Raped at 5, past addict and prostitute faces demons on KC road: ‘You didn’t beat me’
The horror for Robyn Potter began at birth, born into a family of drug addicts.
At age 5, she was raped by a family member. It was the first time of many.
“I was 9 when I started drinking, “ said Potter, now the 34-year-old mother of three young daughters, and four months pregnant. “On my 15th birthday, my parents introduced me to methamphetamine.”
On Friday, Potter stood nervously at the edge of Lykins Square Park, off Independence Avenue, hands trembling a bit. It’s where at 16, until age 25, she turned tricks as a prostitute and “numbed herself,” she said, with drugs on and off for years afterward.
Only now, nearly a decade later and in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, did Potter feel it was time to confront her past. Her goal Friday was to walk the avenue that nearly destroyed her.
“For so many years,” she said, “I let people control me. I let men control me. I let so many things control me. Now that I’m sober, I want to show this avenue, ‘You didn’t beat me. I beat you.’ I want to show myself, ‘Look, Robyn, you did it.’ I want people to see me as a human being. People don’t understand that when you’re out there on the streets, you’re not human to other people. You’re just a throwaway.
“I need to show myself: I’m not a throwaway.”
In a sign of the virus’s far-reaching effects, Potter’s recovery nearly dissolved. Six weeks into the area-wide COVID-19 shutdown, she found herself reeling. She was on the verge of relapsing and breaking a year of sobriety.
It was April 28, her birthday. Truman Medical Center’s behavioral health services, where she went twice each month for counseling and to meet her recovery coach, wasn’t allowing patients in and had yet to go virtual. She was alone. With only a sixth grade education, she felt a crush of responsibility of trying to help educate her three girls, then ages 9, 5 and 3. More wracking still, the date marked the second anniversary of the death of Potter’s best friend, killed after the one and only time she injected meth.
“She was more than a best friend,” Potter said. “She was a sister.”
Potter said she thought she could handle it all. But she couldn’t and felt herself ready to relapse.
“I thought I was stronger,” she said. “When the COVID started, I fell into a depression.”
Sober, she was haunted by nightmares about the life and trauma she endured on Independence Avenue.
“I wanted the pain to stop, the tears to stop, the nightmares to stop. When you’re sober, you have to deal with everything on your own.”
Then she heard a knock on the door. Two women in masks from Truman stood at the door, sent by Lolita McShann, Potter’s 45-year-old recovery coach who had known her since 2017. McShann, unable to reach her by phone, sent what Potter has come to call “her goons.”
“We just want to see how you are,” Potter recalled them saying. The kindness, she said, saved her.
Now, more than four months later, she stood at Seventh Street and Norton Avenue surrounded by at least two dozen other women and supporters of Veronica’s Voice, an area nonprofit dedicated to helping women stay out of the sex trade. Potter spoke in a strong voice, wearing no mask, because a mask, even now, is a trigger of multiple occasions of being muffled and gagged and raped.
“This is so we can take our power back,” she said. “I made it. But we’re walking for these women who didn’t get to make it. We’re walking for these women who are still out here. We want people to know we are human beings. I know people, they see sex trafficking and they think, ‘Oh, that’s just another junkie. That’s just somebody who doesn’t matter.’
“But we matter. We are somebody’s mom. We are somebody’s sister.”
Facing Independence Avenue had been Potter’s own idea, part of the treatment plan that she and McShann had devised.
“This was one of her goals, so I’m super excited for her,” McShann said, in mask and protective goggles and set to walk alongside Potter. “Her story gives strength to a lot of other women out here to tell them: You are bigger than your circumstances. You can flower. You can choose to be whatever you choose to be, as long as you put your mind to it.
“And you do have people who care about you.”
Moments later, unafraid, Potter led the group to the avenue, treading on her past.
This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 6:33 PM.
