Childhood memories before that night seem to fade like a distant fog. Perhaps it’s self-preservation, maybe it hurts to remember, or maybe it’s something else entirely. The faintest memories of a young Ty Coleman begin to emerge, drifting in like an old familiar ghost, as if everything begins that night as an eight-year-old girl. Little, naïve, and laying in the comfort of her bed, she awakens due to the mumbled argument coming from another room. Her parent’s jabs intensify, and Ty tries to close her eyes, pressing her lashes together tightly. Sleep doesn’t come easily. The argument escalates, and soon a door slams loudly. Her father whom she dearly loved is gone. With the closing of that door, her family begins to crumble in a way that will not be recovered. Love, safety and joy is replaced with a broken world, full of unknowns.
This significant night in Ty’s life is metaphorically a “fork in the road” moment. The shifting of railroad tracks in a direction in which she has little control. Uneven, rocky at best, and full of pitfalls. The guiding lights appear dim, and her path becomes dangerous.
At an impressionable age, Ty’s mom remarried a man who became physically and verbally abusive. Their home life lacked love, acceptance and encouragement. As a result, Ty began looking for those things elsewhere, turning to drugs in her early teenage years, and inappropriate relationships with her peers. Always hoping for fill the void she felt in her life.
After barely graduating high school due to truancy, Ty’s drug addiction began to escalate. She dropped out of college after only three weeks and found herself in a committed relationship with a man on probation. In her vulnerable state, he convinced her to leave the state, breaking the rules of his probation terms. Together, they moved to Colorado to live in a small hotel room with his sister and brother-in-law. Eventually her boyfriend was arrested again, and Ty was forced to move back home to Sidwell, Louisiana.
Drugs and sex became her crutch. Nothing in her life was going as planned. Past hopes, old dreams and ambitions were washed away. Drugs helped to numb the pains of her life and fill the ever-growing void.
Unable to hold down a traditional job, Ty turned to stripping. Although it put money in her pocket and kept her high, it made her feel used and unworthy. She felt humiliated. She was disgusted every time she had to go on the stage, being objectified by the hollow eyes of those who didn’t care about her. Soon the economy crashed, and Ty could no longer afford nightly hotel rooms where she had been staying. Instead, she began sleeping in her car and soon her life spiraled even more out of control. If she wasn’t sleeping in her car, she was sleeping in parks wherever she could find a place to rest her head.
Ty was homeless.
By this time in her life Ty had made her way to New Orleans working in whatever strip club she could find. She would use the club’s bathrooms to wash up, make a little quick cash to put some food in her stomach and then find a place to sleep for the night. All the while, Ty was beginning to earn a rap sheet of her own. Over the course of several years, she was arrested thirteen times. The first few times, her mother would bail her out. However, there came a time when her mother decided that she could no longer watch the decisions of her daughter, and the havoc that it was wrecking on her life. At this point her mother choose tough love and would no longer provide bail.
During one of her arrests in New Orleans, Ty learned of inner workings of prostitution for the first time. The words of her experienced cell mate would linger her mind, later taking root into a deeper, darker world of turning ‘tricks’.
Between lockups, the lifestyle that Ty was living allowed for geographical mobility. She could live anywhere, so why not go somewhere beautiful? With what little money she had, Ty hopped in her car and begin driving to Florida so that she could be near the beaches. Perhaps the soft sand and emerald waters would bring a sense of joy to the life from which she was trying to numb herself.
Along the long drive to Florida, Ty would stop at strip clubs to make quick money for gas and other needs. At one of these stops she encountered a couple of drug dealers who enlisted her for help conducting illegal drops and transactions. All three of them landed in the Jacksonville jail house. Upon release, Ty had no money to get her car out of the impound, leaving her with literally nothing besides the dirty and worn-out clothes on her back.
During this low point in her life, the words of her cell mate came drifting back into her thoughts. Although prostitution was not what she had envisioned for her life, she felt destitute. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, and felt utterly helpless. Now in her early twenties, Ty Coleman was turning to the dark world of prostitution out of desperation. She began providing sexual favors, or tricks, in return for money that kept her high and numb from the extreme pain she was feeling. At night Ty would sleep in abandoned buildings or homes to provide some sense of shelter.
She found herself in situations where she would do nearly anything for shelter and drugs. After two and a half years of living on the streets, Ty began living with two men, a crackhead and an alcoholic. Rent was paid by cleaning their filthy and neglected house in exchange for a place to sleep on their couch. Their kitchen was piled so high with dishes that she couldn’t see the sink, and so caked with dirt and grime that she had to bring buckets inside to even begin the cleaning.
The sense of worthlessness and severe depression was settling into her soul. She felt that she was just a body taking up space in the world, and that her life didn’t matter. No sense of purpose or direction, and no one in her life to speak truth over her.
Barricading herself in the house, Ty planned to take her own life. She hated her life and wanted out. Filling a bathtub, she stepped in and swallowed at least twenty-five pills hoping to pass out, slip below the water and drown. But her attempt at suicide was unsuccessful. With tear-stained cheeks, Ty felt that God was saying it wasn’t yet time.
Although it continued to take Ty a while to turn her life around, she always had the sense that God was with her. She had come to faith as a young girl and felt his presence in the midst of her brokenness. Hope the size of a mustard seed helped her to see through the darkness that one day everything would be okay again.
