For as long as I can remember, I've loved writing. It's been my past time, the way I process life and the way that I see the world. I would get up every Saturday morning and I would make myself tea and sit in front of the big window in my living room and write on a full sized legal pad. For hours, I would sit there as the sun came up letting the characters run free on the page. These characters were my best friends in all the world! It was a safe space where I could write MY world.
I loved reading Louisa May Alcott and L.M. Montgomery and Jane Austen... all these romantics. My view of the world was bright and colorful. I saw everything with vibrance. I loved the perfect moments when the "meet cute" happened and you just knew they were destined for one another.
When I was eleven, I had a meet cute of my own. I was just sure that life worked the same way as the books. This was my destiny. However, when I was fifteen, I watched my destiny walk out of my life. The heartbreaking goodbye shattered my entire world. So, I started to write. However, I kept prolonging the inevitable. I couldn't end the story. I couldn't close the chapter. I couldn't write the words... THE END. It was too painful. So, I didn't. I did what most romantics do and I told myself that this wasn't the end. This was just the midpoint.
Day after day, I told myself I would be okay someday. The world was grey. The lights had gone out and everything was muted. I was desperate to see the colors again. So, I turned to anyone. Anyone who would listen. Anyone who would be there. In my mind, I was filling these spaces in my life temporarily because the movie never ends with the boy leaving the girl. That wasn't how it was supposed to go.
After a very traumatic hazing experience at the hands of some people I thought to be friends at a weekend retreat called Teens Encountering Christ, I started having these episodes where I would pass out and I struggled to eat the right thing. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Adrenal Fatigue which is when the body releases too much adrenaline in a traumatic situation and your adrenal glands cannot keep up. I was sixteen and I had managed to shoot my adrenal glands.
Grief became a part of who I was. Everyone was gone, leaving or I was afraid they were leaving. People came and I was relieved. I started dating and I was happy for the distraction. But, things just got worse. Suddenly, I was living in a world where this boy dictated who I was, what I wore, and what I said. I didn't even know myself. He had created this version of me and now I was trapped. Cheating and lying, manipulating and pain... it all led me to my sixteenth birthday when I finally ended it. I'd lost everything... again. They didn't write this part in the novel.
So, I stopped believing that the novel existed. Romantic endings don't happen... that's what I started to believe. I stopped dreaming. I stopped hoping. I started to compromise because loneliness is all consuming. I wasn't careful who my friends were and by the time I got to college I had already been in the room with two girls while they endeavored to commit suicide. Both times, I had talked them down, but no one should have to see that.
I got an acceptance letter from my dream school. I was so happy. I had a huge music scholarship and I was sticking to the plan... our plan. Yeah, the boy from the beginning... he and I had talked about these plans and what we wanted in life, well this is what we decided and I clung to it. It was all I had left of the memories. The only way to be happy again was to go back to the moments we shared. It was the last place I felt safe.
I came to college and within the first year, I started dating guy number two. I knew he was cheating on me, but I didn't care. I didn't want a commitment, I just wanted a companion. However, nothing could prepare me for the moment that he married the other girl. It's funny, I thought not committing meant it was safer, but really, it wasn't. I had proved my insecurities right. They always pick the other girl... I'm not good enough... I don't deserve to be happy... My life will never be good again... These lies the devil tells, they're so real.
I had always believed that Jesus Christ had my best in mind. I had so much faith. But, at this point in my life, I wasn't sure that God cared. I was in a living hell and for what? I had stood up for the gospel even at my university. I was in ministry. I did so much for the Kingdom and my life was a mess.
Meanwhile, I was friends with train wreck number three. By sophomore year, I had prevented yet another suicide, but it was wearing on me. These toxic people were straining both my walk with the Lord and my own life in general. I was so busy taking care of everyone else, I wasn't even aware how absolutely broken I was.
Sophmore year ended and I had a sever neck injury. I was living at a ten pain level and still playing on average 5 hours a day. Looking back, I don't know how I survived this way. I had a couple of good people that came around me... you know who you are... or maybe you don't, cause I kept most people on the outside. I was so closed off.
