Leticia Ochoa Adams describes her life as "insane from the day that [she] was born." Having never met her father and coming from a long line of generational poverty and trauma, her life has been marked by sorrow and courage. Leticia was a beloved speaker at the FemCatholic Conference in Chicago and we are honored that she took the time to answer a few more of our questions.

On your blog, you discuss feeling out of place in contemporary Catholic spaces and share that you “feel more comfortable among strippers and gang members than in a Bible Study at [your] suburban parish.” And yet, you embrace how your love of pop culture (rap, hip hop, and your favorite celebrity family, the Kardashians) fits easily with your spiritual gifts. Can you share more about how God uses you to connect the secular and sacred?

LOA: I feel as though God set me up in a very unique way in life. If I look back on everything I’ve been through, I can see that it began when I was a small child. I see things differently than other people and I can see good in just about anyone.

What I love most about people who seem to be lost in so many ways is that I can see how found they actually are, because they don’t hold much back and they tell the truth. Rarely do you have to guess what they are thinking, and I like that.

And this isn’t to say that I haven’t found amazing people in Catholic spaces, but I have also found a lot of fake-ness and agendas.

To me, it all goes back to being honest about who I am. If God loves me, then who cares if someone else has an issue with me? God is all that matters. Whatever I change about myself is because it’s best for my relationship with God, not to impress someone else.

Whatever I change about myself is because it’s best for my relationship with God, not to impress someone else.

A chapter you wrote for The Catholic Hipster Handbook includes the confession that you started attending RCIA only to get your “Catholic badge” so your live-in boyfriend would marry you. What drew you further into Catholicism?

LOA: My RCIA director was honest about his past and how he was addicted to heroin. He is also very much in love with Jesus and talks about Christ like He is real, and I wanted that.

Also, I was drawn in by being loved and treated like a person, instead of being reduced to my mistakes, by the people God put in my life from the very beginning of my conversion: my RCIA director, Noe Rocha, and my two priests, Fr. Jonathan (Fr. J) and Fr. Dean. These three men became my spiritual fathers. They accepted me as I was and never judged me.

Fr. J helped get me into therapy and was one of the first people in my life to tell me that the trauma of being sexually abused as child was the root cause of so many of my choices in life. He told me that God wanted to heal me. I felt seen and not judged in his office.

You’re kind of a pro-life icon. You had a baby at 16 and you often talk about how raising your son changed your life for the better. Could you share more about that experience?

LOA: Anthony saved my life in many ways. I was a runaway before I got pregnant with him. I was a person who was so lost, lonely, and unloved, and then this baby came along and I had a purpose in life.

He was the cutest baby. I loved to sit and talk to him for hours even when he was just 6 months old. While all of my friends were riding around and drinking, I hung out with my baby. He was like my little brother because I was an only child and I was so young when I had him.

If I had not had him, I would have ended up living a life on drugs and in prostitution because that is where I was heading. My only regret is that I did not know about trauma and how to heal from it. That impacted a lot of Anthony’s life and, as he got older and my trauma caused me more issues, we lost some of the closeness we had always had.

What made your decision possible?

LOA: I was a very stubborn child. One of my cousins had an abortion and everyone talked trash about her, even though they forced her to do it. I figured that if they were going to talk about me anyway, then I was keeping my baby. Also, because everyone kept telling me that there was no way I could raise a child, I was determined to do it.

Your life story is marked by tragedy from your earliest years. Could you share about your journey toward healing from childhood trauma?

LOA: Lots of therapy and mistakes. I have acted out from my wounds throughout all of my life. I lost people who I loved because they couldn’t handle my crazy. And I made choices that had negative consequences for my children.

Healing came when I was ready to face all of that and ready to stop allowing the man who raped me when I was 5 years old to have so much of a say in my life, which is what I did in all of those unhealthy behaviors. Once I did that, I started to feel more and more free.

I also feel more like myself the more I heal. I have less of a need to impress people or to prove that I’m worthy of a voice and love. I know that I am good and I am getting better.

Just as your life was turning out happily ever after – becoming Catholic, marrying your best friend in the Church, coming into financial stability, experiencing healing from childhood trauma – you were crushed by a terrible tragedy. In what Jen Fulwiler describes as "the most powerful interview" she’s ever done, you recall the experience of losing your son, Anthony, to suicide. How did your Catholic community respond?

LOA: Amazingly, starting with my pastor and Fr. J who both showed up as soon as we called, which was within minutes of finding Anthony. They were right behind the ambulance.

Then Jen and her husband showed up with food and drinks, which we didn’t even know we needed. We had forgotten all about dinner.