Even though Ty experienced hope, she continued to self-sabotage. Over the next few months and years, Ty would experience things that would typically be depicted in horror movies, cooked up by the vivid imagination of a director. She was mixed up with bad decisions and even worse people. She would hitchhike. She would get in the cars with sexual clients, known on the streets as ‘Johns’. During one fateful ride, Ty became fearful for her life and jumped out of a moving car. Hitting the pavement was better than the possibilities that awaited her should she stay with him.
Ty was tricked, set up, and robbed at gun point by acquaintances she knew from the streets. As she knelt on the ground with a gun to her head, her only solace was that she hoped the mess would ruin their apartment. Gruesomely dark thoughts that may be difficult to read, but this was her reality. This wasn’t a movie. This was what her life had become.
Her drug use transitioned into harder narcotics and opioids. She began shooting up but didn’t have money for clean needles. While plunging dirty, used needles into her arms she began to acknowledge that she didn’t care about her life, and she certainly didn’t care about anyone else’s.
Ty was afraid all the time. In her lowest moments she would cry out to God, asking “Why, why? How is it okay that I’m kept alive?”.
After many previous arrests, Ty was locked up, and incarcerated for seven months. It was during this last time in prison that she was given an ‘easy-reader’ Bible. While trapped between the four walls of her cell, she began reading it. She would dig into the Word and devour the pages before her. The more she read, the less empty she felt. God slowly began chipping away the callouses of her heart and restoring her soul back to the basics of faith that she learned as a young girl.
Upon release, Ty decided to give her mom a call. She wasn’t sure what her mother would say, or if she would even talk to her. Hearing the change in her daughter’s voice, Ty’s mother gave her another chance and welcomed her to come back home. This second chance at a restored relationship with her mother is exactly what she needed. It saved her from going down the same roads again.
The prodigal daughter returned.
For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate. Luke 15:24
Moving to Oklahoma with her mom was the beginning of Ty’s restoration back in the real world. God had started healing Ty’s heart and also healed her completely of her drug addiction. It was as if a switch had been turned off. The desires to cope with the pains of life through drugs had been lifted miraculously.
Her mother encouraged her in all the ways that she knew. She suggested AA, and other programs to help make sure that Ty’s addictions remained a thing of the past. Together, Ty and her mom decided that a proper exercise routine would be a great start to managing recovery. However, during her first gym visit, Ty passed out on the elliptical after only 10 minutes of exercise. The fall required an ambulance and staples in her head.
Ty quickly realized how unhealthy she had become due to her lifestyle on the streets. Instead of giving up easily, the fall provided motivation to keep going and to get her body healthy. She began working out regularly.
After landing a steady job working at IHOP and keeping the job for a year and a half, Ty was able to hire a personal trainer. She had fallen in love with exercise and found herself to be a natural athlete. Soon Ty was encouraged by her trainer to go through schooling to become a personal trainer on her own. The road wasn’t easy, and she worried that she wasn’t smart enough, but Ty persevered. Ty began journaling, and in her entries, she would ask God for help to understand the training textbook. Although she failed her first certification test, she didn’t give up. On her second attempt, and after much hard work and determination, Ty passed.
This was a pivotal moment in Ty’s life. Just two years prior, she was living on the streets, addicted to drugs and turning tricks. Now, she was a certified Physical Trainer and would have the opportunity to help others. Ty would go on to become a competitive body builder, and also work in sales with a supplement company.
In 2018, Ty moved to Houston, Texas where God began opening doors for ministry opportunities including mentoring at detention centers and sharing her testimony through speaking events. Upon meeting Guy and Kelli Caskey, pastors at WoodsEdge Community Church, Ty started volunteering regularly in the inner city alongside partner ministry, Eyes On Me.
Her journey has now led her to start her own ministry program. Misfit, a fitness ministry, will walk alongside women who are the outcasts, or considered ‘misfits’ in life. The program will help women journey towards spiritual, mental and physical health. Misfit will go into prisons, detention centers, safe houses and more. Ty’s heart behind Misfit is this: “I once was a misfit, and now I am Miss Fit, sharing the gospel and changing lives through physical fitness.”
Ty’s life drastically changed and has been dramatically redeemed. She is an overcomer whose life now reflects hope, hard work, determination, strength, achievement, and most importantly, the love and acceptance of a grace-filled God who loves her.
From the clutches of homelessness to now being a first-time home buyer, Ty’s life is a breathtaking testimony of redemption. After living a life on the streets, she had purchased her very own condo to call home. A safe place to rest her head each night. A place to worship, a place to study God’s word intimately and a place for new beginnings.
Ty has been drug-free for fourteen years. An addiction that was broken by God’s supernatural healing. She is living a life for Christ and is a walking reflection of the immeasurable grace of God. Ty carries no guilt, no shame and no condemnation, for she has been set free by the blood of Jesus Christ!
A verse that is forever written on Ty’s heart is Psalm 40:2. It is a verse that began her journey to freedom and part of the story she shares boldly. Ty desires to help others grow in a personal understanding that God has a plan and purpose for their life. No matter how broken someone may seem, God’s grace is sufficient. He will lift you out of the pit of despair, out of the muck of life, and he will set your feet on his solid rock.
He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire. He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along. Psalm 40:2
