People Giving Back: Danielle

As I look at the Joyful Heart Foundation blog I am comforted by the presence of “heal, educate, empower,” three words that have found a permanent home in my every day life. My organization, h<3rt1, (“heart-one”) stands for my goal to “heal a heart, remove the 1” of the 1 in every 3 young adults involved in an emotionally and/or physically abusive relationship. I want to educate people on the dangers and prevalence of abuse. I want to empower them to take a stand and create change. What better time to focus on doing this other than February: Teen Dating Violence Awareness & Prevention Month.

My name is Danielle DeZao and I am honored to be able to join efforts with the Joyful Heart Foundation. I went through 19 years of my life without ever really having a “cause” to call my own – maybe that meant I was lucky, since I was without a tragic reason to ever fight for something that has caused me grief. But then an unexpected, unwanted cause found me. I didn’t know it would introduce itself to me disguised as the boyfriend I met in college. A guy telling ME who to hang out with and what to wear? Never. Me using make-up to cover my bruises? Never. I never understood how people got involved in abusive situations – until I was one of them.

Abusive relationships do not happen overnight. They start slowly, a gradual progression towards utter chaos. It begins with perfection, laughter, and all of the exciting things that come with new love and new beginnings. But looking back, what was ever even real and what was just part of the downward spiral? What was genuine? Within a couple of months, jealousy and control issues took over. I tried to justify the seemingly pointless arguments by saying it’s still a relatively new relationship, that trust issues are normal. I wanted to believe it would change. I wanted to believe I could make it change.

It takes a while, sometimes even too long, to realize that the people who claim they are trying to “save” you from everything else in your life, are the ones hurting you the most. I felt like I was watching myself leave my body, looking back out of the corner of my eye at everything I’ve ever believed in slowly creeping away from me – a vicious cycle of bliss and pain. With time, the fights grew longer and louder, and ironically, their meaning even more pointless than the time before. Before I knew it, it was a little shove, a little push – followed by his endless promises that he didn’t mean it, that it will never happen again.

No. The first time will never be the last, it will only be the least painful, its bruise the faintest. I remember finding it a struggle to look in the mirror, a black eye staring back at me, finding it difficult to think of new ways to hide the different marks on my body from the people I love, from anyone that might notice, even from myself, as if enough makeup and the right clothes would be enough to convince myself that just maybe they have magically disappeared altogether. I went through so much of my life never even seeing or hearing the words “dating violence.” It took me experiencing it to learn about it, which is how I found out that 1 in 3 teenagers is involved in an abusive relationship. Should it really take someone going through something so terrible to realize that it could have been avoided if only it were a topic that is talked about more often?

I didn’t really sleep after the fact and my only comfort came from researching the cause, reading stories and appreciating the proof that I wasn’t alone, as much as I felt like I was. I read the signs that made so much sense that it gave me chills. Why hadn’t I known about them before? I even found out the cause’s national color is purple. Then I began to scribble. I scribbled notes for a slogan, a logo, a picture, a motto: anything that could be used to impeccably consolidate a year of feelings, tears, despair, but also hope, encouragement, and most of all, change. I came up with h<3rt1. I had never intended on founding an organization, it was nothing more than my own little world that gave me peace of mind, until I realized that if I’m going through it, so many others are too, the statistics proved it, so why not get them involved too?

For me, h<3rt1 was the breath that began to blow away the irritating fog of sadness over my life, the kind that you just want to disappear so that you can see everything around you more clearly. Every day I look down at my bracelets and feel so lucky to be making a difference, but sometimes I find myself practically laughing; 3 silly pieces of string, 2 purple and 1 black, braided together to represent the 1:3 ratio, an idea I dreamt up one of those late, lonely, sleepless nights. A simple idea that allowed me to sell them around campus for $1, to create unity and awareness for a cause invisible to most college students. A tiny little bracelet that made up over 90% of our $1,500 donation to Battered Woman’s Services. Bracelets on over 1,000 wrists somewhere in this world, hopefully carrying the h<3rt1 message along with it.

Passing someone on campus and seeing a bracelet on their wrist, having a stranger hug me after one of my speeches and saying “you don’t know who I am but thank you for that,” seeing the organization logo that was born in the margin of my class-notes on ABC news and my story on ABC’s prime-time “What Would You Do?”, attending a round-table discussion on domestic violence at The White House as a student advocate for Liz Claiborne’s Love Is Not Abuse Campaign – surreal.

I found something that could tell people, even myself, that no one in this world is worth the sacrifice of yourself and the person who says “I love you” will never truly mean those words and hurt you at the same time. If I’ve made a different in even just one life through all of this, it’s more than enough to me. Bruised hearts don’t have to equal broken, they will heal.  www.removethe1.com