From there, people all over the world and online helped us with donations and prayers. We buried Anthony with the most beautifully Catholic funeral. I thought of it as my last expression of love for him. It wasn’t cheap, but we had enough donations to cover it, and for that I will always be so thankful to my community: locally, online, and the universal Church who all showed up for me and my family.

When I get frustrated with the state of the Church, I just go visit Anthony and remind myself that the Church is also who helped me bury him.

When I get frustrated with the state of the Church, I just go visit Anthony and remind myself that the Church is also who helped me bury him.

Anthony left behind two young children. How do you keep the memory of your son positive for your grandchildren?

LOA: We talk about Anthony every single day. He is still very much a part of our family, and that won’t change. I let my oldest grandchild cry when she is sad, and sometimes I join her. We have dance parties when we miss him. We have parties for his birthday and family days to celebrate his life on the anniversary of his death. Anthony was such an amazing dad that his girls remember him on their own and they know what an amazing person he was.

In the moment of seeing your son after his death, you recall hearing a threatening voice in your head, the Evil One trying to silence you: “Stop talking, or I will take the rest of your kids.” How do you move on from that? How do you move past the fear and continue to publicly share your testimony?

LOA: At first I let the fear win in a lot of ways, especially in how I treated God. But eventually, when I realized that God loves me and that free will is a gift that can be used and abused, I became fearless.

[W]hen I realized that God loves me and that free will is a gift that can be used and abused, I became fearless.

I’ve been told to be quiet all my life and I never have shut up, so now is no different. My story is a gift from God and nobody is taking it away from me.

I don’t fight the Devil anymore; that is God’s job. I hide behind God. There is nothing to fear. I have faced and lived through the worst thing a mother can go through.

Your talk at the FemCatholic Conference had a room of 400 women laughing, crying, and completely captivated. As people responded to your testimony, the word I kept overhearing was “genuine.” How do you keep your faith genuine?

LOA: This is always a difficult question for me because the truth is that God didn’t install in me the thing everyone else has that tells you, “Don’t say that.”

I grew up holding the secret of my sexual abuse and denying it when I thought it would make things worse for me and my mother, so the truth is something that I have come to see as healing. Healing doesn’t come from secrets or hiding parts of ourselves from others. When we open up about our own lives, trauma, and experiences, we find other people who can relate, and in those relationships, we heal.

When we open up about our own lives, trauma, and experiences, we find other people who can relate, and in those relationships, we heal.

I still have moments when I wonder whether being honest is going to blow up in my face, but after losing Anthony to suicide, I don’t have the same level of fear of not being liked that I had before.

You’ve talked about freely expressing anger with God. What does that look like?

LOA: It doesn’t look very holy for sure. There are a lot of cuss words and I say rude and entitled things to God. It looks a lot like the tantrum of a toddler or teenager. But it is honest, and God can handle honesty and heal us from that place more than when we are fake or in denial.

Do people ever respond unfavorably to your genuine faith?

LOA: I get misunderstood a lot, especially because some people take what I say out of the context of me being a daughter of the Church. I believe that the Catholic Church holds the fullness of Truth and I am obedient to every one of her teachings.

I get misunderstood a lot, especially because some people take what I say out of the context of me being a daughter of the Church.

We hear you have a book in the works. Can you share with us what it’s about?

LOA: Yes, I do! And please pray for me because I often want to set my laptop on fire when I’m working on it. It is a memoir about my life and my experiences. I have been through a lot of crazy things.

I don’t see any memoirs that honestly talk about real life, discuss God's love, and are written by a devout Catholic and woman of color who comes from extreme poverty.

I have crazy stories, but none of them are about me overcoming anything. God overcame it all for me and I just followed for some reason.

That doesn’t mean that I’m always engaged in holy activities. Some days I binge watch Grey’s Anatomy for the twentieth time and I find God in that. I want to tell that story.

How can we follow you on social media? How can we follow your writing?

LOA: You can find me on all social media as leticiaoadams. But I will warn you, I delete it all every so often because I am pretty sure that social media is taking the place of real life relationships, which we were created for. But then I also love the great people I’ve met through social media, so I always come back.

My writing is on my website and I also share everything I write on Facebook.

“I have all the gifts that God wants me to have to do what He wants me to do. I am fearless when it comes to seeing God in all things secular. . . I live in both spaces, and I am starting to see that as a gift. Just do not ever think that because I share Cardi B quotes or Ariana Grande music on social media that I am not living out the mission God gave me.” -Leticia Ochoa Adams