Keturah Lee Schroeder is Managing Director at Freedom a la Cart, a catering business employing survivors of human trafficking in Columbus, Ohio. Her MA is in International Studies with a focus on intentional economic empowerment to break cycles of poverty and exploitation.
Posts By This Author
Fighting Human Trafficking...and Learning to Love Myself Along the Way
Vintage Typewriter. Photo via Micha / Shutterstock.com
Today, I am the Managing Director of Freedom a la Cart, a social enterprise that offers employment, workforce development, and supportive services to local, adult survivors of human trafficking. The women that I work with are victims of unimaginable trauma and abuse. They are also the strongest, most resilient women I know. Through their words and actions they continue to teach me the power of loving oneself.
Because here is my deepest, darkest secret—the one that I never speak about. The one that I shove deep down and hope that no one ever learns about.
I struggle to love myself.
I am the boss, the director, a caretaker, an advocate for social justice. But I don’t love myself, and I struggle with self-worth daily. I am a perfectionist and constantly feel that I am “not enough.”
It wasn’t until my 30th year of life that I realized how broken and human I was. Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. I was doing a terrible job of loving myself and realized I could not truly love these survivors until I loved myself.
All too often, advocates and activists present themselves as superheroes, rescuing the poor and defenseless. We hide our fear, our guilt, our shame, our self-loathing, because we are supposed to be the strong ones. We are supposed to have all the answers. And yet what is demanded of us isn’t perfection, but rather our faithfulness and willingness to be vulnerable.