to yourself: "I am so fat", "I see
myself so ugly", "I am useless", "I am stupid", - all that hurts you, and if that lasts since your childhood,
you can cause such a serious illness as cancer or others. And we need to change the
thoughts we have about ourselves. I would like to ask you a question, What are the thoughts that
dominate you the most of the time? Good? Bad? If you pay attention,
anyone can hide his thoughts. We can't hide them, just
pay attention to everybody, and you are going to realize
what they are thinking about. If a person thinks positively of himself,
he is going to look happy, enterprising, winning, he will strive. In contrast, if a person thinks in a negative way,
it will be noticed, starting from his own house, if it is in order or messed up. When you decide to change your
thoughts, as I did, the dreams come true. It is not magic. It is a process,
that you have to decide, initiate, if you want that your
future life becomes better, initiating in the
present that we live now. The first time I stepped on a stage,
there were five thousand people. It happened by pure chance, however, my
thoughts were already on another level. I was already willing to look for
opportunities, that we think don't exist. These ones, you have to seize
them the very moment they show up. I was working on a radio station, offering
drinks during events, tickets to arriving people. Thus, one day, one radio speaker didn't show up
at a promotional event happening on the street. And well, it was me
who got on the stage. I seized the opportunity which showed up at that moment
- my legs were shacking. Believe me, in the end, when I went down from
the stage, I threw up because of the pure shock. However, from then on, I have started something
which was my dream for as long as I can remember. It was to speak in front of the public. I remember, once,
I asked for a tape recorder and cassettes for Christmas, in order to make my own radio programs, off course, invented ones. Children's games. I got my first on air program
after working for one year for that boss, without any pay. Perhaps, for a bottle of
water and a ham sandwich, as the "El Chavo del Ocho". This means being persistent. However, everything happens after
you begin thinking differently, after you stop victimizing yourself, and after you stop blaming
everyone who surrounds you. You need to also stop blaming yourself, and become responsible for yourself,
as soon as you are already an adult. No matter how you were
treated by your father, how you were treated by your
mother, what you lived through, if you had a serious illness,
if you lost a loved person, - there is the power in your
hands to change your future, to make it better, so that your
kids would also be different, and wouldn't live what you lived. However, all this without hate. Everyone is looking
for his own inspiration. Ones call it "God", others
call it "something inside you", others are listening
to conferences, audios. However, if you are listening to conferences, audios,
whatever it is, but you don't have it inside yourself, it is going to last for that little. Leaving the conference, you won't
already know what it was about. It is thinking, becoming crazy about it
and looking for that what inspires you. For me it was God. That was one of the first conferences that I
gave, I felt like in a dream in the dressing room. There were small lights and
everything. As it is on TV, isn't it? Believe me, dreams come true. Do you want a good future? Isn't it
true that all of us want a good future? We need to begin with the present. There cannot be a good future
if we don't have a good present. I would like to leave
you with this phrase. Sometimes, when we think
of changing, it scares us, because we have this anxiety to lose our
essence, that someone will brainwash us and that we are not going
to be who we are anymore. However, when you learn from
the experiences you live, you don't need to change your
essence, you only learn and use these experiences in order
to improve, in order to grow. And there is this phrase,
if you want writing it down: "I didn't change, I only learned. Because learning doesn't
mean changing your essence, but means using your
learning to continue growing". (Applause)
