In 2019 I decided I wanted a better life, a different life than the one I'd been living...

I used to be someone completely overwhelmed by my emotions and triggered in conversations, even when I didn't have direct interaction I would be angry and annoyed at the other people at the grocery store or driving on the road just because they were there.

I would take everything in until it felt like it was mine. I would sacrifice my well-being, going out of my way to offer up my own joy to create it for someone else.

I took pride in being a "social chameleon" who could fit in anywhere but I was really just dimming my own light and watering my energy down to accommodate the comfort of whoever else was in the room.

When that would start to weigh heavy, because of course it did, I'd pull back and remove myself from being around people at all.

I began to retreat and retract from the world as a whole so much that I entered a depression I wasn't prepared for.

a happier, healthier, fuller life, with relationships that feel like home, time for rest and relaxation, time for connection and adventure, finances to travel and increased pleasure in the human experiences I'm living.

Having never put much stock into a higher faith or spirituality other than karma and kindness which were also skewed because I had kindness connected to having meaning only if it included great self-sacrifice.

My beliefs were centered around the idea that nothing good happens without giving something first, and that thing had better be hard or really hurt.

I'd have panic attacks and spiral down holes of feeling like the sky was caving in that had me barely able to breathe or get up off the bathroom floor.

I was caught in a deeply entrenched victim mentality of, "I must be one of the unlucky and lost because the world is happening to me and there’s nothing I seem to be able to do to change it".

My perception of life and living eventually became so low I found myself continually coming back to, "if this is living, I just don't want it".

the hurt emptied from my body and suddenly i was able to wipe my tears, get up off the floor, and begin to heal so I would never find myself back down on that floor again.

one night, laying on the bathroom floor heaving with tears, I turned to god and pleaded for him to take my hurt, not caring whether or not if he was "real".

i simply couldn't hold it on my own anymore. so he took it.