My professor got worse and not only was he putting pressure on me to play more, he was also becoming very inappropriate. No one should ever feel like they have to endure advances because of a scholarship or a grade, but there I was. I didn't think my life could get darker, but it did.
Every day, I would wake up and say, "Just get through today, tomorrow will be better" but tomorrow never came. It was just this long string of terrible todays. I couldn't let go of all the pain and all the heartbreak.
July 5, 2019 at 10:13pm my big brother passed away after fighting for his life in the hospital for just over two weeks. I was devastated. He was the one person I talked to about all of this. How was it that even the one good person I had in my life had found a way to leave me? But, I buried the pain with him because I had promised him that I would be okay.
I graduated, barely... during COVID and started my adult life with backpacks and backpacks of baggage. I was towing around all these people and all the things that hurt me. Not in unforgiveness, but in trauma. As Christians, we often only see the spiritual side of trauma. We believe that healing comes by rebuking the devil and that is 100% true. However, we live in a human body and a fallen world, so our human minds struggle to reset. When your brain goes through trauma it shuts down... system overload. So, sometimes it takes us going back with professional help like counseling to get our brains to sort through and properly categorize the events of our past. But, I didn't know this yet. I was still drowning in my own life. There was no way out. But life had to go on.
So, I started fighting the next battle... and the next... and the next... until finally, one day I woke up to realize that he got married. The boy from the beginning. I thought, "What a messed up novel my life is." A few other small things happened and I finally realized I need counseling.
I found myself an amazing Christian counselor and I started going. At first, it was hard. Everything was overwhelming. Between PT, Chiropractic and counseling appointments, I was driving to four different appointments a week. My whole life revolved around the hell I had just lived through. But, I promised myself that someday I would be okay again. Eventually, I got cleared to graduate physical therapy, my Chiropractic appointments went down to bi-weekly and then once a month, but I thought I would be in counseling forever. Getting better just felt so daunting. I had beginning signs of PTSD from the professor situation. Some nights, I wouldn't sleep at all while other nights, I would wake up having slammed my hand or head into the wall. In my dreams I was always fighting, but I could never get out. I had anxiety and sometimes I would just panic. The room would spin and I couldn't breath. I kept asking myself, "How did I get here?" I couldn't figure it out.
I was in a writing class and the professor said, "If you're struggling with the ending, remember that the issue is usually further back than you think." I began thinking about this idea and I realized that it could be true in life as well. See, I thought my hell started when I got into an abusive relationship, but really, it started when one of the best people I've ever had in my life left.
Finally, I had the realization that I could have said goodbye at the very beginning of this story and none of this ever would have happened. I was so desperate to stick to the plan and be loyal to this one person that I missed seven years of living. I was in denial. But, who knew that in order for my life to start again, it was simple... I just had to say this one word.... "Goodbye." Instead, I had gone round and round in circles trying to write an ending that didn't exist because the ending had already happened, I just hadn't accepted it yet.
So, all the toxic people in my life, they were just bi-products of denial. They weren't my fault, they weren't a reflection of who I am... they were just there because I was afraid to start again. But, I'm not afraid anymore. Actually, I can't wait. I can't wait to go on a first date, to go to new places, to see new things and to start all over again with a clean slate because for the first time in seven years, I believe in storybook endings. I can see the colors again and man is it ever beautiful.
Today, was an ending for me... a chapter that should have closed a long time ago, but I know it made me stronger and it made me wiser. I know that my story will help others to see the light on the other side and I hope that the Lord will use it. I know now that the moment I realized to let go was the moment I got my life back. I graduated counseling today and I am so incredibly excited for whatever it is that comes next. I know what is in my past cannot identify my future and for that I am grateful.
Endings are hard, but they're also beautiful because it just means that there's something better on the horizon. So, today isn't really the end for me, it's really just a new beginning.
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