Don’t you love it when people praise you? When someone takes time out of there day to say “good job, I’m proud of you”. Doesn’t that make you feel so overjoyed you just can’t help but smile? I feel like that a lot but at the same time, a dark evil force compels me to overlook my accomplishments and look in the mirror, asking myself who is that? This is the story of how first anxiety and divorce have tried and tried again to break me.

Childhood is supposed to be fun right? A carefree time in your life where you don’t have to worry about anything at all. Well my childhood was fun but it took a turn for the worst when I turned 10. My mom had just broken her leg and I had been sick for days not being able to hold very much food in my body for longer than an hour. My parents had been fighting for years and it was only getting worse from there. Now imagine that you are a 10 year old who just got over being sick, had fighting parents and a mom with a broken leg. Don’t you think this could have been a slightly traumatizing point in your life too? Slowly I started slipping into this state of mind where I was literally terrified of puking and got a stomach ache every time I thought of something that scared me even a little. Even now writing this, my stomach is wrenching just thinking about this point in my life. I had developed anxiety to puking and general stomach aches, so whenever I got scared my anxiety set in, allowing my own fear to take over my body. I can tell you right now that for all you people that say anxiety is just someone being really afraid of little things; you’re wrong. Anxiety affected my entire life for probably 2 years. I would sit in bed at night so afraid of falling asleep and waking up to getting sick that I would have to get out of bed and pace, watch TV, whatever I could do to calm myself down. It got so bad that I started to ask myself if it was worth living through. The constant fear, pain and stress that anxiety put on my body became unbearable. I would sit thinking: would it be easier if I were dead? Honestly if it hadn’t been for my friends, school, and softball, I really don’t know if I would still be alive today telling my story. Finally I told my dad my thoughts of suicide. Suicide. I hate that word. It’s such an awful word and the meaning behind it makes it such a nasty word I can’t even bring myself to say it out loud. I think what I hate about the word suicide the most is how scary it is to think that I might not have been alive because of my own actions and that word. Anyway, I got help from a therapist and yes it took a few months and it’s still a daily struggle, but I’m not in that dark place anymore where my fears control me. I am my own voice of reason and I finally stopped allowing myself to be afraid.

I had probably a year of peace and normalcy in my life before things got shaky again. During the summer of 6th grade my parents announced that they were getting a divorce. If I could change anything in my life, it wouldn’t be my parents’ divorce. Yes my life was torn apart, and yes my parents are never going to love each other again, and no there is not one day that goes by where I don’t miss my mom laying on the right side of the bed reading her magazines like she always did, or her sitting out on the back deck with an ice tea in her hand basking in the suns warm glow, but I know that she was unhappy and I know that my dad was unhappy too and there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s really hard to see my mom as hurt as she is whenever we have to leave for my dad’s house, or when my sister yells at her, and I know that this is not the life she wanted for her kids or herself. I know how much she had to sacrifice for me and my sister and I know how much she loves us both. Divorce has brought change, hope and some peace back into my life but it has not done so without a lot of hurt from everyone in my family.

Anxiety and divorce have been the two lowest points in my life so far because they both happened and I felt as if I couldn’t do anything to stop them. I feel as if I woke up and realized how to control my anxiety and although I couldn’t stop my parents’ divorce, I did learn how to cope with the situation and that’s helped me so much over the past couple of months. I feel as though the universe has tested me again and again and yet I’m still standing, and I truly believe that no matter how hard you push me, you won’t break me because I have reasons to live and people to care for. I am unbreakable.