and techniques she learned during her own recovery process.
Set is an advocate for mental health whenever the opportunity arises. She is emotional and adamant when she says, “I truly believe that improving people’s mental health and addressing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder would lessen poverty, domestic violence, child abuse, drug addiction, and gang activity.” She alludes to a recent trip she made to South Africa where she visited in Soweto. “There was so much despair and depression and it reminded me of what I felt like when I was depressed. When a person is depressed, there is just a feeling of nowhere to go. This is an issue that needs addressing worldwide. So, my best advice is to attend to your mental health. Doing that changed my life.”
Denise Stokes
“I can’t be who I am, if I don’t know who I am.”
I heard about Denise Stokes through another woman I interviewed for this book. “You should really be talking to Denise Stokes,” Sonya Lockett said to me. “She is amazing in her work educating people about HIV and AID’s.”
I went to Atlanta, Georgia to meet with Denise, who came to my hotel wearing a beautiful dress with a flowing cape over it. She looked absolutely elegant, and though she has been HIV positive for many years now, she is the picture of health.
Denise has also been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for many years. And so, we had a brief discussion about my career treating substance abusers before moving on to talk about her very remarkable life.
Denise Stokes says that she grew up in a family that was secretive and confusing. She never really knew her father, and her mother had a fury in her that kept her children from asking any questions or approaching her much at all. Denise found out that she had older siblings when she had a crush on a neighborhood boy and her cousin explained that he was actually Denise’s brother. She found out about a sister by noticing a photo in an album at her grandmother’s house and asking whom it was.
Trying to figure out such basic information as family ties made Denise quite a detective. Her mother told the children very little, and though she could be fun and outgoing, she didn’t know how to express love for them. There was little in the way of conversation and no affection whatsoever. It was a barren environment.
Denise found comfort in all types of music. She found that certain song lyrics seemed to validate her feelings. When she heard Prince sing “Let’s Go Crazy,” it let her know that someone else understood the way she questioned the world and its meaning.
She also loved words and the dictionary. Denise would write poetry as a way to express her feelings and then hide it so that no one would see it.
Early on, Denise was labeled as a bad child. Since there was no one to explain things to her, she explored and tried to figure things out on her own. This frequently got her in trouble. For example, there was a black cat at her grandmother’s house that everyone chased away. Denise was only seven at the time and she thought that if this cat weren’t black, he would have a better life. So, she got a can of white paint and a brush and painted the cat white. The poor cat died and the word went out that Denise hated the cat and intentionally killed it. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the “bad” label stuck.
Denise says that she comes from several generations of abused and abusive women, so it is not surprising that she began running away from home when she was eleven to escape the cruelty there. She was always returned to her mother, where she endured the instability of many moves and a string of stepfathers.
When she was in the ninth grade, a construction worker raped Denise near her home. Her mother’s rule was that Denise had to be home when the streetlights came on; and, because she was late, her mother began hitting her with a belt as she came in the door. She was in shock and never said anything about the sexual assault. But, she wrote poems about her experience and through this poetry she expressed herself without concern about judgment.
Denise was fifteen when she began dating a twenty-one year old man. She was convinced that she was in love. He gave her things that she wanted and said nice things to her and about her. He saw how attractive she was in every way and encouraged her. He also read the poetry she wrote, and really understood it.
When her mother forbade her from seeing this man, Denise became defiant. She wasn’t about to give up the positive attention she was getting. So she ran away again, this time for four months.
Denise was eventually caught and placed in a Youth Detention Center as a runaway. Though she tried to explain herself and her situation to the staff, it was no use. Finally, Denise figured out that if she just said what the staff wanted to hear, such as, “I’ve been bad, but I promise to appreciate my mother,” she would be sent home.
When Denise went home, she had had that four-month taste of freedom. And when she was sixteen, her mother turned her over to this same young man.
Denise says that there was really no one to talk to about any of this. She had been emotionally abused, and had had no help with the trauma of the assault. She wondered if her mother had ever even wanted her.
Denise tried to make a life with the young man she now lived with. There was a lot of drinking, but no drugs. She had been a brilliant student, but living on her own, staying up late and being wild ended her academic success during twelfth grade. It wasn’t until many years later that she finished high school.
With the inevitable end of Denise’s relationship, she decided to enter the military. She was intrigued by the idea of the GI bill for education and signed on with a recruiter. Denise was not quite eighteen years old when she passed the entrance exams with high marks. The military doctor who had performed her physical called her back. With absolutely no emotion in his voice, he informed her that her tests indicated that she was HIV positive and was unacceptable for military service. “You’ll be dead in a year,” the doctor announced impassively. The rape she survived at thirteen had come back to haunt her in the form of HIV.
Denise went back to her apartment in shock. When her landlord got home, she asked him to go to the liquor store for her. Teetering between numbness and terror, her drunken state became the norm and soon she began to associate with the neighborhood cocaine dealer. This began a year of unimaginable degradation.
“Cocaine eventually led to crack,” Denise says. “I was running all over and could not land. I was becoming more and more degraded, and I crossed every moral line you can imagine. I would have occasional moments of consciousness, and then lapse back into that dark, dark world of crack addiction and alcoholism.”
Denise awoke from her fog one morning to realize that she was twenty-one years old. The doctor had said she’d be dead and she wasn’t. “What happens if I live?” she wondered. She had never considered this possibility and had hidden her pitiful state from her family.
“I really wanted to live. I thought it might be great to live, to write again, to listen to music, and enjoy the sun.”
Denise went through several treatment programs trying to get clean and sober. She kept relapsing. At one point, someone had broken her jaw and she was found wandering the streets of Atlanta.
Finally, her stay at The Fulton County Drug and Alcohol Treatment Program, followed by living at Saint Jude’s Halfway House allowed Denise to obtain and maintain her sobriety.
“I loved the 12-Step work,” Denise says. I talked and talked and talked, and everyone listened. It felt so good to share. I had been waiting a long time
